Introduction:
Even for the most successful e-commerce businesses, the journey to a final product rarely resembles a straight line. If you are an ambitious entrepreneur, the product development process may seem shrouded in mystery – how does an idea in your head turn into a three-dimensional object you can hold in your hands?
Effective product development involves market research, product management, and a lot of trial and error. While each story is different, there are some best practices that founders follow on their path to starting a business and launching a final product.
In this guide, learn everything you need to know about the product development life cycle as well as tactics to improve your workflow to help you achieve your vision.
What is Product Development?
Product development refers to the entire process of bringing a product from idea to market. It also describes the process of renewing an existing product or introducing an old product to a new market. This includes identifying market needs, conceptualizing the product, building a product roadmap, launching the product, and gathering feedback.
New Product Development (NPD) specifically refers to creating a new product from scratch and bringing it to market. The process does not end until the product’s life cycle is complete. You can continue the product development process after launch by gathering user feedback and improving the product and developing new versions.
Who is Responsible for Product Development?
In any company, whether it’s a startup or a well-known firm, product development brings together all departments, including design, engineering, manufacturing, product marketing, user experience, and more. Each group within the product development team plays a crucial role in the process of defining, designing, building, testing, and delivering the product. The complexities of the product development life cycle make product management even more important.
How to Create a Product Development Plan?
A product development plan (or product development strategy) is the methodology that the company will use to guide its product development. It is a detailed plan that includes milestones and checkpoints to keep a cross-functional team on track and aligned towards the same goal until launch.
Before you start any stage of product development, put your plan on paper. Ask yourself: how much time do we need? What are the deadlines? How often will we meet? What is our goal?
Later in this guide, we will review the product development process. You can use that as a blueprint to identify sub-goals, workflows, and areas of responsibility for each stage.
Why is a Product Development Plan Important?
A product development plan is a critical stage in the process for the following reasons:
- It unifies the team. Having everyone on the same page from the start ensures that team members can operate autonomously and move quickly towards the same final product.
- It creates checkpoints. Your plan should include meeting frequency and goals to be accomplished at each stage. This allows the team to meet regularly to stay on track.
- It mitigates risks. Having a comprehensive plan that considers all competitive research, market research, and targeted research means you won’t leave any stone unturned.
- It includes success metrics. How do you know if your process is successful? Your plan specifies exactly what success looks like and how it will be measured.
- It allows you to be more creative. With clear guidelines in place, you don’t need to manage the process in detail. Teams will have clear guidance to innovate within.
The Seven Steps of the New Product Development Process
Although the product development process varies from industry to industry, it can essentially be broken down into seven stages: idea generation, research, planning, prototyping, sourcing materials, costing, and marketing.
Use the following framework to bring your product idea to market.
1.
Generating the Idea
Many aspiring entrepreneurs stumble at the first stage: conception and thinking. This often happens because they are waiting for a genius moment that reveals to them the perfect product they should sell. While building something “new” can be inherently creative, the best ideas often result from iterations on an already existing product.
The SCAMPER model is a useful tool for quickly arriving at product ideas by asking questions about existing products. Each letter represents an inquiry: Substitute (such as faux fur instead of real fur), Combine (such as a phone case and battery pack), Adapt (such as a nursing bra with a front clasp), Modify (such as an electric toothbrush with a sleek design), Put to another use (such as a dog bed with memory foam), Eliminate (such as cutting out the middleman to sell sunglasses and save costs for consumers), and Reverse/ rearrange (such as luggage that doesn’t wrinkle your suits).
By considering these prompts, you can arrive at new ways to transform existing ideas or even adapt them for a new audience or problem. It can also be helpful to use ideas derived from business analysis to understand market opportunities.
2. Conduct Market Research
Starting production before validating your idea can lead to failure. Validating the product ensures you won’t waste time, money, and effort on an idea that won’t sell. There are several methods you can use to validate your product ideas, including: sending out an online survey for feedback, launching a crowdfunding campaign, running a marketing test, researching market demand using Google Trends, measuring interest through email sign-ups or pre-orders, seeking initial feedback on forums like Reddit, conducting a feasibility study to assess whether your proposed idea is worth the investment.
It’s important to get feedback from a broad and unbiased audience. Be wary of estimating feedback from people who “will definitely buy” – you can’t consider someone a customer until the money changes hands. It’s best to avoid seeking advice from family and friends (unless they have prior experience in your industry).
Researching validation will also involve competitor analysis. If your idea or niche has the potential to capture market share, there are likely competitors who are already operating in that space.
Understanding how competitors attract customers and make sales will help you. Ask potential customers what they like or dislike about your competitors to determine your competitive advantage.
Combined investigation through product validation and market research will help you estimate the demand for your product and the level of competition before you start planning.
3. Create a Plan
Since product development can become complex quickly, it’s important to take the time to plan before you start building a prototype. At this stage, it may be helpful to have a clear product roadmap.
The best place to start planning is to sketch out by hand what your product will look like. The sketch should be as detailed as possible, with labels explaining various features and functionalities. Product sketches can be found from a crowdfunding campaign for a Bluetooth speaker, Hidden Radio.
You don’t need to have a professional-quality drawing, as you won’t present it to the manufacturer at this stage. However, you can delegate this stage to an illustrator. Dribbble and UpWork are two websites that showcase freelancers for hire.
