What are the States of Product Development?

Product development, in simple terms, could be described as the creation or manufacturing of a product. In this sense, it refers to what takes place in a factory to create a physical product or the coding that developers do to craft a piece of software.

However, product development goes beyond actual manufacturing or coding work. It encompasses everything you do from conception or ideation to product launch. The steps or stages involved in the process can vary from one organization to another.

Product Development isn’t Product Management

While product managers play a central role in this process, it may be relevant to state that this doesn’t make product development synonymous with product management. It isn’t unlikely for you to come across people who use one term for the other.

Product management supervises the process of bringing to the market a new product. It produces requirements and guides how feature and project ideas are divided into tasks. PMs concern themselves more with the “what” of the product.

On the other hand, product development relates to everything that needs to be done to bring products to market. It includes more than the product management team, bringing in multiple teams across an organization including:

• Design
• Engineering
• Testing/QA
• Marketing
• Distributing

Product development basically includes the work of all teams that play a role in bringing an idea to launch.

Stages of Product Development

The phases that are involved in the development process are not uniform across companies. These typically range from four to seven steps. You are at liberty to determine how your organization will approach the process.

The stages discussed by Product School are worth considering, maybe especially if you’re in the tech industry. These are:

1. Discovery – The very first step is about identifying a problem that customers need help solving. Some companies do this inductively; others carry it out deductively. The first involves methods such as interviews, surveys, focus groups, and competition research. As for the deductive approach, it relates more to internal brainstorming sessions to discover innovative ideas. Both approaches should ideally be used together.

• Define – At this stage, you try to better conceptualize the solution and how it might serve the needs of customers. You determine the features that the minimum viable product (MVP) should have. It is critical to have a good understanding of the problem to do this effectively.

• Design – With a good solution identified, you then need to get your designers to produce mock-ups for validation purposes. You should find out whether the solution idea is sensible before you commit too many resources.

• Implementation – This is the stage where engineers and developers come more to the center stage in the product development process. It is when you build the product after it has been well-tested and well-defined. You use your validation results to build something promising.

• Marketing – While the marketing team should ideally play a role from the outset, this is arguably the stage it starts playing its primary goal. This is when you establish marketing goals. Marketers have to ensure that what they know of the “final” product influences their strategies.

• Training – This phase is often omitted in some product development stages, but it is relevant. It is that in which you aim to let everyone – both internal teams and customers – know how to use the product. You are to produce the necessary documentation and training material.

• Launch – This is the point where you release the product to the market and possibly hold events to announce its availability.

A launch doesn’t mean your work is done, especially in Agile settings. You need to assess results and see what you need to do better.

Validation is Critical

Of all of these steps, Discovery can have the greatest impact on your probability of success, and is the one most central to the responsibility of Product Management. The biggest waste in product development, is spending months or years developing a product no one wants. And the best insurance policy against such risk, is product discovery to ask prospective customers early in the process, to understand what is important and what might resonate with them.

The Role of a Roadmap

The product roadmap is practically indispensable in the development process. This is typically put together in the third stage (Design) above. You are ready to have one when you have a valid product idea.

The roadmap shows you the journey of the product from the idea to the release. It makes everyone aware of the product vision and serves as what success is measured against. The document provides a high-level, strategic overview with objectives to guide actions taken by the team.

When it comes to promoting alignment in the product development process, you get immense help from a roadmap. It makes clear the reasons behind certain actions and keeps teams from going off-track. This strategic document also makes it easier for product managers to get achieve buy-in and to address concerns early on.