What is product development? 9 step process explained

The myth of the genius founder is pervasive in product development despite ample evidence that there is a better, more reliable way to build products and services.  

Winning products tend to do just one thing better than all their competitors. Product developers and product managers focus on finding that one thing that really matters and obsess over doing it best. Finding a competitive advantage and delivering that in a product experience is the main job of any product development process.

Product development is the process of bringing a product to market. Sequencing product development into a repeatable process enables  teams toeliably develop and deliver products to customers who want them. 

If you like to build things, you think constantly about what the world needs and how you can build it. The product development process helps you progress from thinking to taking action. Your job as a product manager is to go out into the world to research, test, and validate those needs, and contribute to building a product to meet the needs of the market and your users.

Product managers and their teams are often sent “back to the drawing board” when a test or prototype fails. The most important thing in times like these is to simply begin again. The following stages of product development can be used both as a linear progression and a learning loop. Wherever your team falls, the best advice is to keep moving forward.

I used to work for an early stage VC firm. Entrepreneurs often asked me what they needed to get a meeting with the leadership team and were often surprised by my answer: “All you need is a good team.”This philosophy led to some of our best investments and a strong team is behind almost all successful products. The hard work of team formation should be your first step in product development.

A product development team is cross-functional, endlessly curious, and wildly creative. The curiosity usually comes from a product manager or team lead who commits to learning everything they can about the customer. Creativity comes in when engineers and designers take customer insight and turn it into workable products.

Many product teams are just two co-founders trying to figure it out. They share a breadth of responsibilities until they can grow and hire a full product team. Product development teams are generally composed of the following roles and responsibilities:

Product management: Product management guides every step of a product’s lifecycle — from development to positioning and pricing — by focusing on the product and its customers first and foremost. To build the best possible product, product managers advocate for customers within the organization and make sure the voice of the market is heard and heeded.

Design: Designers help ideate, define, and prototype early iterations of the product. Design remains a key contributor throughout the product development process. 

Development: A developer or dev team builds the product. Dev teams handle engineering and often include testing and quality assurance teammates. 

Marketing and sales: It’s best to consider marketing and sales quite early, to ensure you have a strategy before the product goes live.

Customer discovery is the process of understanding your customers needs and pain points. This is best done through in-person interviews aided by surveys and persona development. 
Let’s imagine an entrepreneur who’s identified a customer that they want to help. In an in-person interview, they validate the existence of a customer pain-point, and share a potential solution . They’re thrilled to learn that the customer thinks that the product would work for them, and they’d likely pay for that solution. They’re puzzled a few months later when that customer and others are hesitant and unwilling to buy what they created with such confidence. 

This entrepreneur underestimated how nice people can be when they’re sitting across from someone who’s energized about their problems and wanting to help. Customers will often tell you what you want to hear, especially when you are seeking validation. Use the invalidation interview to improve your customer discovery process. 

Let’s say you live in a world with all spoons and you want to design something new: the fork. You give a customer a plate of broccoli and say, “I’m guessing you want a spoon to eat this.” You then hear that actually, no, something with a few sharp spikes would probably be better at picking this up. You’ve just validated that they need a fork by encouraging your customer to say no to your question and to explain why. I find that passionate customers give the best insight not when they say yes to validate your solution, but when they say no to invalidate another solution. By seeking invalidation you find validation.

Ideation is the creation of a solution to a known problem. For many, this step focuses on brainstorming. But, remember that this process is designed to help you move away from just thinking about it! Rather, we can refocus on the core insight of most successful products: They do one thing well. 

Start by setting the boundaries of your ideation. The best guidelines come in the form of your target market. You’ve spoken with these folks, and hopefully, learned a bit about them. Limit your idea generation to things that exist in their world only. Another great boundary is existing products and solutions. By analyzing what competitors do well, you can find an unmet need that becomes the one thing that your team can really focus on. The outcome of ideation is not a product spec sheet with functionality and features, it’s one problem worth solving and a hunch for how to solve it. 

The last check in ideation is an honest look at your team and resources. Is your chosen solution something that your current team can execute? Do you have resources or tools to unlock the capabilities that you lack today? If you find a mismatch between your team and your ambitions, there are still many paths forward. You can return to the team formation step to build out a stronger team. You can also bite off a smaller chunk of the problem so that your team can continue to move forward.

You have a hunch about how to solve your chosen problem. Now, you can start shaping that hunch into a real product. This is a dangerous stage, where the planners and doers can run a bit wild creating full product requirements documents with all the bells and whistles. I’d caution you to quickly look ahead at the next step to refocus your energy on only what is required at this stage. 

Defining your product includes deciding what shape, form, and delivery method you will use. Common definitions are “hardware, software, virtual, SaaS, CPG”, and more. You probably gravitated towards one definition early on, and you may be right on the money! Many of the most interesting products broke the mold in this definition state. Imagine when the team at iTunes wagered that the future of music delivery was going to be via software not hardware. Their world was full of CDs and records and that product definition changed the industry as we know it. 

Prototyping is an iterative process used to create a physical manifestation of your product. Efficient prototyping efforts focus on creating a large number of iterations quickly and cheaply. The rise in 3D printing and low-code software development has made prototyping more approachable than ever. 

Your goal in prototyping is to de-risk some of the assumptions made in your product definition. If you assumed you could make an amazing digital music experience like iTunes, your prototype would focus on the upload, download, and playback of one song. If a basic download took too long, or the playback quality was extremely poor, you might need to return to your product definition. 

For example, Chris is the founder of Nocs, an optics company that makes durable and waterproof binoculars for outdoor exploration. He’s an ardent supporter of prototyping, as evidenced by an office nearly taken over by dozens of prototypes of zoom tubes, pro-, and standard-issue binoculars. Asking Chris why he prototypes yields a simple answer. He says that there is no substitute for holding the prototype in your hands and seeing how everything comes together. Seeing an early prototype, and improving it in the next iteration, gives him incredible confidence that not only can he execute his vision, but that customers will love it. Chris keeps a 3D printer in his home office so he can continue to prototype when inspiration strikes.

A minimum viable product, or MVP, is the simplest possible version of a product that you could deliver to real customers. Many entrepreneurs struggle with the notion of releasing a product that they know could be better. This fear is so pronounced that often, entrepreneurs soldier on and develop their product more fully, only to be confused by poor adoption. 

It’s tempting to think of the MVP as a pared-down version of your final product. I’d then ask, “How do you know what your final product is?” The product development process is full of opportunities to challenge and change your assumptions about your product, and this stage is your biggest learning opportunity.Ground this experience in finding the strong foundation on which to build  the rest of your product. Your MVP is that foundation, and you may not hit bedrock on your first try.