What is Product Development
As an entrepreneur or as a commoner with innovative mindset, you must have gone through the process of having an abstract idea of something big in mind. And then navigating through the required process to bring it into realisation. This is exactly what the product development process is. Product development is the journey of bringing a new product to market. This process includes all the stages that the product development team has to go through from ideation, strategising, planning, executing to releasing product after testing and quality assurance.In the recent times, product development has become focus for business leaders in the market. And rightly so because currently product development techniques determine the success or failure of a product launch. Let’s explore in detail that how the product development process works.
Product development lifecycle - stages of product development
Every organisation follows the product development cycle according to the requirements and their available resources. But there is a sort of universal lifecycle that every organisation takes care of while developing a product. Let’s explore the the standard stages of product development process
Idea generation
Like anything else under the sun, idea generation is the basis of product development lifecycle as well. This stage starts with having an idea of the product that one wants to create in the first place. In this particular stage, the idea is devised in mind and then shared with the relevant teams that have to work on that product in the future. The product managers are responsible to grasp the whole idea that needs to be realised. This is the very crucial stage of development as if the idea is not clear to the team, there is no chance of making a successful product launch. Therefore, it is made sure in this step that the idea is clearly circulated among all the stakeholders without leaving any doubts.
Research
Research always proves to be the backbone of any project. Research covers the whole concept of knowing the market in each possible way. Mainly it includes two important forms of understanding. One is Competitiors research and the other is market research. Market research makes you able to understand the general sentiments of the market. It enables you to understand the scope of your idea in the market. If you find the opportunities and holes that your product could fill, then you move onto understand your competitors already present in the industry. Competitors research equips you with the things that your competitors are lacking in. it helps you leverage those weak points of your competitors.
Planning
After the initial research work is done, you are equipped with enough data to plan and strategise your own product. The research that is done in the earlier stage helps you to revisit your initial idea and after looking deeply into the risks and opportunities in the market you go one step back and revise the whole idea and make necessary amendments in the idea according to the data available to you. This is basically the step of refining the idea and then finalising it. When you finalise the product, you start with identifying what you will need in order to create it. This may include the identification of material resources, tools and techniques, teams that will be involved in the whole process of development of that particular product.
Prototyping
This is the stage of creating a low fidelity version of the product that is used as a mockup of what will be created in the mass production. This protoype is often referred to as Minimum Viable Product (MVP). It is the basic version of the product that gives a sense of how it functions. If it is the development of web or mobile app, it can also be referred to as wireframe. It is a skeletal framework of website, product or app that uses visual lines, symbols and text. If it is physical product, then a sample product is first produced before the mass production to analyze the expected performance of the product. This process lets us understand the shortcomings the product might have. This becomes very beneficial as the drawbacks and risks are highlighted and removed by the relevant teams.
Product development
Once the skeletal framework or sample product is designed, the teams move forward with creating the final product. This is a lengthy stage as compared to other stages as it is the development of final product. At this stage, each and everything is considered with utmost care. In this stage, you use the insights from MVP or sample product to make improvements and corrections where they are needed. It depends on the type of business that how the development of final product looks like. If it is software product, then it will be as finalizing the code. Once the final product is ready, it is shared with stakeholders to get the initial feedback and then the products is shifted to the testing team for the next stage of product development process.
Validation and testing
Now the product is ready! But the show is not over yet. When the final product is ready to kickoff, it still needs testing and validation. This is a crucial stage. During product development, there might be some errors and bugs deep down in the product that would be run over if it did not go past the testing phase. The testing team takes over the product for a while and test the whole product to check if all of it’s features are functioning properly and that it is meeting the requirements that were set in the initial stages of the process. At this stage, sometimes the process has to take a step backwards to resolve the issues and errors that might be identified in the validation process. This may keep going until the final product becomes error free.
Commercialization
Finally, the culmination of your idea, research, planning, iteration reaches. Commercialization is the final stage of new product development process. It is the point of the lifecyle where you finally launch the product to market. After making your product live, now it is the time to implement those marketing strategies that were built during the planning phase to make people aware of the product that you have created. You try to make your product available to a large number of users. Launching a product is still not the end of the process. Businesses make better use of the feedback they receive from the users to improve the quality of their product by making changes in the product.
How do we develop a product at Rev9Solutions by following the lifecycle
To understand how a software company practically implements the whole process of product development, let’s look into the framework of Rev9Solutions as an example of product development process. Rev9Solutions is a software company that handles the projects of clients from initial idea to bringing it to life.
Ideation The process of product development at Rev9Solutions starts from signing a contract with the clients that brings the idea of developing web or app based softwares that serve the purposes of their business. At this stage, our product managers hold meetings with the clients to grasp the very idea of the product. They are responsible to gather all the requirements that clients have and disseminate the information to the relevant teams in a clear manner.
Research After collecting the information from the clients, the team starts with the research work. The main purpose of this stage is to check the feasibility of the idea. After the market and competitors research, if the idea comes out as feasible option as it is, then the team proceeds with further process. But if the research hints at some holes, then some improvements are also made in the original idea to make it more productive. This is done by having a constant communication with the stakeholders.
Planning Once the main idea of the product gets finalised, our product development team starts with devising the strategies. In this phase, the resources are identified that will be used in the process. It is identified that which tools and techniques we will be using and which teams will be involved in the process. For example, if it is about developing the web based software, then the teams that are proficient in web development technologies will be engaged in the process. Similarly, if the product is related to app development, then the app development teams will be incoporated in the project.
Prototyping When the idea is finalised, the research work is done and everyone in the team knows their responsibilities, now is the time when teams start working on creating a skeletal framework of the product that exhibits the whole idea of how the product will be functioning when completed. It creates a clear picture for the team members to align their efforts with the requirements in exact manner. With the help of this prototype, the teams are able to move forward with UI/UX designs and other complexities that needs to be addressed.
Product development The prototypes are very important in the development of the actual product. They lay the foundation and our multidimensional teams start working on those foundations. Through this stage, teams incorporate each and everything in the product that were required by the clients. This stage usually takes a long time because it is the stage of bringing the ultimate product out. Since multi dimensional teams are involved in it, this phase in the end brings all the efforts of all teams involved together to bring the ultimate result.
Testing When the product gets finalised by our product team, it is then sent to our testing team where the product goes through the validation process to check if there are any issues and errors in the final product. If some errors arise, it is sent back to the team the error is related to. When the product gets nod from the testing team, it is now ready to be launched. Before launching, it is presented to the stakeholders with all it’s features to get their feedback over it. After their approval, the product is finally ready.
Commercialization This is the final stage of our new product development process. After flowing through the whole process, we finally release the product to rule the market. This phase is crucial for the whole process because at this point we hand over the full fledge version of the product to the client. At this stage, Rev9Solutions takes special care of the security and privacy of the clients’ data. Robust privacy and security regulations are followed to secure our clients from any cyber threat.
Conclusion
Product development is a critical driver of growth, competitiveness, and sustainability for organizations of all sizes and sectors. It includes a wide range of activities, from concept building of idea, research, planning, prototyping, testing and releasing of the ultimate product. Therefore, to develop a successful product, it is important to extract the expertise of diverse teams including designers, engineers and marketers. As markets and technologies grows, the product development techniques will also improve for better. But the basis of the process will remain the same.