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The A-Z Product Development Guide From a Team of Product Experience Pros

Creating a product that’s both engaging for customers and valuable for your business is the core driving factor behind product development. If you don’t nail the product experience, it’s impossible to grow your business.

That’s why understanding everything that goes into product development—the planning, organization, and process management—is so important. Product development keeps your team connected with customer needs, as well as business outcomes, and provides valuable context for why you make certain decisions for your business.

Whether you’re building out a brand new product, releasing an update to your service, or launching a new feature to solve a specific customer problem, the deep customer insights you gain throughout the product development process are what sets your company apart from the competition.

When you’re able to nail the product experience for both your customers and your team, it sets your company up for success. That’s why we’ve put together this resource as a jumping-off point for all things product management. In it, we’ll talk through what product development is and how it impacts your team, your business, and your customers. Understanding how to take an idea all the way through to launch is the best thing you can do to grow your business.

What Is Product Development and Why Does It Matter?

Product development defines the various processes and workflows that go into taking a new product or feature from idea to release. It requires input from various stakeholders and teams across your organization and helps everyone come together to focus on every new product or feature your team creates.

When your team understands the various facets of product development, it keeps them connected with the value your product provides to customers and helps everyone involved understand the underlying “why” behind any given project.

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Taking your product idea and turning it into something that solves a problem for your customers is one of the most difficult processes you can undertake as a product manager.

Understanding product development makes it easier to define the work required from everyone across multiple teams and ensure that everyone is headed in the right direction. And that direction is defined in your product development strategy.

Understanding Product Development Strategy

Much of your company’s success hinges on the product experience. A strong product development strategy not only makes it easier to know when you’re building something of real value for customers, but it also gives your team a clear and well-defined path forward.

Think of strategy as your team’s guiding light. It provides valuable context for every decision you make. It’s easy to veer off course in the product development process when your team is heads-down in their work; defining your product development strategy mitigates this risk.

Creating a solid product development strategy also connects overarching business goals with specific customer needs and outcomes. This helps you know when you’re building something of real value for customers while also helping your team engage with their work on a deeper level.

As you progress through the various stages of product development, it’s important to give your team a way to check in with the high-level goals you want to impact.

The PM’s Handbook to Product Development Strategy helps you understand the value of this kind of strategy for your team.

How to Build Your Own Product Development Strategy

Now that you know why it’s important to define your product development strategy, how do you create one for your team?

Creating a winning product development strategy is all about gaining deep insight into your target customer. Their wants, their needs, their problems — all of this is valuable context for your team. Understanding what outcomes your customers look for helps you empathize with the problems they face every day, then create a product to solve them.

These six steps help you codify the value you provide to customers by turning it into clear goals and outcomes for your team:

  1. Document your ideas.
  2. Validate with research.
  3. Create a roadmap.
  4. Define the process.
  5. Refine your testing procedure.
  6. Prepare for launch.

Building out your strategy helps communicate these goals with your entire organization, making it easier for everyone to engage with work in a more meaningful way.

Check out the 6 Steps to Building a Foolproof Product Development Strategy to get started.

Mapping the Product Development Life Cycle

There are seven distinct stages in the product development life cycle. When you define these stages for your team, it clarifies what everyone is responsible for at each step and highlights potential issues before they delay your release. Not only does this make it easier to guide your team through the product development life cycle, but it also builds repeatable and measurable processes for them to follow.

Each stage of the development life cycle requires a different kind of work. Whether you’re refining ideas with customer research, actively coding new features, or building out a marketing plan for release, understanding the different processes and workflows helps you plan for everything more effectively.

Mapping out the product development life cycle also helps you justify why certain tasks are done at different points along the way. You can use this to increase buy-in for a project, as well as communicate your requirements to the team.

Learn how Understanding the Product Development Life Cycle Keeps Your Team on Track.

Building Out Your Product Development Process

Creating a well-defined product development process helps your team execute on the various types of work required to release new products and features to market. It guides everyone through the product development life cycle and highlights where you can increase efficiency and decrease complexity along the way.