As part of your drawing, create an ongoing list of parts or materials needed. For example, a handbag design could accompany this list: zippers (large and small), metal clasps, leather straps, protective pocket, engraved label, internal wallet.
You should
Your plan should also answer the following questions to guide pricing, brand positioning, costs, and marketing strategy: Will the product be a daily item or for special occasions? Will it be a luxury item or an affordable product? Will it use luxurious materials or be environmentally friendly? What will the packaging and labels look like?
4. Creating a Prototype
The goal of the prototype creation stage during product development is to create a final product to use as a sample for mass production. Prototype creation typically involves experimenting with many different versions of your product, gradually discarding options and making improvements until you are satisfied with the final prototype.
The complexity of creating a prototype depends on the type of product you are developing. The least costly and simplest cases are products for which you can create a prototype yourself, such as: recipes, cosmetic or personal care formulas, some fashion and jewelry designs.
However, more often than not, entrepreneurs will work with a third party to create a prototype for their product. If you are starting a clothing brand, work with local seamstresses or shoemakers or prototyping specialists. These services can be found online by searching for local services or contacting design or fashion schools for help in creating prototypes.
For items like toys, home accessories, electronics, and many other solid-natured items, you may need 3D rendering to create a prototype. Use UpWork or Freelancer to find artists or engineers trained in using computer-aided design (CAD) programs. Or try SketchUp, Tinkercad, or Vectary to create 3D models yourself. Tinkercad / Marta Redondo Luengo
With the innovation of 3D printing, digital designs can be turned into physical samples at a much lower cost and in less time than traditional mold-making methods.
The first working version of the prototype (or minimum viable product) can be launched to a small test group to gauge interest and test price sensitivity and messaging. Feedback collected at this stage allows for the creation of further versions of the product and building something more valuable for your target audience.
Examples of Product Development
In the 2023 film BlackBerry, based on a true story, the founders of Research in Motion (RIM) come together to create a prototype for their mobile smartphones to accompany their pitch to investors. Although the final product did not resemble the prototype, the prototype served as a practical guide and a starting point for securing funding or testing the market.
Product development became a critical part of RIM’s (later named BlackBerry) business in the race against Apple, which the company lost due to a misunderstanding of the market and rushing to produce the final product without adequate testing.
Don’t make the same mistakes – understand your industry and market. The product development cycle will naturally vary by industry, so let’s take a quick look at what you may need to consider through case studies for each.
Fashion and Apparel Development
In the fashion industry, product development typically starts in the traditional way: with a hand drawing or its digital equivalent using software like Procreate.
The drawing is developed into a sample using a prototype maker or seamstress. During the prototype creation stage, a size set is created, meaning a collection of samples in different measurements for each size you wish to sell.
The product can be handmade by the designer, produced in a factory, or printed by a print-on-demand company (in the case of graphic t-shirts or accessories). Other factors to consider include: swing tags: branded tags that hang from the clothing and usually contain information like price, size, etc. labels: fabric tags sewn or printed into the clothing that usually contain information about the fabric content and care instructions. wash tests: putting your product through wash tests to understand if it will hold up over time and how to care for it.
Development of
Beauty and Personal Care
It is absolute that many new brands in the beauty and personal care industry start in the kitchen. Founders experiment with ingredients, and some launch handmade products before mass production through manufacturers.
Private labeling is also common in the beauty and cosmetics industry. It is the process of finding an existing product or factory and then packaging and marketing the products they are already producing. Whichever path you decide to take, mass manufacturing of cosmetics is usually done in collaboration with a lab and chemist to ensure quality remains consistent as you scale up. Other factors to consider: labeling and warnings. Identify all materials used in the product and any potential reactions. Laws and regulations. Research regulations imposed by the Food and Drug Administration and how they apply to your product and packaging, whether in the place they are produced or where you intend to sell them. Shelf life. You should conduct tests and add necessary expiration dates for the products.
Food and Beverage Development
Food and beverage products are among the easiest products to start developing at a low cost from home. Creating a new energy bar can be as simple as buying ingredients and tweaking the recipe in your own kitchen, just like Lara Merriken did when she started Lärabar.
To transition from the recipe to the packaged goods you can sell in stores or online, you will need to find a licensed commercial kitchen to produce the food and pass health and safety inspections. These are manufacturing facilities that specialize in processing raw materials and producing food and beverage products in bulk. Other factors to consider: labeling and warnings. You will need to display ingredient lists and nutritional information. Laws and regulations. There are regulations in many countries regarding nutritional information, allergy warnings, and health claims that you must comply with. Expiration dates. You need to understand the shelf life of your product and how to produce, package, and store it to accommodate that.
Conclusion of the Product Development Cycle
Throughout product development, each journey to reach a final product varies, and each industry has its unique set of factors that need to be considered to create something new.
If you find yourself struggling to figure it all out, remember that every product that came before yours had to overcome the same challenges. By following the steps in this guide, you can better manage the process of launching a new product.
Regardless of what you are developing, by making all the necessary preparations – through research, planning, creating prototypes, sourcing materials, and determining costs – you can put yourself in a good position for a successful final product.
Source: https://www.shopify.com/ca/blog/product-development-process
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