Many leading businesses understand that developing new products is complex. To manufacture smart products, they recognize the need of implementing the best digital product development process in order to gain the optimum result.
They recognize that the need to leverage digital tech to manufacture smart products is to seed an idea of implementing the best digital product.
Do you think executing the traditional- waterfall approach would create more complexities?
Of course, in the era of the digital revolution, developing a smart product with a clear waterfall structure is like preparing for an unplanned roadblock. If you are tired of struggling with building a smart product with a traditional approach don’t worry, you are not alone. All you need is a shift to accommodate the new evolving world of digital technology.
For instance, imagine a home that anticipates your every need with just one click. Does it sound like science fiction? Maybe yes but this is the fact in today’s era.
Well, the credit goes to the emerging improvements in the field of technology. IoT is the key component in connecting devices, sharing the data, and using sensors, and communication hardware that helps in building the best digital products for consumers.
From developing a food delivery app to manufacturing home automation systems that simplify our daily chores. And being built by an IoT Development Company, smart products for digital industry 4.0 have shaped businesses and life.
What is Digital Product Development?
It is the process of bringing an idea to real-life with cutting-edge technologies, best approaches and suitable strategies.
How does a digital product come to life, to a practical reality? Where do you start from? Is there any roadmap to finding the best approach?
Fortunately, yes! We’ve come up with the End-to-End digital product development lifecycle stages. While each product is different, the creation of the product follows a series of steps.
Benefits of Digital Product Development Services
Improved productivity
The numerous tools and platforms available are a good starting point for helping create a streamlined process. Once the groundwork has been completed using these fine resources, it becomes quite simple for the development teams to function much more productively. By using digital platforms, teams can quickly track the project progress in real-time and get updated on any changes required. Hence avoiding unnecessary meetings, email communications, and calls. This, in turn, helps accelerate production and prove to be cost-effective, and new products have a speedy delivery in the market.
Better Collaboration
Product Development teams and Digital Product Engineers teams that incorporate individuals from different business areas who are not digitally connected and are unaware of the developments in the other departments. Digitalizing communication and project administration along with Agile methods of working helps break down the silos and establish a clear flow of communication across all departments while even enhancing overall project transparency. This flow of communication helps the teams stay on the same page and makes better collaboration throughout the Digital Product creation journey.
Increased speed to market
Increased speed to market is the greatest motivator for companies to go digitalized and stay relevant to gain a competitive edge. Organizations put together the right tools, streamlined processes, and their most talented resources to dramatically accelerate product delivery to the market. The benefits, like creating a rapid prototype, testing products before finalization, and integrating customer feedback earlier in the production process, make a product-to-market timeless. And lastly, using digital platforms to collect data that product development teams can depend on insights to avoid prototypes and iterations and make smarter decisions quickly.
Save money and achieve higher productivity
An increase in productivity and increased speed to the market gives the opportunity to gain monetary benefits and even have higher productivity. Intelligent working methods assist in early problem detection and solutions to it quickly, along with constant integration of customer feedback. The cost of production is further reduced by rapid prototyping and AI-based testing for sample creation time. The more the customers are satisfied with a product more likely they are to adopt and use the product, meaning the product developers can avoid creating more samples that may not be used and continue focusing efforts on improving the approved products. All these, in general, helps business concentrate their resources on how to create a digital product and progress with the timelines and stay on budget and make smarter sourcing decisions using the data available.
Higher Customer Satisfaction
The modern customer base is well aware of their wants and needs and when to get them. And even businesses empower their customers by giving them all the required information on their products and services. And digital transformation paves the way for customers to get involved by providing valuable feedback and sharing their experience with the product or service. Customer feedback is heavily emphasized to be incorporated throughout the product life cycle to develop a final product that stands on customer expectations. In an era of increasing customer requirement demands and continuous market trend shifts, digitally intelligent businesses are able to meet customer satisfaction and give a delightful experience that keeps customers coming back.
What is Digital Product Development Process?
It is the process of bringing an idea to real-life with cutting-edge technologies, best approaches and suitable strategies.
8 Essential process to follow by Digital Product Development Company
THow does a digital product come to life, to a practical reality? Where do you start? Is there any roadmap to finding the best approach?
Fortunately, yes! We’ve come up with the End-to-End digital product development lifecycle stages. While each product is different, the creation of the product follows a series of steps.
1) Ideation
The first and most important step is idea creation. A digital product comes to life through its idea. Only about 10% of ideas turn into successful products and help bring value-added products to end-users. The product idea should solve an issue or serve a purpose. And this brainstorming phase is aimed at exploring the actual use of the final product, and if it can avoid failures first. Basically, this step is all about problem identification. The ideation process includes deep thinking, practical analysis, and evaluation of the product and the related tasks.
