Introduction:
Even for the most successful e-commerce businesses, the journey to the final product rarely resembles a straight line. If you are an ambitious entrepreneur, the product development process may seem vague to you – 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 differs from the other, there are some best practices that founders follow on their way to launching a business and shipping a final product.
In this guide, learn everything you need to know about the product development lifecycle as well as tactics to streamline your workflow to help you realize your vision.
What is Product Development?
Product development refers to the entire process of taking a product from an idea to market. It also describes the process of renewing an existing product or introducing an old product into a new market. This includes identifying market needs, conceptualizing the product, building a product plan, 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 doesn’t end until the product’s lifecycle is over. You can continue the product development process post-launch by gathering user feedback, making adjustments to the product, and developing new versions.
Who is Responsible for Product Development?
In any company, whether it’s an early-stage startup or an established business, product development brings together every department, 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 lifecycle make product management more important.
How to Create a Product Development Plan
A product development plan (or product development strategy) is the roadmap that the company uses to guide product development. It is a detailed plan that includes milestones and checkpoints to keep a cross-functional team on track and aligned toward the same goal until the product is launched.
Before starting any phase of product development, document your plan on paper. Ask yourself: How much time do we need? What are the deadlines? How often will we meet? What are our goals?
Later in this guide, we will walk through the product development process. You can use that as a framework to define sub-goals, workflows, and areas of responsibility for each phase.
Why is a Product Development Plan Important?
A product development plan is a critical phase in the process for the following reasons:
- It unites the team. Having everyone on the same page from the start ensures that team members can act autonomously and move quickly toward the same final product.
- It creates checkpoints. Your plan should include meeting frequency and goals to be achieved at each stage. This allows the team to meet regularly to stay on track.
- It eliminates risks. Having a plan that covers all competitive research, market research, and target audience research means you won’t leave any stone unturned.
- It includes success metrics. How do you know if your process is successful? Your plan clearly defines what success looks like and how it will be measured.
- It allows you to be more creative. With specific guidelines in place, you don’t need to manage the process tightly. Teams will have clear directions for innovating within it.
The Seven Steps of the New Product Development Process
Although the product development process varies by industry, it can essentially be broken down into seven stages: idea generation, research, planning, prototyping, sourcing materials and production partners, cost estimation, and product launch.
Use the following framework to take your product idea to market.
1.Generating Ideas
Many aspiring entrepreneurs stumble at the first stage: idea generation and brainstorming. This often happens because they wait for a moment of inspiration to reveal the perfect product they should sell. While building something “new” can be fundamentally creative, many of the best ideas result from iterating on an existing product.
The SCAMPER model is a useful tool for quickly arriving at product ideas by asking questions about existing products. Each letter stands for an inquiry: Substitute (such as synthetic fur instead of fur), Combine (such as a phone case and a battery pack), Adapt (such as a nursing bra with a front clasp), Modify (like a sleekly designed electric toothbrush), Put to another use (such as a memory foam dog bed), Eliminate (for example, cutting out the middleman for selling sunglasses and passing the savings to consumers), and Reverse/ rearrange (like a suitcase that keeps your suits wrinkle-free).
By considering these suggestions, you can come up with new ways to transform existing ideas or even adapt them for a new audience or a new problem. Leveraging business ideas can also be helpful for understanding market opportunities better.
2. Research
Starting production before validating your idea can lead to failure. Validating the product ensures that 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, testing marketing by releasing your idea to a very small group of your target audience, researching market demand using Google Trends, measuring interest through email sign-ups or pre-orders, seeking initial feedback on forums like Reddit, and conducting a feasibility study to evaluate whether your proposed idea is worth investing in.
It’s important to get feedback from a large and unbiased audience. Be cautious of overestimating the value of feedback from people who “will definitely buy” – you can’t consider someone a customer until money is exchanged. It’s better to avoid seeking advice from family and friends (unless they have previous experience in your industry).
The research will also involve competitive analysis. If your idea or niche has the potential to capture market share, there are likely competitors already working in that space. Researching competitors will help you understand how they attract customers and make sales. Ask potential customers what they like or dislike about your competitors to define your competitive advantage.
The information gathered from conducting product validation and market research will help estimate the demand for your product and the level of competition before you start planning.
