Launching innovative new products can seem overwhelming, considering 60-80% of all new offerings fail within the first few years. Yet many of these failures can be avoided by following a more disciplined new product development process.
With the right approach and framework for conceiving and ideating impactful solutions, you can set your new product efforts apart, save tremendous time, money, and headaches, and ultimately deliver maximum value to customers. Below, we’ve outlined six tips for developing new products efficiently and effectively:
Use Available Templates and Software
When starting the new product development process, don’t reinvent the wheel. There are many excellent templates and software tools available to help you structure and organize the product planning process. For example, a product planning template can provide a framework to guide you through important steps like identifying market needs, defining product requirements, analyzing competition, and projecting costs and revenue. Leveraging these templates and tools can save significant time and provide assurance that key bases are covered.
Deeply Understand Your Customer
Too often, new products fail because companies develop offerings without thoroughly understanding target customer needs, frustrations, and jobs to be done. Truly connecting with your customer at an emotional level provides critical insights to conceive original products that solve real problems. Spend time researching and observing how customers interact with current solutions and identify subtle pain points. Use surveys, interviews, and prototyping to test concepts with target users early and aqayoften. Let their feedback drive development priorities rather than internal assumptions.
Map the Full Customer Journey
Customers interact with products across a progression of touchpoints over time, not just during a single moment of use. Carefully map out the entire customer lifecycle from initial discovery to final stage to uncover more expansion opportunities. Analyze interactions customers have with competitive solutions at each touchpoint as well to find weaknesses to capitalize on. Innovating across this full continuum reveals possibilities that are hidden when only focused on product functionality.
Leverage Existing Brand Assets
Launching totally new brands requires huge investments that startups rarely have. New products that leverage existing brand names and assets have built-in advantages. They inherit hard-earned trust, reputation, customer awareness, and more that took years to earn. This brand halo effect transfers positive associations to new products, reducing risky and costly consumer education and allowing more focus on delivering core benefits.
Prototype Early and Often
No amount of research, analysis, and projection can replace physically putting product concepts in front of target users. Early prototyping surfaces key flaws and reveals must-have features long before expending resources on full development. Continued iteration of quick prototypes is the most efficient way to test functionality and usability assumptions. Prioritize testing concepts that have the most uncertainty first. Not all features deserve the same level of experimentation.
Build a Flexible Development Process
Customers change, markets shift rapidly, and unexpected events happen. Fixed product roadmaps quickly become outdated and force tradeoffs between responding to opportunities and promises made months or years earlier. Build adaptable systems, supply chains, and partnerships that allow some flexibility in priorities as you learn, and conditions evolve. Structure internal workflows and communication to handle some level of change without derailing momentum.
Following the six tips listed above will help establish critical processes for developing products customers genuinely want while avoiding common missteps that doom many new offerings.
