A product development roadmap includes the main development milestones that lead to the product release. To get more details on the topic, check out our guide on a product roadmap and how to create one. In this case, product development strategy allows focusing on the final goal and spending the resources accordingly.

This process means every subsequent stage of development can benefit from analyzing actual product usage or from hearing users’ thoughts and feelings about the product. Let’s discuss how a company could build a product development strategy around the design thinking approach—a framework for creating products based on looking at the world from your user’s perspective. Now that you understand the six stages of the product life cycle, let’s look at real world examples of some of the most successful product development strategies of iconic startups to inspire your own. When a product development strategy is ready, it can be broken down into milestones which will be transformed into product roadmaps with clearly defined duty holders and estimated timeframes. A roadmap can change depending on the market situation, technologies and specialists available in the team, and many other factors. Nevertheless, it should always correlate with the product strategy and vision that are fixed and rarely deviate.

In 1980, Glen L. Urban and John R. Houser released a book where they defined nine product development strategies, divided into proactive and reactive categories. Now that you know what a product development strategy is and why you need one, let’s look at the types of strategies you can choose for your product. Product vision explains the dream behind it but doesn’t explain how this dream will become a reality. A product development strategy defines how to achieve the vision behind the product without getting too deep into details . Discover best practices to improve the effectiveness of your product development efforts and accelerate time to market. So, take a regular step back to make sure that the initiatives and priorities you’re working on right now still support the winning product strategy you worked so hard to create.

Top 5 Product Development Strategy Examples

You can narrow the list to only the most severe pain points you’ve found, or according to pain points that you believe your team could most quickly and easily develop a solution. Design Thinking emerged from Stanford University and carried forward by IDEO. Both Stanford and IDEO have templates to get you started, if you are new to design thinking. Even at this stage it is possible for early validation of your ideas – those it is likely that these are screenshots or paper prototypes. Learn how Coca-Cola, IKEA and Kellogg use product as an integral part of their corporate strategy in the free downloadable book, Or just scroll down the page. Some solutions may be obvious, while others may be less intuitive.

The idea isn’t to do everything; the point is to do everything possible without compromising on product quality or the consumers. In other cases, it allows customers to choose a product that suits their needs and wants. There’s a good chance that if you convince a customer with a trial for one product, they will be more likely to buy other products too. For any product, you need to come up with hundreds of ideas, so you can decide on a few good ones. It can be acquisition – you can buy an entire company, a patent, or a license to manufacture a new product.

You might determine that the most important thing your product could achieve would be to capture a new type of user persona and to increase the lifetime value of each customer. Yes, you could sit around waiting for the next Facebook-sized product strategy to hit you. The product backlog is a dynamic list of product development tasks and initiatives, including features, updates, optimizations, and bug fixes.

Though product strategy is deeply connected with the goals of the company and product, it is distinct from product vision. This is a fundamental step to decide how you will position and differentiate yourself in the market. By creating product packages that give customers additional options, such as add-ons, you present them with better value for money. A package deal may provide a discount, which could encourage your target market to make more purchases, earning you more revenue than if they had purchased the original item on its own. Getting feedback on the success of your product’s development journey can help you make time-sensitive decisions about overhauling offerings that aren’t meeting the targets. This means that resources, like money and time, can be reallocated for better use.

I know it’s very easy to get pulled along in the current of day-to-day tasks, requests, and urgent issues that need your attention. The product roadmap is your key to bringing the product strategy to life. It’s a high-level plan for how your product will achieve its strategic goals and what the product priorities are. Once you’ve defined the strategy based on the product vision, user needs, market differentiators, stakeholder inputs, and feedback, it’s time to put it into action. At the early stages of strategy building, it’s important that you test, adapt, and evolve your product. Get general user feedback on your product ideas as soon as possible and use it to refine the strategy.

stages to creating a product development strategy

Listening carefully to what customers say can give you a strong competitive edge. However, identifying and responding to those that are repetitive can only help you. 12 Traits of High-Performing Product Teams As a product team grows from one or two individual contributors to a larger, more diverse team, it takes some…

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This strategy can be used to improve an existing product or develop a new one based on the customers’ feedback. However, companies that rely on this strategy may come up with a solution too late. So if you’re responsible for developing a product strategy roadmap, you need a plan. But you should have some sort of defined approach to developing a winning product strategy. The next step is to channel all of these insights into the product strategy.

It begins with a product vision, which aligns everyone around the shared objective for this product. This is followed by a product mission—the ultimate purpose of the product, who it is for, and what it does for them. Finally, it establishes some guiding principles for the work to come. Dimensional analysis – listing all physical characteristics of a product idea and asking relevant questions to assess its potential for success.

