A well-planned, formulated and executed product can fetch you new growth opportunities and get off to an excellent start. However, the process of product development company can be too overwhelming, especially if it’s your first time! Venturing into a brand new landscape opens doors for challenges; thus, you need to have a structured digital product development process to deal with unforeseen issues. If you’re planning digital product development, we have outlined 10 steps for a seamless digital product development and launch.
Let’s dive in!
What Is Digital Product Development?
Digital product development can be described as a process of ideation, product designing, developing, conceptualizing, building, formulating, and other steps before the product gets finally launched in the market.
It is a dynamic and an iterative process which combines the expertise of cross-functional teams like designers, product managers, quality assurance testers, developers and marketers to get the best product inhand. The primary aim is to analyze the market, understand customer’s needs, and build digital products that become useful for targeted customers.
10 Steps Processes for Digital Product Development
Step 1. Ideation
The development and the launch of your digital product starts from the ideation stage. In this stage, you identify the gap in the market or the issue and generate an innovative idea that can potentially solve or minimize the problem. Here, it is vital to have a clear goal in mind and understand your targeted customer’s needs.
Step 2. Market Research
Once you have an idea on board and identify certain areas for improvement, it’s time to kickstart the research process. Start by researching your targeted customers, users” expectations, their needs, existing solutions, competitors, prevalent market trends and the overall market. By gathering all this information, you get an idea of what’s exactly in demand. During this stage, ensure you employ the right tools and software to ease the research process.
Step 3. Idea Validation
Ideation and market research are not just to start the product formulation process. It is important to conduct various surveys, solicit feedback from industry experts and stakeholders and take customer interviews to analyze and confirm your product idea’s viability. The major aim is to understand if the market and the users truly need your product. This eliminates any unnecessary expenditures or expenses on something that is not viable or may not succeed.
Step 4. Defining Product Requirements
Once your idea is validated and you’re all set to go, it’s time to understand your product requirements. In this step, even the minute details of the product are mentioned along with the aim to build it, its functionality, features, necessary technology used for development and user flow. If you have clear and concise product requirements, it becomes easier for you and the entire team to be on the same page throughout the development process.
Step 5. Building a Minimum Viable Product
Up next, you develop a minimum viable product or MVP, which is a basic version of the actual product. It is designed and developed to check the overall functioning and tackle all existing problems without investing too much resources. It is great to get feedback before actually making the final product.
Step 6. Testing the MVP
After a minimum viable product is built, it undergoes the testing stage. The primary aim is to detect any faults and get honest feedback. Since the product is tested under real-world conditions, it uncovers all issues and highlights potential improvement areas.
Step 7. Feedback Loop
In the feedback loop stage of the digital product development, all feedbacks collected from the last stage are taken into consideration and worked upon. All necessary changes and modifications are made by you so that the final product is free from all errors and to meet customers expectations. This makes the product unique and stand out in the market.
Step 8. Product Development
After working on all feedback by the stakeholders, industry leaders and more, it’s time to kickstart the full-scale product development in full swing. During this stage, all planned functionalities and features are added to the final product, and it gets ready for the product launch.
Step 9. Product Launch
Following multiple quality checks, rigorous testing and continuous development, your product is all set to enter the real-world market space and bring a storm. Since you are going to launch your product, effective marketing strategies need to be implemented to introduce your new product to the targeted audience successfully. It increases the brand’s visibility and promotes sales and growth. You can rely on influencer marketing to market your product in the eyes of potential customers.
Step 10. Feedback collection after the Launch
Once the product is in the market, chances are high that you may receive different feedback from industry experts, stakeholders and most importantly, the customers. It is your responsibility to consider their feedback and implement strategies for improvement continuously. It is an ongoing process necessary to meet customers’ ever-evolving expectations and demands.
Benefits of Digital Product Development
Here are some benefits of digital product development:
- Digital products are easier to make and can be launched quickly as compared to physical products.
- Developing and launching a digital product is inexpensive as it does not require a lot of physical resources or materials.
- Digital products and services can be distributed to anyone and anywhere without any boundary issues.
- Digital products can be scaled much faster.
- They generally possess a lower environmental footprint as it reduces the need for transportation, raw material and waste.
Wrapping Up!
Product design and development is a comprehensive process whose primary aim is to fill the gap in the market, understand customers’ needs and formulate a product that meets their expectations. In this article, we discussed a 10-step process through which you can develop a highly compatible and great-quality digital product that stands out in the market. There are several professional product development companies that you can rely on for end-to-end services. This article reads about 10 major steps for digital product development and its benefits!
