Product Development

It is the first stage in the development process, where you gather your team and generate different ideas.

Coming up with a product idea is easy, but coming up with a great product idea is another story. This stage's primary goal is to give significance and think of something that could solve the customers' problems and cater to their needs.

There are several methods to generate valuable ideas. The following are two great ways on how to create valuable ideas for your product:

SCAMPER method

This method helps you generate ideas for your product and services by asking yourself or your teammates these seven different types of questions; Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put, Eliminate, and Reverse.

This method will help you understand how you can innovate and improve existing products, services, problems, and ideas.

To put it simply, you take an existing product and create an even better product.

Mind mapping

Mind mapping is also a handy method for generating a product idea. It helps organize brainstorming sessions efficiently and document results in an easy-to-understand manner.

Usually, mind maps start with a simple idea or product description and eventually form a visual representation of everything a product must do or that customers want it to do.

In fact, there are certain circumstances that mind mapping that will give you unexpected solutions.

Once ideas are generated, the next stage is to screen those ideas to determine whether they will succeed or not.

Idea screening is a very crucial stage in the development process. Product ideas that do not meet the company's objective should be eliminated.

The idea screening process helps you narrow down irrelevant ideas into an acceptable amount. In other words, it is the process to eliminate the number of product ideas without screening out the potential ones.

If a poor product passes through the screening stage, it would be a waste of money and effort in the subsequent stages and even worse if a worthwhile product idea is screened out.

But through successful idea screening, the company can focus the whole product development process with a higher chance of achieving success of their product.

During the screening process, specific criteria are prepared in which a product should meet. Some of the primary factors are:

If the product does meet the screening process's requirements and objectives, it will move on to the next stage: produce a clear product concept and test its viability.

At this stage, a few and realistic product ideas remain. You will need to describe the product in a way how the customer would use it. This involves a detailed description of the product idea and the customer's perspective.

In other words, you need to develop a product concept. But what exactly is a product concept?

What is a product concept?

A product concept is like a blueprint of your product idea. When developing a product concept, certain things are needed to consider:

• Describe your concept from your customer's point of view
• Thorough research to determine your target audience
• Conduct focus group and in-depth market research
• Resources needed for designing, manufacturing, and delivering the product.

Also, a product concept should describe and highlight the best features of the proposed idea. These features are:

• Quality (Does the functionality of the product will meet customer's needs and expectations?)
• Pricing (How does the customer willing to pay for the product?)
• Usability (Is the functionality easy to understand?)
• Convenience (Does the product saves the customer's time and effort?)

After you develop your product concept, you need to test it with a customer to test its viability. But first, let's understand what concept testing is.

What is a concept testing?

Concept testing is a way to assess your customer and determine their reaction towards your proposed product or service before introducing it to the market.

Concept testing typically involves surveys to your potential customers and asks their opinions towards your product's concept.

You may ask them specific questions like if they are interested in the product or how much they like the product.

You can also present several other concepts to determine which among them the customer finds most fitting.

After the concept and testing are evaluated and confirmed, the next stage in the process would be prototyping and evaluating your product.

In this stage, you are finally giving life to your product. This stage aims to create a finished product and use it as a sample for mass production, using surveys and research results from customers as a guide to creating a prototype with designs and features that the customers desired.

Prototyping helps you explore your product idea and demonstrates its features before investing in its complete development. Also, prototyping is a common practice among many companies since it saves time and money.

A product prototype must be built as early in the process as possible so you can evaluate the product and gather feedback from your clients or customers. At the same time, you are thinking of ways to improve or make your product better.

Thus, it makes sense to create a prototype product first rather than spending thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours creating a finished product and then realizing that it still needs modifications.

From web development companies' perspective, they usually spend time making prototypes for their clients to illustrate how the website will work and what its features will look like.

In that way, if the client desires to make some changes, modifications can be made quickly since none of the back-end code has been implemented yet. And when the client is satisfied with the prototype, only then will the developers invest time to make a finished website.

This stage is also known as commercialization or market entry. This is the stage where your product enters the marketplace. All information collected throughout the previous stages is utilized to produce, market, and distribute the final product.

At this stage, your product will be launched, full scale to the market. Thus, this is the point where the highest costs are sustained. Other than the costs, other factors must also be considered. This includes both when and where your product should be launched.

Promoting your product is also essential to your product's success. If possible, promoting must be done before product launch to pique customers' curiosity.

Social media is the biggest, if not the most influential channel for advertising and marketing. The fact that it is easy to interact with people that got fascinated with your product. It is the most effective way to reach the most customers as quickly as possible through sharing and word of mouth.

With everything in place, your product is now available to everyone and the "product development life cycle" begins.