Product Development Strategy: 6 Pitfalls to Avoid

Product development is the process of creating a new product or bringing significant changes to an existing product to introduce it to the market. This process can involve a wide range of activities, such as research and development, market analysis, prototyping, testing, manufacturing, and marketing. Product development aims to create a product that meets the needs and wants of the target market and is competitive in the market. Product development can be complex and multifaceted, involving contributions from various disciplines, including engineering, design, business, and marketing.

At Ronins, we’ve seen our fair share of product development blunders over the course of decades of consulting work with wide-ranging organisations. Many of the issues we encounter are common among businesses and industries. Most of them are easy to avoid, but their impacts are nonetheless substantial.

The top six product development pitfalls we have observed are listed below, along with advice on preventing them.

There’s rarely a magic moment when everything is ready, and the big launch can occur. You could always do more things to improve your product, reach more people, or work out more bugs.

The important thing is that you keep making those improvements; whether before or after the launch doesn’t matter much. The progress you’ve already made will keep paying off, even after the official product launch.

New products don’t get launched; they escape. If every new product is a kind of prisoner, your goal is to help it escape. Don’t wait for a perfect launch with a perfect name, a flawless logo with patent-pending, enough funding and all the approvals. If it’s worth doing at all, it’s worth doing now. You shouldn’t wait until every feature is ready and every bug is ironed out; you want to get it into your customers’ hands as soon as possible so they can start using it and suggest improvements.

When you’re new to the product development process, there is a tendency to over-complicate the process of product development. Every feature you can think of is going to be essential, and every flaw that comes to mind must be addressed.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s a lot like writing a paper for school. In school, your work always starts off with an idea. But you’ll never start writing until you have thought of every possible objection someone might raise and addressed them in your introduction.

This is over-complicating things. The point of writing or developing something new is not to meet objections or anticipate criticisms. It’s to find out what’s right about the idea by trying it out, which means starting sooner rather than later, even if you know you will have to change it later.

One of the companies’ biggest mistakes is focusing on marketing before validating the idea.

The most crucial stage is ensuring you have a product/market fit. That’s when you have a product that can sell to many people.

Going from an idea to the product and market fit is hard and takes time and effort. Get your product in front of as many people as possible at different prices, and gain feedback about what they want and their willingness to pay.

Inevitably, this takes time, and it’s not easy for companies that are used to shipping products every few months or quarters. But if you rush this stage, you can waste a considerable amount of money on development and marketing costs, which may set back your business years.

You usually learn if you have a good product/market fit when sales start. But if sales aren’t coming in fast enough, it may well be because something is amiss.

A common pitfall that arises when customers are not involved early enough in the product development cycle is that the needs of customers and what they want to buy may not be precise.

We tend to assume we know what customers want when we design the product, but without asking, we can’t be sure if we fully understand their requirements.

The best way to ensure you haven’t missed something is to ask customers what they want and take their feedback seriously. If you don’t, you’ll end up with a solution that may not solve their problem.

It can be tempting to skip this step because you believe you already know the solution and don’t want to spend time researching. But it’s essential that you ask your customers for their input and listen to what they say. The more you ask, the more you will learn about your customer and what they want or expect from your product.

Stress over competition comes from an unhealthy focus on your competitor’s products and actions and insufficient attention to your company and what you can do.

This is classic failure mode: teams spend more time looking at what the competition is doing than at what they can achieve. They make plans based on the competitor’s actions and become sidetracked from their own vision.

It’s understandable. Competitors are apparent, while the company’s capabilities aren’t as noticeable unless you’re close enough to see them firsthand. The competitor may be doing something exciting, even though it isn’t likely to work out well in the long run; your own boring-looking actions may be much more promising. But it’s easier to get people excited about a new product if it’s an improvement on something else than if it’s a completely new direction.

Innovation doesn’t just happen randomly. It results from a deliberate strategy — a carefully thought-out and evaluated process. It is a cycle of creativity, investment and execution.

Innovation isn’t just about having a great idea; being the first to have the picture isn’t enough. The key to innovation is being able to create, invest in and distribute ideas that are useful or desirable enough to catch on with customers.

Successful innovation requires understanding the complex interplay between customer needs, desires and technology. It also requires understanding how to best execute those ideas so your company can benefit from them.

The companies that consistently produce innovative products and services do so by focusing on the overall innovation process: how they discover opportunities, evaluate them and move them through the pipeline to market — all with a consistent focus on meeting customer needs and desires.

It can be disheartening to see the same errors being made repeatedly, especially when they are preventable. Many of the issues above can be avoided without time-consuming post-mortems, drawn-out change management activities, or costly IT purchases. They are fundamental to humans and the quirks of communicating – or don’t, respectively.

If you’re considering developing a digital product, you must know common pitfalls that can derail your project and lead to costly delays and setbacks. However, working with a reputable and experienced product development agency like ours can significantly increase your chances of success. Our team has a wealth of knowledge and expertise in product development, and we can help you avoid common mistakes and get your project off the ground smoothly. So don’t hesitate to contact us and see how we can help you bring your idea to life.