Defining these processes clearly also makes it easier for every member of the team to stay connected with customer needs as well as your business goals. Understanding how to optimize the product development process keeps you on pace with your roadmap and always headed in the correct direction.

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There’s a lot that goes into building a winning product experience. So any missteps throughout the process can wreak havoc on your team if you’re not keeping a close eye on your progress.

Check out 7 Strategies for Building a Concrete Product Development Process to learn more about how to refine this process for your team.

The Most Important Person in Product Development

Getting a handle on the product development process requires a lot of hard work and great organizational skills. That’s why the digital product owner is such an important part of your team. They manage the inner workings of your product organization and help your team create more efficient processes across the board.

Digital owners also provide the type of cross-functional support you need to build and release products/features faster. Product teams work across so many parts of the organization, so having a centralized person to facilitate communication is key.

Defining a digital product owner also makes to clear who the go-to person is for questions about any aspect of your project.

Learn Why The Digital Product Owner is The Most Important Person On Your Team in this article.

How to Define Your Product Concept

Defining your product development strategy and process helps your team build the kind of product or feature customers want to see in the market. Validating your product concept is an important part of that process and keeps your team aligned with these customer expectations.

So when you have a product idea—document it. Even if you don’t think it’s ready, every new idea has the potential to become a new source of revenue for your business. It’s important to keep that in mind, even when your product concept is still in its nascent form.

Writing out a product concept also makes it easier for you to share your vision with the team. You’ll be able to invite feedback early on in the process and democratize the process of developing new products for your customers.

Learn more in Product Concept: 4 Questions You Must Answer Before You’ve Nailed It.

2 Types of Product Development Methodology

There are a number of different methodologies that companies use to define how new products and features are developed in their organization. We take a look at two of the most widely used frameworks and how they help product teams build and release faster and more efficiently.

The first framework we look at is lean product development. Coming out of the manufacturing world, the lean methodology is a useful lens for looking at how your team interacts with processes as your company scales.

Lean product development, as the name implies, is built around the idea that efficiency comes through the reduction of wasted resources. The goal is to decrease dependencies between team members and maximize return on investment (ROI) without sacrificing the quality of your next product or feature release. There are certain situations where the lean methodology is very helpful at guiding your team to a successful release.

Understanding Lean Product Development and When to Use It helps your team refine their internal processes and reduce complexity in the product development life cycle. Done correctly, the lean method helps reduce your time-to-market without causing additional stress for your team.

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But Lean product development isn’t the only way to think about process optimization for your team. Agile product development is arguably one of the most popular development frameworks for technology and SaaS businesses. When you create an agile product development process for your team, it helps codify the way your team executes on their work, making it easier to release continuously.

The agile method breaks down work into smaller units, helping your team move faster without sacrificing quality. It breaks up your organization into product/feature-focused teams that can execute on various different aspects of your company autonomously.

Making teams smaller gives everyone the independence they need to execute on tasks in their own way and keeps everyone engaged with the project long-term.

Start thinking about Creating an Agile Product Development Process for Your Team.

5 Product Development Examples and Why They Work

Understanding product development is much easier when you can see examples of it in the real world. We took a look at five different product development examples to see how successful companies have used the process to create value for their customers.

Here’s a sneak peek of the companies we looked into:

For each company, we highlight how their team took a deep understanding of customer needs and turned it into a successful new product or feature. We also look at how their efforts made an impact on the overall success of their company.

Understanding Product Development Helps Your Team Move Faster

Product development is the key to building an efficient team. When you have a clear sense of how the various processes, systems, and methods of product development impact your team, it’s easier to build customer-focused, high-value products faster.

This increased efficiency not only helps your team move forward toward shared goals quickly, but it also gives product owners and managers more time to spend on high-level issues. Every new product launch and feature release is a fundamental step toward building strong, engaged relationships with customers—the more time you have to plan the process, the easier it is to make a real impact on your business.