Exploring the 7 Stages of New Product Development Process

Delivering innovative and customer-oriented products helps you gain a competitive edge in the market. It aids your business walk parallelly with the evolving customer needs and market trends.

However, considering the dynamic nature of consumers’ expectations, it becomes imperative to deliver ingenious solutions in the market constantly. In this context, the role of new product development methodology becomes prominent. It is a key driver that keeps your market share and builds customer loyalty.

But what is new product development, and what are the states involved in developing a new and innovative product?

Well, this informational piece is a detailed walkthrough of the new product development process. In this blog, you will get an idea about:

• The concept of new product development
• 7 stages of new product development process
• The advantages of new product development to businesses

So, let’s commence our exploration of new product development.

What Is New Product Development?

The new product development process deals with transforming a novel idea into an innovative product that’s new to the market. Its primary purpose for businesses is to derive innovation while delivering value.

What makes new product development unique is that unlike upgrading the existing products, it addresses the challenges of developing, designing, and delivering brand-new products for the company.

A new product development approach focuses on an entirely new idea, clasping the ongoing market opportunities revolving around customers’ expectations. Some of the popular examples of new product development include Trello, Zoom, Dropbox, Figma, etc.

What Are the 7 Stages of New Product Development Process?

Building a new product requires careful planning, streamlined project management, and expertise in agile development methodology. Below are the 7 steps of product development that you need to consider while creating a new product.

Idea Generation – The First Stage

Every innovative product begins with the conceptualization of a problem and scouring ideas that solve it. These ideas can either come from the inside, that is the customer service team, or from outside via market research.

This stage is a crucial part of the entire new product development process as it forms the basis of the product. Also, generally, the more the ideas, the better. Tools like Jira Product Discovery can be used to segregate and prioritize ideas from the bulk.

Besides, your ideation teams can also support ideas with data, sales input, customer feedback, emphasis on customers’ problems, etc. One of the best ways to pick an idea is to determine whether it can resolve the customers’ issues. Observe whether it can align with the “4U approach of Michael Skok.”

If the problem is — Unworkable, Unavoidable, Urgent, or Underserved — the product idea that fits best for all these aspects can be an ideal choice.

Screening of Ideas – The Second Stage

Idea screening is the second stage in the 7 steps of product development. In this phase, you have to pick one idea that you think has the highest potential for success. A distributed agile team of experts will review the idea bucket and pick one based on its feasibility and usability.

For a software company, proof of concept plays a crucial role in the new product development process. Proof of concept in software development provides a demonstrative illustration of the product that helps in evaluating the idea’s feasibility.

Besides this, you can also go for the SWOT analysis and Competitive analysis to shortlist and validate digital product ideas. These techniques help clearly understand the existing opportunities and areas where your product might need improvement.

Concept Development and Strategy Formulation – The Third Stage

After shortlisting your new product idea, it’s time to make your product strategy and develop the core concept. An ideal product strategy comprises the vision, mission, goals, target users, market position, product features, and the value it brings. Simply put, in this stage of the new product development process, you get a clear idea of the business requirements.

In order to create the product strategy, you need to outline your objectives, define success metrics, and include support documentation. For concept development, processes like gain/pain ratio, competitor analysis, and value proposition charts can be used.

Product Roadmap and Business Analysis – The Fourth Stage

The next phase in the new product development stages deals with building a product roadmap. A product roadmap is basically a business action plan that outlines the functionalities of your product and helps you track the development process.

Apart from this, a product roadmap also works as a communication tool that aligns with your business goals. Businesses often organize a product discovery workshop to create a feasible and results-oriented roadmap for their product. With a well-planned product roadmap, you can ensure that the entire team is on the same page.

Additionally, the role of business analysis services is prominent in determining whether your new product development is worth investing or not. Furthermore, the best pricing for your new product is also determined at this stage.

Prototyping and MVP Development – The Fifth Stage

Since you are ready with your new product idea and have a product strategy in mind, it’s time to prototype it. The prototyping stage is crucial as it decides the UI/UX of your product and how it will look. For a mobile app solution, developers use specific mobile app prototyping tools to create a visually appealing design.

Once done, the prototype is shared with the stakeholders, and on approval, developers start building a minimum viable product (MVP). Since time to market is critical in the case of a new product, developing an MVP is recommended to ensure viable solutions.