This adds value for customers, who may well buy your new product, even though they have the current version. Developing a new product needs to be weighed up against the risk involved, overall costs, pressure on your team’s resources, and time to market. In this blog, we’re covering product development strategy and some examples of this in practice.

For example, technology manufacturing companies will often bundle laptops with mice, webcams, and other peripherals to increase the likelihood of purchase. As the bundles are usually cheaper than buying each item individually, the customer saves money in the long run while the business increases its sales. This strategy also works when organizations need to sell less popular products — by bundling them with the most popular items, they can quickly get rid of them, allowing them to make room for new stock.

I suggest you use a weighted-scoring model for the initiatives you’re considering adding to the product roadmap. Use the product goals you’ve established (“Customer Delight,” “Entry into a New Geographic Region,” etc.) as the guides for scoring each proposed new theme, epic, https://skatay.com/novosti/angularjs_maintaining_web_applications/2021-01-14-65543 and feature. As you review a new epic, for example, you’ll score it against each of your product’s goals. When you’ve established your high-level product vision first, all of the decisions you and your team make regarding the product will have a more strategic basis.

Led by user needs

You can develop multiple product concepts for various ideas, but that just means more time, effort, and resources are being used. If you’re interested in learning how to create a great product strategy, then take a look at our product management certifications where we help you do just that. For instance, you created a new product and the target market isn’t responding to the new offers.

Often this takes the form of a relative emphasis on technological or market innovation, led by product management. Not every problem is problematic enough to warrant a product-based solution. However, the pain it causes and the number of people or organizations it impacts can determine whether it’s a worthy problem to solve and if people are willing to pay for a solution . So identifying a problem that needs solving is where this journey should begin.

Changing an existing product or service idea

The goal of most businesses is to adopt a mix of proactive and reactive strategies so that they are always prepared for whatever happens next in their industry. Prototypes can also give you a general idea of how much time it will take to create your product which can help plan budgets and schedules accordingly. Customer feedback analysis article to understand what needs to be done. Remember how I talked about efficiency and lines of communication?

We can also look at product development strategies evolving as collaborations between companies, such as Spotify and Uber. These market leaders partnered to provide a richer, more personalized rideshare experience for users, and in turn, boosted their own brands and increased demand for their services. With a product development strategy, a team gets more chances to create a product you want and users need.

Here’s where the team puts in the effort and applies their creativity to devising how a product might serve its needs. Scenario analysis – identifying market evolution to capitalize on anticipated consumer needs. Added value, as you get not only the solution but a development roadmap as well.

• Moonpig.com relies on the market’s desire to want to go the extra mile for their loved ones.
• Technology product management leaders are under growing pressure to differentiate their products and improve customer experience, all without compromising time to market.
• Coca-Cola has a strategy that is all about the voice of the customer.
• In an agile development organization, this will also help clarify which task-level initiatives take priority at any given time, and which ones to include in an upcoming sprint.
• The customer might simply throw the cord over her shoulder while vacuuming.

The company has developed a new packaging method called “Doritos Locos Tacos,” They take their classic Doritos chip and put it inside taco shells instead . An example of this would be when Microsoft released the Surface RT tablet. The company was reacting to Apple’s iPad, which was dominating the tablet market. However, Surface RT ended up being a flop because it didn’t have the same features as the iPad and therefore couldn’t compete with it. This process is where the prototypes come in handy, as they can help speed up the process by giving everyone an idea of what they need to create.

Innovation in Product Development Strategy:  Ideation Process Approach

Middle of the Road companies are happy to take an incremental approach with low or moderate innovation in products and markets, and stick more with modifying existing products. To avoid a promising product vision from faltering in the face of challenging work and difficult hurdles, roadmap strategies should be tightly coupled with Agile planning to optimize the work being done. To learn more about how rapid iteration can stay true to long-term objectives, check out this webinar. From here, it’s a cycle of reviewing data, synthesizing feedback, and continually updating the product roadmap while grooming the product backlog to ensure every development cycle is utilized for maximum impact. Experiments can gauge interest, prioritize marketing channels and messages, and begin testing the waters around price sensitivity and packaging. It also kicks off the feedback loop to bring ideas, complaints, and suggestions into the prioritization process and populate the product backlog.

Product Analysis:

Now, you conduct market research and find out the exact needs and wants of the customer, and give a new idea to your product relevant to the market requirements. In an agile development organization, by contrast, the team will build the minimum functional solution they can and release it to users as quickly as they can. In the design thinking approach, this final stage refers not to internal QA testing but to allowing your user personas to try your product and tell you what they like and don’t like about it. Here you will coordinate with your designers and your development team to build an MVP or a working version of your concept that you can put in real users’ hands to gauge their level of interest.