Product development sustains and drives many businesses. Creation of new products is necessary to survive and product development lifecycle times are getting shorter to keep up with customer expectations. A short lifecycle can optimize the strength of your business by tightening up processes and eliminating extra steps.
If your organization lacks a well-defined product development process, it means that project teams have to essentially recreate the process for each project. Your process may have missing elements or suffer from a lack of integration. Even a well-defined process may be too rigid and take too long to execute.
New product development services are available to distributors, entrepreneurs and manufacturers looking to turn product ideas into on-the-shelf products. The services can be extended to include support services will shorten the time to market.
Defining and streamlining the process
Idea generation: Development begins with an idea. In many cases, it may be broad and needs to have its limits tested and stretched. Big ideas are often difficult to execute. To bring an idea to life, it has to be feasible. It has to take ROI, affordability and distribution costs into account.
Screening the idea: It is important to establish criteria for ideas that should be dropped or continued. Poor ones need to be rejected early on. In screening the idea, the innovations of competitors must be taken into account, how much market share they have and what benefits end consumers could expect, etc.
Testing the concept: Testing has many aspects, including doing patent research and other legalities. Testing also includes knowing whether a consumer needs, understands or wants a product.
Analytics: A business needs a system of metrics to monitor progress. Input metrics include average time spent in each stage as well as output metrics such as the percentage of new product sales. All these figures provide valuable feedback for further development.
Marketability tests: Launching beta versions of a product, arranging private test groups, and forming test panels can provide invaluable information that allows for last-minute tweaks. It can also create a buzz about a new product.
Technicalities: All technicalities need to be addressed to make sure the manufacture goes smoothly.
Commercialization: At this point, consumers are purchasing your product and you are consistently monitoring progress and keeping your distribution pipeline loaded.
Post-launch review: You need to review the efficiency of the process and see where improvements can be made. Make sure internal costs don’t overshadow profits from the new products. Utilize internal services wisely to save on costs. Keep differentiating consumer needs as the age of your product and work on improving the delivery process.
Change the focus
Product development usually involves several stages in a standard linear process, from the conception of an idea itself until the product is ready for launch. However, if the focus is simply on following and completing a series of steps, it may not be a good process.
Trust that personnel will apply their intelligence, experience and skill to execute the process and intelligently satisfy the purpose of the steps.
This may mean that a development team and screening team might work together and instead of moving through incremental stages, there’s a simultaneous contribution. It isn’t always easy to follow a different approach, especially if the traditional development process is deeply ingrained in routine practice.
Summing up
The whole product development process is evolving all the time. It is a testing platform where designs may be ditched, errors are made, and losses are recorded. Productivity can be achieved if goals are clearly defined and the whole team collaborates in tight synchronicity to get products to launch successfully.