From Concept to Delivery: Building Products That Matter

The business has to build products that can survive and thrive to beat the competition. Every product development sparks an idea that can solve a problem. Developing a product from an idea needs a strategic plan that can bridge vision to execution. The current article helps the product owner focus on building products that matter and build the right product before building it right.

Develop the product to solve the problem

Organisations can develop the right products only when they understand customer pain points. The product team that is into product development should understand the problem they are going to solve with product development. The product owner should have identified the insufficiency of competitors in solving the problem or the problem that is ignored by them. You should view the problem from the customer’s perspective and uncover their frustrations or unmet needs.

Talk To Users

Know your customers and learn from them about the products they are using and the solutions they are looking for. It could be about the product you are already offering, trust issues or payment-related issues. Check if they are using a competitor product because it could offer a valuable insight into your new product development and beat the competition. You can conduct thorough customer research through surveys, behaviour tracking and analytics or any other feedback tools. Understand the need for building the product for the customer to ensure you are building the product right.

Build a product prototype

Before building the new product, you should build a product prototype and make it accessible to the customers. You should iterate on it based on testing, measurements and learnings to develop the right product quickly at a lower cost. The product owner should incorporate agile methods in the organisation to develop the new product, as it allows customer feedback in product development while making measurable changes and necessary adjustments in the development process. This way of testing the product and refining it at the development stage reduces complexity in building the product and saves a great deal of time.

Define Your Unique Value

Organisations build new products to beat the competition. The product owner should be able to disclose their unique value proposition that makes their products stand out from the competition. You should disclose what makes your product different from others and why customers should choose your product over competitors. Defining a clear value proposition helps your product connect with the audience and communicate the product’s worth effectively.

Validate Before You Build

Product development is all about executing the new, valid business idea, but it is important that you validate the idea before you build it. You can validate your product development idea by conducting user interviews and building minimum viable products. You should gather the feedback from the users early and often to save time, resources and energy before starting product development at full scale.

Balance Business Goals with User Needs

Many businesses follow a customer-centric approach while building new products, and a few focus on generating profits for the business with their product, but the real success lies in striking a balance between the two. You should research the product features that will delight users without complicating their experience in using the product. Also, you should ensure that you drive business profitability while maintaining product quality. The product cannot be sustained in the market without customer satisfaction; likewise, the business cannot develop the product in the long run without any profits.

Froster on continuous improvement

The customer needs in the market are very dynamic and they change constantly, so product development is not a one-time effort. The business should constantly take customer feedback, monitor trends and technologies, and stay adaptable to change. By listening to the users constantly, you can make sure that your product evolves with customer needs, building loyalty and trust over a period.

Build the product

The business should now develop the successful product using agile methods to make quick decisions and ensure faster delivery to the market. To develop the product using agile methods, they should understand agile principles. This helps the product manager launch the product quickly and release interim versions of the product for customer feedback. The agile methods will not have any standard product development plan, but they allow you to experiment and refine versions during the product development process.

By using the agile method in building the products, you will know the interests of the target customer even before developing the product. The product owner should embrace mistakes and allow their team to approach the mistakes as a learning opportunity. Test small parts of the product development to know if it is working as expected. If you find any deviation, you can make early changes and bring the project back on track.

Not every feature you think of can be incorporated into product development; the product manager should develop the product after understanding the core customers of their business. Know about the features that customers are looking for and run A/B testing before developing the final product. Also, it is important to learn to say no if the customer’s requirements are compromising your organisational brand. You should learn to manage products through SAFe Product Manager Certification Training.

Conclusion

The successful product developed by the company should convey a clear purpose to the customers. It should be built balancing both customer needs and business objectives. Building a successful product is a constant journey that takes changing customer needs into consideration to thrive in the market.