What is Product Development and Why Does it Matter?
At the end of the day, people buy products. Your brand may have been what enticed them, and your marketing content might have helped you close the deal, but the your product is ultimately what consumers choose when they make the final purchase decision.
That’s what makes product development such a powerful process. But what is product development, really? Product development is the way you conceptualize all the work that goes into building something new. When you understand everything that goes into taking a new idea from inception all the way through to release, it makes building a more valuable product or feature that much easier. You’ll be able to see how every task contributes to a project, as well as how it impacts the customer experience.
When every release can have either a positive or negative effect on your relationship with customers, being able to build features faster and more efficiently is vital to your company’s success. Product development is what helps you get to that point. It expands your understanding of the overlying systems and structures that make it easy to deliver value with every release.
What Is Product Development?
Product development is the process of taking a new product or feature from idea to release. It encompasses varying workflows and processes across multiple teams, coming together to make your product launches as seamless as possible. In essence, product development is the thread that runs through everything you do when building something new for your customers.
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Product development takes a high-level view of your releases, assessing their effect on both your customers’ needs and your business goals. It helps your team stay connected with desired outcomes and applies deep user insight to the day-to-day responsibilities of building out a new product or feature.
As you move through the product development process, every choice you make will either contribute to or detract from the overall product experience. So it’s important that you manage this process effectively.
Product Development vs. Product Management
There’s a considerable amount of overlap between these terms, and they’re often used interchangeably. But you need to understand the nuanced differences between product development and product management to create the best possible products for your customers.
Thinking of the two as synonyms can introduce unnecessary confusion into the complicated product development process.
- Product development takes a high-level view of the processes, teams, and business goals that go into building and releasing something new to market. It’s the way you conceptualize the underlying structures that support your team as they work through individual tasks.
- Product management is more concerned with the relationships between teams and processes and focuses on how to make them work as efficiently as possible across your entire organization. It helps you identify potential bottlenecks and highlight areas for improvement along the way.
5 Reasons Why Product Development Matters
When your team understands how to work together toward shared goals and outcomes, it makes the process of building truly amazing products simple. You can easily boost engagement with your product development strategy and iterate on complex processes to help every member of your team execute effectively on their individual tasks.
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1. It Defines Product Outcomes
Having a solid product development strategy ensures that your team is always connected with the driving factors behind a given project. It highlights desired outcomes for customers based on their wants and needs, as well as showcasing the overall business value of every release.
When your team has a clear understanding of why they’re working toward a specific set of goals, they’ll be able to engage directly with the work in a more meaningful way. This helps them see the real-world value of their contributions to the project, which makes it easier to deliver on this value as efficiently as possible.
2. It Organizes Your Work
Product development systematizes all the work required to come up with the concept for your new product or feature [link to How to Know When You’ve Nailed Your Product Concept], build it, and then release it to customers. Your team will be able to see how their day-to-day tasks play a part in the overall success of the project and will hold themselves accountable for completing that work on time.
Organizing tasks in a systematic way also highlights potential conflicts in your timeline or product roadmap before they cause issues for the team. That oversight is key when you’re working on a specific release date.
3. It Creates Repeatable Processes
Defining everything that needs to happen at various stages of the product development life cycle also helps your team execute on their work more efficiently. When you create repeatable workflows for how your team documents their progress or merges code into product, they can easily work through these complex processes with autonomy and move forward quickly.
These repeatable processes also make it easier to scale your business with new team members, because every step of the process is clearly defined and visible to the whole organization. This gives product leaders more time to focus on high-level strategy, because individual team members will understand the minute details of every project.
4. It Helps You Measure Your Progress
A well-defined product development process helps you keep measure the different types of work that go into building new features as well. Every action can be tied back to a specific metric or overarching business goal, making it easy to identify bottlenecks before they become issues for your team or cause unnecessary delays to your release. Let’s say you’re building out a new feature to ease customer pain during onboarding: you would tie that to overall churn rate reduction or an increase in lifetime value (LTV).
These metrics act as your basis for analysis as well. You can track how your team executes on individual aspects of the work and optimize each process accordingly. As your team grows or customer needs evolve, you’ll always understand how the features your team builds make an impact on the market.
5. It Increases Visibility Across the Team
Understanding the product development process increases visibility into the underlying structures that help your team execute on any given project. You’ll be able to see how product teams use documentation to highlight customer needs and how developers turn that documentation into individual tasks. This not only makes it easier to identify issues before they damage the product experience, but it also helps you highlight the importance of everyone’s contributions.
When every member of the team understands why you’re building a specific new feature, it builds a culture of open and honest feedback within the team. As a result, they’ll be able to provide more targeted feedback throughout the development process.
Understanding Product Development Helps Your Team Win
When 45% of the products launched are delayed by at least one month, anything you can do to mitigate risk helps your team build a better product experience. Answering the question “what is product development” is the key to defining a repeatable, optimizable, and, ultimately, more valuable process for your team.