3. Planning
Since product development can become complex quickly, it is important to take the time to plan before you begin building the prototype. At this stage, it may be helpful to have a clear product roadmap.
The best place to start planning is to draw a rough sketch of what your product will look like. The sketch should be as detailed as possible, with explanatory labels for the various features and functions. You can hire a graphic artist for this stage. There are sites like Dribbble and UpWork that offer a list of freelancers available for hire.
As part of your diagram, create an ongoing list of parts or materials needed. For example, a design for a bag might include this list: zippers (large and small), metal clasps, leather straps, protective casing, embossed label, internal wallet.
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Your plan should also answer the following questions to guide pricing, brand positioning, costs, and marketing strategy: Will the product be an everyday item or for special occasions? Will it be a luxury product or affordable? Will it use luxurious materials or be environmentally friendly? What will the packaging and labels look like?
4. Prototype Design
The prototype design phase during product development aims to create a final product that can be used as a sample for mass production. Prototype design typically involves experimenting with many different versions of your product, gradually eliminating options and making improvements until you are satisfied with the final prototype.
The complexity of prototype design depends on the type of product you are developing. The simplest and least expensive cases are products you can design yourself, such as: recipes, cosmetic or personal care formulations, and some fashion and jewelry designs.
However, most of the time, entrepreneurs will work with a third party to design their product prototype. If you are starting a clothing brand, work with local seamstresses or pattern makers. These services can be found online by searching for local services or reaching out to design or fashion schools for help with prototype design.
For items such as toys, home accessories, electronics, and many other tangible products, you may need 3D design to create a prototype. Use platforms like UpWork or Freelancer to find artists or engineers trained in using computer-aided design (CAD) software. Alternatively, try SketchUp, Tinkercad, or Vectary to create 3D models yourself.
With the innovation of 3D printing, digital designs can be turned into physical samples at a much lower cost and in a shorter time than the traditional method of making molds.
The first version used from your prototype (or minimum viable product) can be launched to a small test group to gauge interest and test price sensitivity and messaging. The feedback collected at this stage allows for the creation of further iterations of the product and builds something more valuable for your target audience.
Examples of Product Development
In the 2023 movie BlackBerry, based on a true story, the founders of Research in Motion (RIM) come together to create a prototype of their mobile smartphones to accompany their pitch to investors. While the final product did not resemble the initial version at all, the prototype served as a practical guide and starting point to secure funding or test the market.
Product development became a crucial part of RIM’s (later named BlackBerry) business in competing with Apple, which the company ultimately lost due to a misunderstanding of the market and rushing the final product to market 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 with case studies for each.
Fashion and Apparel Development
In the fashion industry, product development typically begins in a traditional manner: through hand-drawing or a digital equivalent using software like Procreate.
The sketch is developed into a sample using a prototyping maker or seamstress. During the prototype design stage, a size set is created, which is a range of samples in different measurements for each size you wish to sell.
The product may be produced manually by the designer, produced by a manufacturer, or printed by a print-on-demand company (in the case of graphic tees or accessories). Other factors such as: hang tags: branding that hangs from clothing and usually contains information like price, size, etc. labels: fabric labels that are sewn or printed into garments and usually contain information about 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.
DevelopmentBeauty and Personal Care Products
From cosmetics to bathing products to skincare items, many newer, more popular brands in the beauty industry have started in the kitchen. Founders experiment with ingredients, with some launching handmade products before mass production through a factory.
White labeling is also common in the beauty and cosmetics industry. It’s the process of finding an existing product or factory and then packaging and marketing the products that they already produce. Whichever route you decide to take, skincare products are typically manufactured in bulk in collaboration with a lab and chemist to ensure quality remains consistent as you scale.
Food and Beverage Development
Food and beverage products are some of the easiest products to start developing at a low cost from home. Creating a new energy bar can be as simple as buying the ingredients and tweaking the recipe in your own kitchen, just as Lara Merriken did when she started Lärabar.
In order to transition from a recipe to packaged products you can sell in stores or online, you’ll 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 on a large scale.
Concluding the Product Development Cycle
During product development, every journey to the final product is different, and each industry has its unique set of factors related to creating 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.
No matter what you’re developing, by putting in all the necessary preparations – through research, planning, prototype design, sourcing materials, and determining costs – you can put yourself in a good position to achieve a successful final product.
Source: https://www.shopify.com/blog/product-development-process
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