New Product Development – Plan, Develop, and Launch a New Product

Product Development

Product development is the initial step in the product life cycle, and if you want to create a product for online sales, you must rigorously study product, market, and distribution features to build your project plan.

The steps that convert a new idea into marketable items are referred to as the process of product development. You begin with an idea and end up with technical details, product positioning, price strategy, service components, and financial metrics.

This process can be concept-driven or market-driven at the start, but it usually involves the same steps.

 Research

With your product plan in mind, you may be tempted to skip ahead to development, but this might be a mistake if you do not first validate your proposal.

Product validation assures that you are producing a product that consumers are willing to buy and that you are not wasting resources, time, and energy on an idea that will not succeed. You can validate your new product in a variety of ways, including:

• Discussing your concept with relatives and friends
• Distributing an online survey to gather feedback
• Launching a crowdsourcing campaign
• Using social media forums to solicit input
• Using Google Trends to investigate market demand
• Creating a Coming Soon page to assess interest through email opt-ins or pre-orders

Whatever method you choose to validate your idea, it is critical to obtain input from a large and unbiased audience on whether they would buy your product. Be mindful of overvaluing input from people who “certainly would buy” if you created your hypothetical product—you can’t depend on someone as a buyer until money passes through hands.

You may want to do a feasibility analysis or assessment to see whether or not your suggested project is worth investing in.

Product validation assures that you are developing a product that customers will pay for.

Competitive analysis is an unavoidable component of validation research. If your idea or specialty has the potential to gain market share, there are already rivals in that field.

Visit your competitors’ websites and sign up for their email lists to see how they draw clients and make purchases. In order to define your own competitive advantage, you should ask your own potential clients what they like and dislike about your competition.

Before you begin planning, the information gathered through product validation and market research will help to measure the demand for your product as well as the level of competition that exists.

 Prototyping

The prototyping phase of product development aims to create a finalized product that can be used as a sample for mass manufacturing.

It’s doubtful that you’ll get to your finalized product in a single attempt—typically, prototyping requires testing with numerous versions of your product, gradually removing certain aspects and making adjustments until you’re satisfied with a final model.

Prototyping also varies greatly depending on the sort of product being developed. Goods that you can prototype yourself are the least expensive and easiest examples. If you are fortunate enough to be trained in these fields, you can apply this do-it-yourself prototyping to fashion, ceramics, design, and other fields.

Most major cities also offer art, design, or fashion schools where learners can access these skills. Administrators at these universities or colleges can generally provide you access to their internal employment board, where you can post a request for prototyping assistance.

Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding is about more than just funding: it’s a strategy for gathering market input before your product is ready to go. It may be a highly informative experience because it places your product in a real market situation and allows you to engage with your initial circle of clients.

At this point, the product isn’t completely finished, and you’re already honing your sales pitch through your crowdfunding campaign. Furthermore, this is a chance to increase financial resources at a time when you have made the most investments and still have a long way to go before selling on the market.

Crowdfunding allows you to learn from real clients’ reactions to your product’s first development, which will help you determine your positioning approach. You may even be able to generate buy orders for the eventual finished product, generating income before the product cycle is even completed.

Product Development

This phase includes developing the final product, which will be commercialized after it is ready. You’ll use the feedback from testing your product to finalize your prototype and commence mass manufacturing.

Depending on the nature of your organization, you will most likely have a unique product development process. If you’re a SaaS company, for example, your internal software development or programming teams will most likely be working to finish code. If you make a physical product, you can outsource labor for certain elements and assemble finished goods in your warehouse.

Whatever your method is, your planning should have assisted you in determining how your product development will proceed.

Commercialization

Commercialization is the ultimate outcome of your new product development process, in which you introduce your items to the market. This is the conclusion of your creativity, research, and iteration, and it is the point at which your viewers may finally use what you developed.

You’ll carry out your marketing strategies to make your target consumers aware of your new product and run campaigns to encourage them to become clients.

Despite the fact that this is the final stage, many organizations launch their products and then return to update them based on customer input and market developments to guarantee they’re always offering the greatest possible customer experience.

Each road to a final product is unique during product development, and each industry has its own set of oddities involved in producing something new. If you’re having trouble figuring it all out, keep in mind that every product that came before yours had to face the same obstacles.

Conclusion

By following these steps as you go through your own product development process, you can divide the daunting task of introducing a new product to market into more manageable stages.

You should be able to set yourself up for a good final product by doing all of the essential preparation—researching, planning, prototyping, sourcing, and costing—regardless of what you’re making.