Whether it is about a SaaS product, enterprise software, or custom software, developing each of them is not an easy cakewalk.
After the development, all of them require a massive product launch. It provides a chance to taste success in the long term, boost business growth and build honest relationships with clients.
The detailed product development process encompasses all eight steps from product ideation to development to launch.
Product Development Steps
Step 1: Perform An In-Depth Market Research
The first step in the product development process is to analyze your business requirements and perform in-depth market research. Moreover, identifying your target audience, analyzing their customer behavior, market demands, and so on. For this, you need to analyze the market placement and segregate your target audience.
It’s essential to understand how your customer looks at your competing brands in the market. Also, how your customer rank your product in terms of everything (features, functionality, etc.)
Step 2: Identify Your Targeted Audience
Now let’s move one step ahead with identifying buyer personas or the targeted audience. Identify your targeted customers for each market segment you have identified.
Search for your targeted customers and collect all customer details, including customer behaviors, demands, market patterns, etc.
Create distinct user personas for each segment.
Step 3: Prepare A Detailed Product Roadmap
The product development process is the combined effort of developers, designers, testers, managers, etc. These professionals help you streamline operations and keep everything run smoothly and planned.
For this, you need to create a product roadmap which is the complete overview of your entire product development process, including product functionalities, tasks, deadline, scope, etc.
Prepare a mind map and break it into simpler processes as it helps you track each process/task running individually in sprints.
Step 4: Building a Prototype
This step is basically to create a prototype of your product. Your prototype is a mockup of your yet-to-be-developed digital product.
A prototype is the final version of your product that you can use to get the right and instant feedback from early adopters. You then start validating your product or app functionality to the immediate users to check whether the product satisfies your customer demands or not. Moreover, it needs any kind of modification or not.
MVP or minimum viable product is a minimal digital product that includes only minimal features. Here you can check the viability of the product. MVP is the beta version of the product launched in the market to satisfy customer demands.
Prototyping is experimenting with multiple versions of your digital product and gradually making modifications as per customer feedback.
Step 5: Design and Development
This step is considered most crucial in the product development process. The design and development stage involves designing documentation, process workflow, and creating code to build a robust and innovative digital product.
However, whether you’re working in Agile sprints, building out an MVP, or using the latest business model, the prime goal of the teams here is to stick to the SOW and build clean, robust, worthful, and efficient software.
The software teams should develop quality code that meets the software requirements specifications and customer demands.
Step 6: Integration and Testing
After completing the software development, it is time to test your product on several aspects. This stage is all about testing, tracking, and fixing bugs.
However, once the product gets built with full-fledged features and functionality is completed, the product is ready to go for in-depth testing and integration. Here you release the product to a group of beta testers to track how your customers interact with it.
A team of skilled and experienced testers and QA engineers utilize various frameworks for continuous integration executing unit tests, automated compilation, and testing.
You should understand that it takes long hours of development time and hard-earned efforts to build a robust, reliable, and scalable digital product. So, it’s better to test every aspect of the software product to deliver it with no bugs left.
Step 7: Deployment
After product testing, the deployment of the finished product takes place.
After delivering the end product to the end customers, you should ensure that it works properly on a large scale to go with beta testing. While deployment, if there is any possibility for changes, immediately send the report to the respective team in real-time.
The final deployment began as soon as you fixed all the bugs. The last code is then implemented into the software and deployed or delivered to the end-customers customers for usage.
Step 8: Product Maintenance and Support
As we all know, customer requirements and needs are constantly changing and ever-evolving.
After deploying the full-fledged product,end-customers may find bugs, request new features, and so on.
It is the end stage of product development that includes product maintenance and regular updates. This stage is crucial, and you should treat it with the utmost attention.
Regular product maintenance and support enhance and boost the application’s performance, functionalities and add new capabilities.
Concluding Lines
Every enterprise follows these steps to build a successful product. No matter what strategy you follow, what methodology you implement, or what business model you choose, every enterprise implements its development process, bringing a unique idea into a reality.
In-depth research and proper planning take your software product to the next level. After all, satisfying your customer needs should be your prime focus. However, it will ultimately help you boost your business revenues.
Author Bio:
Tanya Kumari leads the Digital Marketing & Content for Classic Informatics, a global web development company. She is an avid reader, music lover and a technology enthusiast who likes to be up to date with all the latest advancements happening in the techno world. When she is not working on her latest article on tech dynamics, you can find her by the coffee machine, briefing co-workers on the perks of living a healthy lifestyle and how to achieve it.