Product Development Process - Explained

What is the Process for Developing a Product?

Updated at September 28th, 2021

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What is Product or Service Development?What is the Product Development Process? What is Initial Research and Development?What are Common Product Development Frameworks?

What is Product or Service Development?

Product and service development (PSD) is more than simply manufacturing a product or devising procedures for carrying out at service. PSD involves strategic assessment of your concept and how it delivers value to the customer. Likewise, you will have to compare the value delivered to customers against the value received for the product.

In the previous lectures, we examined the needs and wants of your target customers. Your job in PSD is to develop a product or service that meets those needs or wants without including additional features that do not earn additional return from customers. This concept is known as developing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

What is the Product Development Process?

We begin by examining in detail the research and development process for a product or service. There are numerous Product Development Frameworks (discussed below), but hte process of product development generally includes the following steps:

Initial Research and Development
Alpha Testing
Strategic Assessment
Beta Testing
The Launch

The above process is most commonly associated with products rather than services and is most commonly used in the technology field. This is due to the high need for continued research and development of technology products. In any event, this process can be applied to a product or service.

Next Article: Alpha TestBack To: ENTREPRENEURSHIP

What is Initial Research and Development?

In previous lectures we made the distinction between entrepreneurs and inventors. Often, these two individuals are not the same person. If so, however, the inventor often partners with another entrepreneur who can work on building a business while the inventor entrepreneur works on further developing the product. The non-inventor entrepreneur should serve as a source of input and sounding board for ideas about the product. The market analysis helps determine the need or want that the product solves, but it takes a great deal of trial and error to develop the product to a stage that adequately meets customer expectations. This is why the product concept from the feasibility analysis is so important and is a continuously changing item in the business plan. Once you have a product that meets the needs and wants of the customer, it is time to test the product for functionality and other necessary changes or modifications necessary to meet customer expectation. This process can be tricky because, in any product, there is a point where additional features do not add to the value that certain target customers are will to give for the product. That is, at some point there are diminishing returns for investing more time and capital into adding features to the product. This is generally known as developing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). The manner of arriving at the MVP is through product testing and continued development. The following sections outline the typical process for testing and developing a new product or service.

What are Common Product Development Frameworks?

Fuzzy Front End (FFE) Approach to product development are:

Identification of design criteria
Idea analysis
Concept genesis
Prototyping
Product development

The Design Thinking Approach to product development includes:

Empathize
Define
Ideate
Prototype
Test

The Composite New Product Development (NPD) framework includes the following steps:

Idea generation
Idea screening
Concept development and testing
Market strategy/business analysis
Feasibility analysis/study
Product technical design/Product development
Test marketing, or market testing
Market Entry/Commercialization

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