As critical as it may seem at first glance, product development might not be something that is a priority for every business owner. For example, a company that specialises in selling machinery parts developed by other companies might not see the initial need for product development as they leave that process of innovation to those other companies that provide them with the products. Product development refers to the series of steps that businesses undertake to conceptualise, design, create, and launch a product for consumers to purchase. However, the aforementioned theoretical company might need to realise that product development is not just about creating consumable physical products; it also applies to digital products and services. Even if your company focuses solely on selling products developed by other companies, you are providing a service, and your service is an element that can be innovated and developed the same way that product development is carried out.

Thus regardless of whether your business chooses to focus on selling services or products, having research during development or as most call Research & Development (R&D) – allows your product to stay ahead of its competition by catering to consumers’ needs.

Why Focus on Development?

Service and product development is crucial because it serves as the means by which your business can innovate, adapt and grow to match evolving market and technical conditions, making your brand dynamically flexible. Firstly, this will help your company stay relevant in the fast-paced modern market shaped by digitalisation and globalisation, where technological advancements and consumer demands are evolving more rapidly than ever.

By becoming a leader in product development and keeping up with trends and changing values and beliefs, your company image will strengthen and become synonymous with innovation and forward-thinking, which will eventually lead to an expanding market share as your strong brand reputation allows you to penetrate global markets.

Finally, the added benefit of having product development is not just about the end product – it is an endeavour that involves the constant improvement of processes and technologies. This can lead to more efficient production and management methods which will be a boon to your company as you take each step towards the future.

What NOT to do in Product Development

With all the benefits that product development brings to the table, it may be tempting for businesses to rush headlong into the process, committing all their available resources towards product development to gain that crucial competitive advantage. This can prove to be a common mistake, as business studies have shown that maximising the resources that your company allocates to product development does not necessarily lead to optimal results. Product development relies heavily on the incremental creative efforts of product development employees who constantly go through the steps of ideation, testing and evaluation – a delicate process that can be prone to delays when too much is put on their plates. Furthermore, all the aforementioned projects will need to be managed – a task which cannot always be expected to be performed with 100% efficiency.

Product development is also not about developing a huge range of new products or a single product with an enormous range of features. Attempting to manufacture numerous new products at once will most likely cause your company’s production line to stall under the weight of creating so many new components at once while trying to cram as many features as possible into a single product is highly unlikely to appeal to your target customer – in fact, a deep dive into your target market will likely reveal that the dominant brand/product is the one that provides a simple and elegant solution that is focused on addressing your consumer’s main pain points.

When all is said and done, product development cannot be seen as something that will take care of itself and pay dividends for your business as long as you dump enough time and resources into it. Instead, it needs to be approached with the awareness that the success of your brand hinges on an astute understanding of the product development process, otherwise also known as the innovation journey.

Ideation

The first stage of product development is the generation and refinement of ideas. Ideas can come from various sources such as customer feedback, analysing competitors, and internal brainstorming sessions. At this stage, it is crucial to encourage creativity and innovation to generate a range of potential product concepts, which can then be refined into the early stages of a potential product or service.

Market Research

Alongside the ideation stage, a comprehensive market research strategy is invaluable as it will give you insight into how your target consumers behave and what they want from your product or service. Not only can the right market research framework feed you specific, targeted ideas for your product development, but it will also give you information that can determine whether or not a product is worth bringing into the market.

Conceptualisation

Once suitable ideas have been generated and refined, the selected ideas are developed into detailed product concepts. The product concept is defined at this stage, which involves coming up with the descriptions, features, and benefits of each potential product. In this stage, key questions must be addressed for the product development to progress further. Who is the target market? What features must the product have to be a success? Would consumers like this idea? Is the idea a unique one that isn’t already on the market? This is part of a process called idea validation (aka concept testing) where the purpose is to figure out if an idea for a new product or service is something that consumers would want, willing and able to pay for.

Design

With a defined and approved concept, the product can move to this stage where detailed product designs are created, including specifications and engineering drawings. In the case of a service, detailed plans for how the service will be carried out are created so that they can be envisioned and put into practice.

Prototyping

Prototypes or initial versions of the product are then created, keeping in mind the cost that it will take to produce the product for the end consumer. Using information obtained from earlier market research, there are many angles of costing that need to be considered, including how much the product will cost to produce, how much the consumer will be willing to pay for the product, and whether or not the product can be produced cost-efficiently enough and sell for a profit.

Answering these questions and performing multiple iterations on prototypes can help validate customer and market needs; if in food/beverage, it’s about getting the right formulation that meets what consumers want. This will also help you formulate your pricing and marketing strategy in the process as well.

Testing

This stage of product development is when the product is tested in different ways to ensure product quality and reliability. Some types of testing are straightforward such as in the case of new food products where consumers are given new flavours/types of food products to try and are asked to answer a survey which requires them to rate the product on a scale of 1-10 for different categories such as taste and appearance.

There is also concept testing where a product is physically tested then the idea of the product is discussed amongst the group with their personal opinion, to confirm if the concept is indeed valid for the target consumer. In some cases there is even home usage testing where a product is given to consumers for them to bring home and try for themselves over a period of time, to provide accurate feedback if the product is able to hold up under the rigours of daily usage and gauge if it helps to address their pain points during the usage period.

In the case of services, the testing phase ensures that the methodology and standard operating procedures that form the basis of the service are able to operate smoothly while serving real-life consumers, and allows for the troubleshooting and reworking of any stages or steps which fail to meet the customers’ needs.

