Best Ways to Opimize Product Development

What are some of the best ways to optimize product development?

  1. Calculate the Product’s Opportunity in the Market
  2. Choose only the Best Ideas
  3. Get Customers Involved Early
  4. Dedicate A Team To The Job
  5. Find the Pain Points of the Target Market
  6. Select Best Pricing
  7. Consider the Product After-Sale

Launching a new product or an innovative product is one of the best ways to stay relevant in the market. Whether you are in the food business, fashion, or services industry, there are plenty of ways to optimize product development in order to get more than what your calculated return of investment tells you.

If you are in the stage of asking what are the new product development processes, then it is a sign that you are skipping a lot of important stages in product development. You have seen many companies do this, yet not all products or services are the same. The market is continuously changing. They see new things; they criticize and compare. If you look at product development examples, you should consider benchmarking yourself with competitors of the same tier.

Here are a few ways to improve your planning to optimize product development. These should help you pinpoint whether you need an adjustment and make little changes or a complete turnaround to allow drastic changes.

Calculate the Product’s Opportunity in the Market

Calculate the Product's Opportunity in the Market

Looking at the entire market through your customers’ lens to determine your product development’s actual potential is a huge step for you to get a hold of a firm understanding of endless opportunities.

The best product development example is the rise of online shopping. Companies such as Amazon and other businesses offering products through their physical store began upselling through online shopping. In lieu of the pandemic caused by the spread of COVID-19, a new market called online shoppers was formed. People did not want to leave the safety of their homes, so they heavily relied on online stores and shopping apps. With this, you should already know that the market was as large as any other online sellers.

By accurately sizing the opportunity, you can set proper expectations of what your product development can achieve. Then you can begin writing a realistic business case to know whether this will be a large or small win for the product you are creating.

Choose Only the Best Ideas

Choose Only the Best Ideas

It’s not always about having plenty of ideas to choose from, but it’s also about having a few great ideas that will indeed churn in money. Many organizations carry all their new ideas through the new product development process when some of those should have been left behind. More often than not, this happens because people don’t want to be unfair towards others. Some ideas are only considered because of unreasonable kindness. If you are having problems with scratching certain ideas, always consider the business. You wouldn’t want to be carrying new ideas too far that waste resources and distract the team’s efforts from focusing on ideas that have potential.

To avoid this, make sure you have comprehensive parameters and checklists to screen new product development and service ideas. Establish the elements and considerations that an idea must have to stay on the list. If an idea does not meet your revenue requirements, you must either cut it from the list or figure out how to rework it so that it can generate more money.

Get Customers Involved Early

Get Customers Involved Early

You can improve your concepts by including your customers in the product development cycle, especially if you do it well before you launch. Determine the phases in which you will reach out to your customers. Would it be in the materials you use? Can you involve them in the design? Would they be helpful in pricing? Consider creating a customer advisory panel and marketing research team. Take note, regular meetings with a customer feedback panel and research teamwork both ways: not only do you improve your understanding of how they feel about your product, but you also build customer awareness of your offering before trying to sell them on it.

A simple survey is one of the effective ways in order to hear the market’s opinions and thoughts. There is clearly no way to read the market’s mind except for carrying out certain tests applied to clusters. Hiring a research team will not only be useful for the new product development, but it will also be vital for the future’s innovation.

Dedicate A Team To The Job

Dedicate a Team to the Job

A launch can easily be compromised if the responsibility for the success of a new service is spread among too many individuals or if there are no dedicated resources and point persons. But just making someone directly accountable is not enough to streamline the management process to improve product development. You should consider empowering that person so that they have authority and resources. Establishing a team who would take responsibility for their area from start to end is necessary to complete daily small tasks to largely important ones.

Find the Pain Points of the Target Market

Find the Pain Points of the Target Market

In order to know whether your product is to solve the world’s problems, you should be able to answer a few important questions to realize what is product development for your company. What is the actual purpose of your new product or service? What need does it solve? There are companies that develop benefit statements based on a new offering’s features instead of its actual benefits. These are not really false advertisements, but it is unethical as you are robbing money and selling something that is subpar.

Another product development definition you should be able to establish is the need for making your customer’s life a little easier. Say you are selling a gaming controller that is both compatible with Microsoft and iOS. While you are selling a highly needed product by gamers using the PC and laptop, there might be some flaws as to the compatibility of the controller to the systems of a computer. If you don’t thoroughly understand your target group’s pain points, you can easily undersell the very real benefits of your service or miss the features that can bring the best out of your new product development.

Select the Best Pricing

Select the Best Pricing

After you have decided how you will go through your new product development process

and how to create a product that should bring benefits to your target group, then you open your product to more possibilities of generating profit.

Choosing the best pricing could mean selecting between cost-plus pricing and customer-based pricing. The best way you can select the best pricing is when you already have a database including financial statements, product growth, expenses, and the possible return of investment. While plainly looking at the expenses and the percentage you would want to add in the expenses can tell you the pricing, having a basis should drastically improve your sales.

Companies often use cost-based pricing in order to validate an acceptable return of investment for the business case when they should be developing pricing based on their customer’s cost threshold to ensure that price does not become a barrier to purchase for people who truly want the product. Again, regardless of having the best marketing campaign, if you are selling a product that is not well-priced, you will not achieve your target market.

Consider the Product After-Sale

Consider Product After-sales After most companies launch a new product or new service, the only people interacting with customers are the sales and customer support service teams. Not only should there be a detailed plan as to how this new product will be supported by the product development team, but there should also have extensive training and education available for in-store staff and on-call services.

It’s far better when the development team and sales/support teams work in unison to ensure that the customer is given much attention. Your product development team is important to be involved with the sales and service teams earlier in the process, rather than just training them after the product is ready. This will help get everyone in the company or dedicated team thinking about the total customer experience and not just its initial marketing, but how the new product will be supported and improved upon throughout its lifecycle.

Key Takeaway

The truth is there’s no shortage of new product ideas out there in order to create the best product development plan. The real skills lie in finding the most appropriate, establishing a well-managed and resourced process to build them, utilizing customer input from the conceptualization process, launching them with a fully supported and dedicated team, and learning how to continually improve on what has been launched. Finally, greatly considering a new product development process lies in the purpose of your product. Finding the real benefits to solve the world’s problems is the best way to introduce your product. For any tips to improve your business or build a website for it, check us out by clicking here!