Product development sounds fancy for sure. When you look at conversations around startups, the way ideas are incubated and how organizations are eventually established to thrive – everything sounds good. But of course, there is more than what meets the eye.
You need to do elaborative research where everything you do is defined by what the potential user would like to see. And don’t forget market trends as well. When both user and market needs are part of the equation, your work will make sense more easily.
And you will need to get out of your comfort zone. There will be multiple stakeholders involved. From app developers in Houston to business strategists elsewhere – everyone will provide their input.
The roadmap will eventually be defined and multiple approaches will be underway. In this article, we will be looking at our personalized product development journey. You do not have to necessarily follow all steps. Your roadmap might look different.
Take inspiration, reflect, and move forward with your process. Let’s begin.
The 5 stages of product development
The journey might seem overwhelming at first but in order to launch the ideal product, you will have to take into account all sorts of measures, eliminating all kinds of potential errors. Remember that communication and teamwork will help you cover the workload much more efficiently. Do not shy away from problems.
Ideation
Be creative and come up with all possible ideas. No rational thought. Just instant brainstorming. Be quick and agile with your thought process and consider all possibilities. The goal here is to be innovative and create a market-ready solution that you would ideally like to see. Whether the idea is actually plausible or not shall be defined at a much later stage.
Once your entire team comes up with an idea and there is somewhat of a vision in mind, the company you collaborative with will help in gathering the right insights much later on. Keep brainstorming and finalize how you would like to see a product.
Get better ideas through SWOT analysis and SCAMPER. Both are later thinking techniques where all kinds of possibilities are considered and evaluated for future use.
Product branding
Once the idea is ready and it has been discussed and evaluated in terms of business and rationality, the next goal is to develop a well-crafted brand identity around the product. You will have to be more considerate of business repercussions, the value proposition involved, metrics attached, and the eventual marketing strategy.
Defining user personas and doing user research matters here. While crafting a brand, you will need to know your audience in a more personal way and include measures that showcase you care for them. And include clear goals here as well. Figure out what kind of metrics you would need to evaluate after the product is launched. Later on, the name, logo, tagline, and the kind of design and text you decide to include will define the brand voice.
You can keep personalizing the voice and create different tones. But that is after the initial guidelines are defined.
Prototyping
At this stage, you will see actual development and your product becoming a reality. The iOS app development companyyou partner up with will be responsible for taking the ideation further and creating a prototype where the product is taken into hypothetical situations, and all sorts of risks are eliminated.
Deadline and workflow timeline will be evaluated here. How feasible is the strategy? Is the estimated workload too much? Setting up different takes and assigning them to stakeholders shall take place here.
And throughout the prototype stage, the minimum viable product (MVP) will help in testing out ideas and provide a rougher version of the app. The MVP, as the name shows, will include minimal functions and will be enough to showcase how the product can potentially look like once it moves toward the fully-assembled phase.
Validating the idea
With the MVP, there is room for experimentation, and you can test out ideas. There will be constant iterations and that is ok. It is part of the process. Quality assurance is part of the plan, and identifying bugs and errors will always be more helpful.
Front-end testing will take place, and the code will go through multiple technical rounds. During validation, functionality and user compatibility, among factors, will be thoroughly looked at. And not only the product, even means of marketing should be tested here. Is the campaign effective? Is the planning according to brand guidelines? Keep asking questions until you validate everything.
Launch
Finally, now is the time to launch the product and finalize everything. Throughout the product development cycle, you will be dealing with product managers, designers, business architects, and stakeholders such as investors and VCs.
The stakeholders might increase depending on the complexity of the project. Not every project requires an entire finance or engineering team. But some do. And launching the product is the beginning of a whole new cycle. A software development company in Houstoncan help you elevate your business presence and help with strategy and development altogether.
Your focus should gravitate towards listening to feedback and looking initial reviews right after launch. The rest will figure itself.