Also, the cost of developing an MVP is relatively low, providing an advantage, especially to startup businesses. All you need is a professional MVP development company to develop a viable product with minimal but essential features.

Product Deployment and Testing – The Sixth Stage

Once the prototype and MVP of your product are built, it’s time to deploy your product in the live environment. This process basically involves the collaboration of the development team with the DevOps team.

The different phases in new product deployment include:

• Code Integration: The newly built features are incorporated into the code. Open-source DevOps tools and CI/CD technologies such as Jenkins can be run to evaluate the code efficacy.
• Build Stage: DevOps specialists integrate the software artifacts into the registry. Docker tools, such as Packer or Gradle are used in this stage of the new product development process. 
• Alpha Deployment: This deployment stage focuses on testing the performance of the new builds and how they are interacting with each other.
• Beta Deployment and Testing: The newly built product is manually tested for its overall efficiency, effectiveness, and performance.
• Production Deployment: Once your QA and testing team finishes with the overall testing, your new product is ready to be deployed in the live environment.

Product Launch and Commercialization – The Final Stage

This is the last stage of the new product development phases. As a business owner, you need to be extra careful in this stage and carefully plan for a successful launch of your new product. It’s better to create a product launch checklist to ensure everything is done as strategized by the product development team.

For instance, if you are developing a new software-as-a-service product, you can make and follow a SaaS launch checklist. Once you are confident that the entire new product development process is as planned, you can release the product into the market. The next step will be commercializing it by leveraging several marketing tools and strategies to ensure its success.

What Are the Advantages of New Product Development?

A new product helps you nurture the culture of innovation and makes your business sustainable in terms of market needs. Below are some of the benefits of the new product development process.

• Innovative product development ensures the technical feasibility of a business idea and increases its success chances.
• A new product focuses on effectively addressing your customers’ issues, expectations, and needs.
• Following a strategically designed digital product development process acts as a potential driver and promoter of new ideas for your business.
• A streamlined NDP process enables you to identify the effectiveness of your new products before they are released into the market. Consequently, it ensures faster time-to-market and saves money.
• With a strategic product development model, businesses can eliminate or at least reduce the risks of failure.
• By creating new products and facilitating advanced services, you can sell to an extended section of your target market.

What Are the Challenges Associated with the New Product Development Process?

Following the right NPD process steps helps in developing a new and efficient business product. However, there are a few challenges that the development teams need to address to ensure a successful launch of the new product.

Defining Clear Requirements

A company develops a new product in order to grapple with an existing issue or a set of problems. For that purpose, it is crucial to have a clear understanding of the product’s requirements and objectives prior to deployment. All this comes with a shared understanding of your customer’s needs and expectations.

Evaluating the Development Effort

Estimating product development tasks is a cumbersome process, and it becomes even harder in a new product development process. To overcome this, the best way is to break work into smaller tasks. Create the complete product roadmap to get more accurate work estimates and understand their impact on product development and evolution.

Siloed Tools and Technologies

Each of the new product development stages requires specific teams, tools, and technologies to ensure the project’s success. In fact, their collaboration becomes important in streamlining the development process. In such a case, siloed teams can create a challenging landscape in building the new product, hindering collaboration and extending the development time.

How Can Appventurez Help You with New Product Development?

The chances of success for a new product depend largely on how well you keep your customers’ needs in mind while developing it. Each stage of the new product development process is tricky and requires expertise for optimal results.

To streamline this cumbersome process and ensure innovative solutions, it’s better to collaborate with a trusted software development company. Appventurez can be your trusted partner you can rely on for seamless product development.

As a professional product development company with over a decade of experience, we have crafted several innovative solutions with our new product development services. We understand the importance of product development for a business. Therefore, we thoroughly understand their needs and ensure to deliver a customer-oriented solution.

Some of our prominent digital products include:

• Gribb – A Netherlands-based fleet management solution empowered with digital technologies, analytics, and driver behavior data.
• EFL Clik – A seamless loan solution to streamline and digitize the loan processing services for Electronica Finance Limited.

If you have a great product idea in mind or are looking to nurture one, consult us for new product development services. Let’s propel together on an innovative journey of digital transformation!