It is also important to note that the testing stage encompasses elements of the product beyond the actual functions of the product itself. Packaging testing/evaluation is a key example of this, where consumers with different options of packaging and asked to provide feedback to grade the options in several aspects such as how eye-catching the packaging is, whether or not the packaging would be effective in convincing them to buy the product, and whether the packaging is convenient for the consumer.

Marketing Integration/Commercialisation

Before the product is launched, there is still work to be done in order to complete the product development process and position the product for success. This stage involves producing advertisements and promotions for the upcoming product, planning sales channels, and strategising how to position your product in the market amidst all the aforementioned activities.

Integrating your new product with the market can be done with targeted effectiveness by leveraging the data gathered from the market research stage at the beginning of the product development cycle and focusing on what position your brand should occupy in the market. This will enable you to position your product and brand in terms of costing, marketing and sales channels so that when the product development cycle is completed, you can launch your product/service with a price, look, and appeal that generates sales from target consumers and profit for your business.

In the earlier section, we mentioned the process of idea validation/concept testing as part of the product development cycle, but there needs to be a closer look at this crucial phase of product development as there are many misconceptions about idea validation and what it is actually for.

As mentioned earlier, the goal of idea validation is to figure out if an idea for a product or service is something that would help consumers while also being something that they would want to pay for. Without going through this process, it’s entirely possible that a business could end up committing a staggering amount of resources to an idea that would end up not appealing to consumers once it is launched to the market.

One thing to note is that simply carrying out idea validation does not guarantee that your product will succeed. Idea validation also does not serve the purpose of brand building or user acquisition, as the majority of users would not come to know your brand or be able to associate it with any of the ideas being validated during the process besides a very small number of early users that decide to stick with you after the validation process.

For idea validation to be effective and foolproof, you are required to validate everything about the particular idea. However, the three most important areas to focus on are as follows:

1. User/Product: Find out whether there are customers out there who need your product or service and whether they are willing to pay for it.
2. Market: Take a deep look at the market and understand who the current players are, how big the market is, and whether you can enter it and grab a share of the market for yourself. A successful, valid idea is one where the solution offered by your product or service meets the needs of the market.
3. Business model: The big question – how will you make a profit from your idea?

Finally, you must safeguard the accuracy and validity of your idea validation process by ensuring that mental biases do not affect the result. Humans are prone to bias the moment a question is posed to them, so be wary of anchoring a consumer by asking questions that could cause them to give a biased answer towards your product idea by the end of the process. Instead, ask big key questions (metrics) as early as possible to solicit purer feedback.

Minimum Viable Product – it might not be the most glamorous sounding term attached to the acronym MVP, but it will still serve as a highly valuable component in your product development cycle.

What is it?

The minimum viable product (MVP) is a version of a product created early in the product development cycle that is designed to have only the minimum necessary core features it needs to solve the problem that it is intended for. Depending on the industry, some organizations employ this approach when it comes to product development.

Similar to a prototype in that it is an early version of a product, the MVP can be thought of as a functional prototype or in the case of digital products/services a kind of beta test that can be offered to consumers to test the functionality of the product and collect feedback directly from users in scenarios that the product is intended for.

Why are they so useful?

Creating and offering an MVP to consumers can be highly beneficial to your business and can serve as a driving force in the product development cycle.

When it comes to innovation, not every business will have enough spare resources lying around to commit to designing and developing a new product from scratch, so businesses often rely on stakeholders and investors to buy in and provide funding for new projects. By having an MVP, a business can test its idea and build a solid case for the new product that can be pitched to potential investors. Furthermore, a functional MVP can also form the basis for a quick initial product launch when investors do buy in, allowing stakeholders to start getting a return on their investment without having to wait a long period for the final product to hit the market.

Building an MVP will also allow a business to test the concept of the product and verify whether there is a market demand for the product. By having a product that has just the core set of features, you can offer it to your target consumers and see if it resonates with them – do they want a product with these features and would they be willing to pay for it? What often happens is that testing an MVP with target consumers yields feedback that a business can use to adjust and improve on the product’s features, making it even more suitable for the target consumer down the line.

How does it work?

The general process of creating and building on an MVP is as follows:

1. Present a product that serves a target audience by solving a primary issue
2. Obtain feedback from the target audience
3. Present the feedback to the development team so that they have a better understanding of what to build.
4. Eliminate undesirable features while adding or improving on desirable ones.

The intention of an MVP should be to create something that is scalable and can be used to drive subsequent development and product decisions, as each iteration of the MVP is something that can be built on rather than being an isolated product. By going through the process of building the MVP, your business can continue to improve and scale the product up to serve more consumers while having increasingly desirable features.

What Not to do With Your MVP

Creating an MVP should not be about cutting corners to rush out a product as quickly as possible. Although an MVP can indeed help to make development more streamlined and cost-efficient, it should still be the result of a rigorous and well-thought-out testing and design process to create the most effective product possible to meet the consumer’s needs without any superfluous features.

An MVP is also not the same thing as a Proof of Concept (POC). An MVP is meant to be a usable product to be provided for consumers to use to test the viability of an idea and receive feedback from those users. A POC on the other hand serves the purpose of demonstrating whether a product is possible to develop or is feasible from an engineering or technical point of view.

With that in mind, remember that an MVP is also more than a rough draft. Although it will not include all the features that the final version of the product eventually will, it is still a crucial part of the product development cycle that consumers are meant to be able to interact with and fully utilise. The goal of MVP development is to produce a product that has the minimum set of features, but it cannot be of minimum quality. It has to be able to convince users of the value of your product so that they buy in and are willing to pay for the eventual final product.