Overview of New Product Development and it's Best Practices

Introduction of New Product Development

The ability to innovate and successfully bring new game-changing, engaging products into the market is crucial for organizations and economies. Transforming vision to live products is a process that seems to be a hurdle to most Entrepreneurs. Building a product is like cooking a dish. Everything needs to be in perfect order and quantity. Product Development is far beyond being cool. If done rightly, it can bring significance to someone's life, solving a customer's daily life problem. How satisfying can a company be if their product matters and creates value in someone's life?

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Every year lots of organizations build and release new products in the market, but only a few products get success and good response from the market. Ever wondered why products fail even when a company puts lots of investment, capital, resources, human power, expenditure on new technologies, or emotions. When a lot of hard work is put into building a product and fails, how much pain can it be for a company?

What is New Product Development?

New product development is a process where concepts are converted into real working models and are brought to the market, creating differences in people's lives. Various stages of building a new product :

Idea generation
Evaluation and screening
Business Analysis
Imbibe the purpose
Development and Testing
Presentation (Market testing)
Commercialization

Why it is Important to Implement Best Practices in New Product Development?

Implementing any practice that can improve efficiency, effectiveness, and quality can act as a deciding factor between success and failure. The goal is not always to achieve the functionality or create a working product. It is also doing things rightly. Because your product has to last longer, you need to bring new features frequently, and during that, if your product is not rightly built, It becomes a vast technical debt for you and may lead to late delivery of features in the future.

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Best Practices of New Product Development

Start developing new products only when you have fully dedicated resources, as if resources are deployed on some other projects, too, there will be a delay in delivery.

Having a focused customer approach is how innovators have built valued products that matter to them and their customers. Customers play an essential role at every stage of product development. From product requirement definition, every phase, deciding features to testing everything, revolves around the customer.
Building and shipping products quickly with just enough features to be usable by early customers in the starting phase helps product owners get feedback early for future product development.
Tightly fix the requirements to minimize changes that will require redesign cycles.
Focus on early analysis so that re-development does not take
Capture proper documents of requirements, specifications
Properly analyze and define proper timeline borders for product development lifecycle.
The Agile way for faster release of a prototype of the product to understand market response at an early stage.
Continuously check and adapt to customer needs.

Few Additional Best Practices in New Product Development are below:

Expectations and customer needs may change over time. E.g., In this Corona outbreak, people have moved more to automated working solutions. Hence the demand for zoom applications increased with this zoom has also brought changes in its features. Similarly, applications like slack, Google Meet have adapted to need. These are appropriate examples of continuous checking and adapting to customer needs. Because in the end, the customer will use the product and provide value to their money.
Try to achieve design and component reuse to reduce development costs.
Do not write code that you think you might need in the future.
The other time you write the same code again is the right time to create a general-purpose interface/function.
Documentation: How will customers know how to use the applications and their unique features? It comes your way. Documentation is necessary for the development team and user to understand how they can use various features. Having updated Documentation is the best practice in developing a new product.
Product Development and Experimentation are two things that have to walk hands in hands to develop something extraordinary. Who knew that a ride ordering app or food ordering app would be so successful. But they took that risk. They did an experiment that beared fruit. Because initially, people never thought of ordering food online, they never thought that this would be possible in the future. We have to present that options before the customer. Then only can we change trends in the market? Hence Experimentation is an inseparable part of product development.

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Conclusion

The idea is essential for building a product, but it can turn to a blunder using best practices if not developed rightly. Following best practices allows you to streamline your team and product to the ultimate vision you had, then only it can bring value to your customers. Because in the end, the customer matters. So gear up, ideate, develop, iterate and release.