Thousands of new products are introduced every year. According to Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, 95 percent of these are doomed to fail. There are many reasons why a new product will fail and an inefficient product development strategy is one of them. If you are always struggling to meet deadlines, you will never have time to truly improve and refine your product. There are some ways to improve your product development process.
Start from Governance
Good project governance is essential in enabling a meaningful and efficient product development process. Poor governance can lead to teams and their members pursuing different directions and derailing the group effort. Project leaders must establish goals, objectives, and strategies with the development teams from the onset so that all efforts are aligned.
Resist the urge to micromanage or create complicated approval processes. Instead, be concise and clear about the requirements of the project and allow team members to use their expertise to guide tough decisions. Be wary of scope creep or feature bloat and lead with conviction to ensure that the most important elements are always prioritized.
Create a Workflow
This may sound simple but you will be surprised how many development teams do not have a basic workflow. Without a workflow, there is no clear way for project managers and team members to maintain an idea of the project’s overall progress. As more and more tasks become backlogged, there delivery timelines can be interrupted.
Your workflow should be straightforward and clear. From start to finish, a task may go through several phases of product development including planning, in progress, testing, and under review. Having this workflow available to team members ensures that everyone can visualize the flow of the project and understand how one delay could result in others.
With a workflow in place, project managers can see where bottlenecks occur. Some stages in the process may be taking a long time or certain tasks may be repeatedly bumped back to previous states. These insights can help project managers to streamline the workflow and address inefficient processes (and team members) before they affect the entire project.
Curate Your Ideas
With a new product, it is always easy to come up with tons of exciting ideas. However, implementing them all will take a lot of work. Carrying a large number of random ideas through the development cycle instead of focusing on the most valuable ideas is a waste of time and resources, especially if these extra ideas do not add significant value to your product.
Furthermore, having these less-worthy ideas on your to-do list will add to your backlog and create more stress. A better idea is to have strict parameters that ideas have to fulfill before they make it into your feature list. You can also move these ideas into a ‘future features’ list that can be activated after your initial product development is complete.
Use Functional Prototypes
You can thoroughly test your concepts and products by involving your investors and potential customers in the product development cycle. With rapid prototype manufacturing, you can create high-quality functional prototypes at all major stages of development. This allows you to test it for functionality and demonstrate your product in action.
Involving stakeholders early enables you to prove (or disprove) market demand for your product before you invest more time and money into its development. A tangible working representation of your product will allow you to gather user feedback about the look, feel, and performance, and find out which features are most attractive to users.
Prototyping also helps you to convince investors that your products are extensively researched and refined. Prototypes allow you to improve your product as you develop it, resulting in a final product of superior quality that is built around the needs of users. At the same time, you foster awareness of your product that will support your marketing efforts.
Plan for Post-Launch
Towards the end of the product development cycle, it is time to induct your sales and service teams into the development process. Customer-facing staff must be well-versed in the functions of your product. A clever way to do this is to enlist your sales and service teams as prototype testers. This will ensure that you consider the full user experience during development.
Product development should continue even after launch. A business should think about how its product will be supported and improved by the product development team throughout its lifecycle. Remember the list of future features that you set aside? It is now a useful resource that can provide ideas on how to expand and enhance your product.
Product development is an interesting field full of risk and reward. By ensuring that your product development strategy is streamlined and results-focused, you can have more control over both the creative and production processes. This will allow you to create better products that attract investors, satisfy customers, and grow your business.