The Importance of Product Intelligence in the Product Development Process
Robust intelligence data allows you to optimise your product development process. It enables you to test product concepts at every stage of the development lifecycle, ultimately enhancing your product’s chance of success.
Discover how you can leverage valuable consumer and market intelligence to refine your product development process.
Product intelligence: an overview
Product intelligence involves collecting and analysing robust customer insights and product analytics. A project management team will leverage these actionable insights to make data-driven decisions. This helps inform their marketing and product development strategy for enhanced customer satisfaction and business success.
The product development process
Product development refers to a product’s journey through each phase of its lifecycle. A new product development process begins with an initial idea, continuing to the final product launch and including all future design iterations.
The product development cycle
Just like each product is unique, so is each development process. However, there are several crucial stages that make up every product lifecycle. These rely upon the collaboration of design, management, marketing and product development team members.
Some key stages of product development include:
- Idea generation. Brainstorm new product ideas
- Concept validation. Specify and refine your specific product idea
- Prototyping. Develop design prototypes and a minimum viable product
- Marketing strategy. Compile a targeted marketing strategy
- Development. Test your development strategy and build your final product
- Market launch. Share your finished product with the public
- Improvement. Continuously analyse feedback to improve your design
How to leverage intelligence throughout the product life cycle
For the most successful results, agile teams should leverage consumer intelligence throughout each product development stage.
Idea generation
It is essential to keep your end users in mind when generating new product concepts. Start by pinpointing your target audience and doing in-depth consumer and market research. This will help you understand your customer’s needs and identify their unique pain points. You should leverage this information to develop a product concept that addresses an existing customer problem.
By analysing market trends, you can identify gaps in the market and begin planning how your product can fill them. You should also monitor your competitors and use your knowledge of them to ensure your product is both original and useful. You can brainstorm your product’s functionality and appeal by placing yourself in users’ shoes and validating early ideas with initial concept testing.
Validation
During this stage, you should start ‘idea screening’ to narrow down potential product concepts. Developing a profile of your ideal consumer can help you identify which product idea is most valuable. You can further validate this decision by using qualitative and quantitative research to gather initial feedback from your target market. Some key research methods include:
- Focus groups
- Interviews
- Surveys
- Questionnaires
The next step is to expand your new product concept and refine your development strategy.
Your project management team should conduct a business analysis. This involves gathering valuable intelligence surrounding current market conditions and the technical feasibility of your product’s development. You can use this data to create a product roadmap, including long and short-term goals to guide your development process.
Prototyping
The prototyping phase involves product concept development and market testing. Product managers conduct risk-focused market research and use product intelligence data to draw up a detailed business plan. This helps expand the concept development strategy and highlight any potential risks early on.
The design team can troubleshoot other development challenges by creating early-stage prototypes and wireframes. Using these as a basis, the development team will produce a minimum viable product (MVP) with only the most essential product features. Target customers will then test the MVP, reporting any issues or difficulties they encounter. Product developers can leverage this feedback to adapt and optimise the design.
Marketing strategy
This stage of the product development process involves the collaboration of product and marketing teams to develop advertising materials and market campaigns. By conducting research to better understand consumers, you can frame your product as an appealing solution to their wants and needs.
This approach relies upon identifying your value proposition — how your product can improve the lives of potential customers. It is also heavily dependent on brand intelligence. Consumers’ perceptions of your brand influence how they will view your product and can give you insight into the best ways to market it to them.
Development
During the development phase, you will begin building your actual product. This complex process can involve quality assurance checks, troubleshooting and more. It also relies upon consumer testing and validation.
When developing your final product, you can benefit from an iterative design process. This involves a continued cycle of testing, analysing, and refining your product to help ensure the best end result. Another common product validation method is beta testing. This enables you to receive direct customer feedback from your target audience, highlighting potential user experience challenges which may otherwise have been overlooked.
Market launch
The final stage of the development process is your product launch. You can ensure your product reaches your target audience through strategic commercialisation that is based on valuable consumer data. This helps boost your chance of business success and a good return on investment (ROI).
Improvement
Product development is a continuous process. After your launch, it is vital to track user feedback and other success metrics. The same process applies to existing products. This data provides valuable insight into how consumers view and interact with your product.
You can use these consumer insights to continuously improve and refine new product development or to optimise an existing product. This helps you keep up with competitors and continuously satisfy customers in an ever-changing market.
Benefits of product intelligence for successful product development
Robust intelligence data offers actionable insights about your product concept and target market at every stage of the product life cycle. This provides you with a unique competitive advantage, as you can continuously validate and optimise your product development and research processes for success.
Vypr: Reliable consumer intelligence for successful product development
Vypr is the world’s leading product intelligence platform that enables businesses to rapidly understand changing consumer behaviour through fast, cost-effective consumer insight.
Validate ideas and refine your product development process. Leverage actionable insight for a truly successful product launch within a competitive landscape.
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