Behind-The-Scenes Looks at Your Product Development Process

Behind-the-scenes looks at your product development process are an effective way to humanize your brand and provide more intimate views into team’s daily work and process, connecting with audiences more directly than scripted content ever could.

A product does not arrive fully developed on store shelves without going through some sort of development process, including research, brainstorming and prototyping.

Product Design

Your team should begin the product design process by developing physical and logical product specifications to define how your new product will appear, helping guide its creation while meeting user and business requirements.

As part of product design, prototyping should be your next step. This allows you to determine whether your idea will work and gather feedback for making improvements based on customer opinion.

As part of your prototype design, try to avoid adding unnecessary features – often known as feature creep. One way of combatting feature creep is using the jobs-to-be-done technique for outlining features. This can help your team avoid overdesigning; Lucky Orange provides tools that enable customers to provide feedback before creating prototypes which saves you time and money in the long run.

Marketing

Development involves taking your brainstormed ideas and crafting them into real products that meet customer needs. Depending on the product type, this may involve internal software programming or physically assembling physical components in your warehouse for assembly into finished items. At this point, it is also wise to put into place marketing plans and pricing models which will aid marketing once your product goes on sale.

As part of your planning stage, it is crucial that you develop a prototype and define its specifications. Furthermore, research the cost of production as well as identify teams involved with its creation is an essential step to ensure your product fits within budget and is manufactured efficiently.

Now is also an opportune time for validation research and competitor analysis, discovering what customers want, what products are already out there that could fill a particular void, and how your new product could fill that void – knowledge which can help create a comprehensive product portfolio.

Development

Once your roadmap is clear, teams can start developing the product. This step takes your ideas from brainstorming to reality; providing your target audience with something that meets their needs while adding real value.

At this stage, it’s advisable to conduct more research, refine your design and produce a prototype. Furthermore, this stage should involve setting pricing models, sourcing materials and manufacturing options and outlining potential external partners that could take part in production.

Development processes are a core part of any business and involve many departments and stakeholders. A product manager often serves as the focal point of these tasks to ensure they are completed efficiently and effectively, so using project management software such as ClickUp will assist with this oversight and ensure the best possible results are obtained from each task performed. Watchers or comments can be added for improved collaboration during development processes.

Testing

Product development encompasses research, ideation and prototyping; to make this process as efficient as possible for your team, project management tools like Asana can help coordinate workloads while streamlining cross-departmental collaboration.

Product design starts by identifying the problem it solves; this can be accomplished through conversations with potential customers, surveys or user research activities.

Once you have a solid understanding of your problem, you can create a prototype to test out your solution. This may take the form of anything from an elaborate 3D model to simple sketches. When testing a minimum viable product (MVP), be sure to do it as soon as possible so as to validate and collect feedback as soon as possible in order to identify pricing sensitivity, messaging issues and any other factors affecting market launch as soon as possible so as to make necessary improvements before going live with the final product. Quality assurance testing (QA) is another stage in this process focused on verifying that the final product works as intended before going live with its final launch.