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Here’s a familiar scenario: You spent quite a fortune on mass-producing a new product, but at the current rate it’s going, it seems that you won’t be able to break even.
If you’re starting a business, chances are, you’ll stumble upon this predicament in the future, and if that happens, no matter how much you blame your products, there’s no getting your money back. Now, you might be wondering—is there a way to prevent this incident from happening?
Actually, there is, but putting all your attention on your product shouldn’t be your primary concern—it’s a matter of how you conduct product development that changes the outcome.
As such, instead of focusing on the product, this guide will show you several ways to get the most out of your company’s product development process.
- Develop A Workflow
Product development is basically the process of creating a product, usually by thinking of a never-before-heard idea. At first glance, it seems simple enough, but there are actually many steps involved behind the scenes, such as:
- Ideation: Brainstorming to come up with an original product idea
- Research: Looking into the market to see if the idea can succeed
- Planning: Preparing everything necessary for the actual product development
- Prototyping: Creating different versions of the product to determine which is the best
- Sourcing: Finding vendors that can distribute your products to customers
- Budgeting: Estimating the total cost of the mass production
Your goal is to make sure there’s a plan, be it a workflow or roadmap, that details each step involving the product development. With a workflow, it’d be easier to track the project’s progress. It’s also possible to make the progress more visible to employees by using project management tools such as Jira.
Jira can be quite handy if you’re looking to improve product development, especially as this platform can serve as a bug and issue tracking tool, which is essential in product development. In other words, you’ll be getting more out of Jira than when you use other tools. However, before you put the workflow in motion, you might want to clear up your backlog first.
- Finish Old Tasks
Even the best companies will have tasks that remain unfinished for a long time. Backlogs can be quite detrimental when you’re currently developing a product. After all, large-scale projects like product development require utmost priority, and you can’t risk dividing the attention of your personnel due to backlogs. Hence, it’s essential to clear up any old tasks, especially if you’re seeing any of these signs:
- You don’t remember most of the things in the backlog
- Most items in the company backlog are urgent
- You get nervous when looking at the backlog
If, at least, one of these scenarios applies to you, chances are, your current backlog will become a black hole in the future, sucking in employee productivity, which is extremely bad news. So, before it gets worse, you should clear up your backlog before starting product development.
However, there are cases when you’ll be better off leaving the backlog to your other employees, but that’s only if you have a product development team.
- Create A Product Development Team
The product development team is responsible for any changes within your current product and the development of a new product. In some cases, however, a company creates not a team, but a whole department in charge of product development, and this department usually consists of the following sectors:
- Product Management Team: This team is responsible for planning product releases, creating strategies, and coming up with new ideas. This team will usually come to you, the business and product owner, for suggestions and approvals.
- User Experience (UX) Team: This team’s job is to ensure that the resulting product will be something that users will like, and they do this through user testing and prototyping. If you need a more specialized team, you can consider hiring UX/UI design companies like Clay.
- Analytics Team: The analytics team usually works together with the UX team. More particularly, this team looks into user behavior and market trends through research.
- Marketing Team: Lastly, the marketing team will determine the best way to market the product to customers. Thus, most of the time, they are the key to a product’s success.
By having a product development department or team, it’d be easier to establish the roles of each of your employees. However, if you can’t afford to create a whole department, there’s a more affordable option—investing in third-party product development specialists.
- Invest In Innovation Specialists
Yes, some people specialize in product development, and it’s possible to hire them through innovation specialist firms. One of the main reasons these firms exist is that many businesses are in the same predicament as you are—they want to improve their product development process, but they can’t afford to hire a whole team, and that’s not all.
One other reason investing in innovation specialists can be beneficial is that you can get the opinions of people outside your business. After all, feedback from someone that can be a potential customer can be quite handy as there’s no bias. Speaking of customers, you might also want to involve your customer in this operation.
- Involve Your Customers
Typically, you’d only want to involve your customers with product development only when you’re handing out prototypes, but it doesn’t hurt to involve them a little early.
By collecting your customers’ opinions, preferably your loyal customers, you can get a reality check. In fact, if all businesses do this, they might be able to save themselves from the mistake of spending a fortune on mass-producing products that are guaranteed to fail.
But, aside from that, involving your customers means you’re practically marketing your products to customers even before selling them.
What’s more, regardless of what impression it makes, customers will feel more inclined to buy your products. For instance, if they didn’t like the product before, they’ll buy the final product wondering what changed since the first time they tried it. If they did like the product, there’s no reason for them to pass up on buying one from your business.
In Conclusion
Product development isn’t something that many businesses focus on. Perhaps the best they’ll do to improve it is to create a team designated with this job.
Unfortunately, these businesses cannot see the bigger picture, looking only at the product rather than the whole process. But, that also means you’re gaining an edge over your competitors if you manage to improve product development drastically.