Are you trying to understand what is product development and why it is one of the most exciting and stressful processes simultaneously? There is no need to worry because it depends on many factors, which sometimes become a complex and time-consuming process. In this article, we will discuss in detail the core steps of the development process to help you understand how successful products are efficiently developed.
What is Product Development?
Every unique product idea that comes to our mind goes through a complete process to understand what scope and risks it has in the market. This step-by-step process is called the product development process, which mainly has 6 stages. Product managers have a crucial role in these stages because they ensure smooth communication between the teams.
This helps create a healthy working environment, enabling teams to develop products per market demand more effectively. At this point, third-party platforms like ZEGOCLOUD can help complete complex software development processes quickly.
Product Development vs. Product Management
You might have heard and wondered if product development and management are the same. However, it is not true because they sound familiar, but in reality, they have different meanings and roles. That is why, below, we have made a table for you so you can understand the concepts of these terms in the most appropriate way:
| Features | Product Development | Product Management |
|---|---|---|
| Main Objective | It deals with the development of products, including designs and other features. | This mainly covers how the development process should be wisely done to get the desired results on time. |
| Focus | Product features and other technical aspects. | Manages the roadmap of market research and business strategy for the product. |
| Duration | It mainly leads the product development and improvement phases at different times. | Product accessibility to all users is led by the product manager until the product is available in the market. |
| Execution | Coding, testing, building prototypes, and other essential aspects of the development phases are the responsibility of the product developer. | Whereas managing teams’ coordination and ensuring product quality is efficiently monitored by the product manager. |
6 Stages of the Product Development Process
Dividing the complete product development process into small milestones and stages can benefit developers. This will help you ensure that the product has all the desired features as per the requirement. Therefore, to help you understand what these development stages are and how they work, let’s take a look at the following details:
1. Brainstorming for Ideas
Before starting the product development process, the first thing that experts do is brainstorm new ideas according to the customer’s needs. This is because the backbone of any product or business is its idea, based on which a lot of effort is made.
Thus, without having a clear vision or understanding of the market demand, it would be difficult for new businesses to launch their products and compete with the competitors. Following this, perform a detailed market analysis in this stage to understand how existing products perform and engage customers. Using this brief analysis, developers can improve the product idea and its functionality to easily stand out.
2. Research and Strategy
The second stage of the new product development process deals with market research to identify the competitors and gaps in the market. This initial homework can help you a lot to measure the strengths and weaknesses of your business rivals. Using this information, developers can add value to your product according to the customer requirements.
In addition to the research, it is necessary to have the right strategy to launch and advertise your product in the market. Without having an effective advertising strategy, it will be difficult for businesses to attract relevant audiences to their products. Therefore, many companies spend thousands of dollars developing customer-based strategies to boost their revenue.
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3. Prototyping
After finalizing the product idea, you will have to carefully prepare the prototype and detailed business plan for it. Moreover, it helps a lot to understand the market behavior and potential threats.
These prototypes are very beneficial in analyzing the market risks and preparing a feasibility report to understand the true potential of the product under development. This helps pitch investors with an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) for launch to raise funds for the product.
4. Creating the Initial Design
Once the funding is successfully approved, the developers cautiously design a product mockup according to the prototype. At this point, stakeholders and the development team put a lot of effort into ensuring that the product has the right problem-solving design and features.
In addition, sourcing materials is finalized in this stage because having a quality product is very important in the long run. That is why different vendor’s materials are carefully tested to finalize the mockup of the product, which helps to reflect the true idea in an impactful way.
5. Testing and Validation of Initial Design
Businesses do proper validation and testing before investing a lot of money in developing the final product. That is why, in this stage, the product mockup is thoroughly tested multiple times to validate it. Therefore, many big software development companies also launch beta versions of their products to get customer feedback.
This way, they collect feedback from customers for the beta version by testing the front-end functionality of the product. It helps to identify technical errors on the user and server sides, which developers can carefully fix in time.
6. Commercialization
The final stage of new product development involves commercializing your concept that you have validated and tested in multiple stages. In this stage, you have to launch the final product in the market with a proper marketing strategy to ensure it reaches the target audience.
Here, ZEGOCLOUD can also benefit the developers to quickly finalize their products’ UX/UI design with the help of different UIKits. This way, a lot of their time and effort can decrease when they have deadlines and a lot of work pressure.
Use ZEGOCLOUD SDK to Simplifies Product Development
To simplify the new product development process and enhance product quality, you can use the video call APIs & SDKs, live streaming APIs & SDKs, or messaging APIs & SDKs of ZEGOCLOUD. This SDK provider has solutions for several services, enabling you to build a robust product quickly and efficiently.
ZEGOCLOUD has 20+ pre-built UIKits, which help developers design engaging user interfaces for their products. Moreover, you can add voice calls, cloud recording, and other valuable features to the products with the help of customizable APIs/SDKs.
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