Product Development Process
The supporting actor that gets neglected!
Most organizations have a defined set of processes, which employees are required to adhere to. However, these processes often get sidelined in an effort to get the desired output. This is akin to a supporting actor in a movie, who is cast to support the lead, but is rendered irrelevant for the most part. However, if these supporting actors are provided with meatier roles, it only adds to the plotline, and to the success of the movie.
Oftentimes, startups are unable to create the right product despite having a brilliant idea and an in-depth understanding of the market. Having worked for several startups, I have observed one thing in common — almost all of them don’t follow a well-defined product development process. This can be due to one of two reasons:
- they are not aware of the development process
- in an effort to meet deadlines, they neglect the defined process
Personally, I use a simple, self-designed process, that can be used for both, a big product idea as well as for a small bug fix. I have often found that the role of the product owner is critical in ensuring that the process flow is adhered to.
The Process
The process has 7 steps as shown below. Product owner needs to ensure that each step of the process is frozen before moving on to the next step. This will enhance the quality of the product and will help project stick to the timelines.
Step 1: Idea
The business team comes up with an idea that needs to be explored and nurtured. This need not be a new idea, it can also be a small bug fix or a minor feature enhancement.
Step 2: Requirement gathering
Once the idea is formalized, the business team needs to understand the market and delve deeper into the problem. This may include the following steps:
a. Market research
- Defining the target audience
- Understanding the current problem — what is the need for the product?
- Understanding how people tackle these problems currently
- Understanding the unstated problems of the target audience, through research papers and studies
b. Competitive analysis
- Researching the major direct and indirect competitors
- Understanding the problems that the competitors are solving
- Understanding the customer satisfaction levels with the current products in the market
c. Analytical data
This can be done in case of product improvement as customer data would already be available.
- Understanding the already existing data online, if any
- Analysing the consumer data captured on the previous product
d. Feature brainstorming
After understanding the qualitative and quantitative consumer data, the team needs to discuss with the relevant stakeholders, in order to develop a feature list that can solve the consumer issues.
Step 3: Product planning
Analyse the value provided by the features discussed in the last step and plan the go-to market of the same. This may include the following steps:
a. Feature prioritisation
The features need to be prioritized based on the value that they provide to the users and to the organization. There are multiple prioritization techniques which can be used. The below link is a good resource to identify prioritization techniques:
https://www.productplan.com/strategies-prioritize-product-features/
b. Divide into phases
The prioritized features need to be divided into multiple phases. This will ensure that the product has smaller iterations and a reduced go-to market time. It is also important to identify the top 3 product metrics that would define success of the product.
Step 4: Design
Product design has several components:
- User flow: The user flow should be created, marking the user journey for various features. Focus should be on keeping the number of steps minimal.
- Low fidelity UX design: A low fidelity UX design should be created, wherein the structure and user flow can be finalized.
- High fidelity UX design: Once the low fidelity design is ready, the detailed user experience design (which consists of the final content and all the parameters that need to be shown to the users) should be created.
- User interface design: Finally, the application should be designed and frozen for the next phase.
Step 5: Development
Once the designs are finalized, the flow and the design need to be explained to the developers — they need to be provided with the raw design files to start the development. If possible, they should be provided with the design specification document too.
All elements should be mentioned, along with intended transition. It is very important to implement data capturing of events at this stage. This provides the team with the real user behavioral data, which can be used for making product enhancements.
Step 6: Testing
Once development team has developed the product, all subsequent changes should be pushed to a staging server. In depth testing should then be performed on the staging server, in an exhaustive set of environments.
Step 7: Release
Once all the development / changes are verified on the staging servers, the code needs to be pushed to the live server, along with a quick sanity test.
Once the product is released, the teams need to do a lot of data analysis, to gather insights into the product and its usage and accordingly, improve the released product. Use the same flow chart to improve the product.
As mentioned earlier, the above process can be used in case of a new product idea, a new feature implementation in an existing product or in order to resolve a bug. The product manager is in the best position to determine which steps need to be performed and which need to be skipped. For example, in case of an improvement where the color of a button needs to be changed, the requirement gathering step can be skipped and the teams can start directly from the user design step. Similarly, in case of webpage performance issues, requirement gathering and design phases can be skipped, and the teams can start looking into the development phase directly.
While the above process can be tailored to suit specific product requirements, having a systematic approach is an imperative. A hapazard process can lead to increased technical issues, which in turn can affect the product’s intended functionality. Teams must therefore make it a point to define their process before starting the project and while following the process, the next stage should only be initiated once the previous one has been finalized satisfactorily.
If you liked this article, do check out my article — “How avoiding common developmental errors can help in creating a market-fit product”