2) Research and Hypothesis
To come up with an idea is entirely different to find out the demand for a product. Research allows you to identify and authenticate your idea, identify your target market and customer segments, solve any problem beforehand that may arise, and observe the activities of other businesses in the markets. This process gives you an idea as to how profit-oriented your product is going to be and if it can be positioned in your digital product strategy.
A hypothesis is the summary of your final digital product. This sums up all your thoughts and expectation on the basis of the data you give. The performance of your digital product depends on the accuracy of your market research and the analysis of your solution.
3) Budget
Having knowledge of the proposed budget of your digital product allows you to estimate the size, the resources you can apply for it, and the time to the market. The main components of the budgets should include human resources, product management costs, and digital infrastructure facilities. Your budget needs to be divided based on the financial assets available and your estimated costs for the long and short term.
4) Minimal Viable Product (MVP)
You may have thought of numerous features at the ideation stage, at this stage all your ideas are minimized to essentials only to align with your hypothesis. Once your MVP is validated, all the additional features can be incorporated at the later stages in the development process. And if the MVP is not approved, this would limit the additional feature to perceive the basic features’ development cost.
5) Design and Prototyping
Designing a product gives you a visual image of your digital product and even cuts down development time greatly by clearly defining specifications. Tools that fabricate interactive prototypes with 2D models are applied for mock testing your potential users. The mock-ups hence created help in design iterations data and collection before developing your digital product.
Then comes Rapid prototyping that quickly converts your design into a working product with the combination of agile development and sprint delivery of features. The sooner the working digital product is created the quicker you move towards idea validation, data collection and implementation of improvements if any.
6) MVP Validation
With the launch of your digital product, you get the opportunity to validate your digital product with your proposed hypothesis. As a result, it creates an action for your business within your target audience. The reactions received are gathered and analyzed and the scope is measured.
7) Feedback and Review
Feedback loops are a vital necessity for any Digital Product Developmet process. Reviews from end-users help keep your digital product relevant and in line with purpose fulfilment. A feedback loop assists you to keep aligned with your digital product and lets your business respond to trending changes in the market and any surfacing requirements.
8) Scaling
Scaling is an essential part of your business to remain competitive in the market. And this becomes even more inevitable when your digital product perfectly sets in with your user’s needs. May it be with regards to the features, and end-users, the opportunity to grow can lead to an overall increase in your revenue and turnover rate. In synchronicity with the feedback loop, it allows you to determine your long-term product roadmap.
That’s all with the stages of digital product development process.
However, there are multiple methods or approaches to developing a digital product successfully. The emerging industrial revolution has brought smart factories and smart manufacturing with high automation connected to high-tech networks. However, every company has its own way of implementing and offering a full cycle of product development services.
There are digital product development companies that are influenced by the new technological advancements. It leads to the production of innovative smart products to meet the market requirements. On the other hand, society plays a key role in the environmental impact, health, and safety issues.
Now let us understand the various models adopted by different companies for digital product design.
- Product Engineering
- Product Engineering
Digital Product Development – Approaches
We’ve laid the above general stages of product development. However, there are specific models that a product design agency often uses to develop a digital product. Let us take a closer look at each one of them.
Waterfall Development
This is the most common traditional approach to developing a digital product. It offers a stage-based framework involving linear stages from ideation to launch.
Unlike the Agile method, waterfall focuses on intense paperwork for each stage.
Before each phase starts, there’s a stage that previews before stepping to the next. It establishes scope and timeline where you can understand the entire production process at launch. Waterfall development is a fit for companies having ample budget, tech stack, and timeline. In-house projects can benefit from this approach.
Agile Development
Agile Digital Product Developmentemphasizes face-to-face communication with rapid and flexible responses to change. It splits the development cycle into short time slot iterations. The agile method does not look back to the previous stage until the entire product development is completed. It mainly focuses on:
Scrum Development
Scrum Development fits best for complex projects that require frequent changes. The entire workflow is divided into sprints, meaning development is divided into a period of 2 to 4 weeks for each milestone to be achieved. And each sprint completed leads to the successful completion of a stage in the development life cycle.
The entire life cycle goes like initialization by understanding the project idea, Planning and designing and creating a blueprint of the project, then Developing and implementing the structured project, Rectifying any bugs or glitches, and finally releasing the project through QA verification.
The scrum is one of the most flexible as it allows verbal communication within the team and encourages healthy discussion with a practical mindset. This enables quick response to project challenges and a better understanding of the actual issue.
Rapid Application Development
Rapid Application Development or RAD is mainly concerned with Prototyping the product development process as its core element. Time and expense for creating a prototype increased due to the extensive planning required before project initialization. RAD’s life cycle goes like initially gathering all the requirements at the planning stage, working on the user-provided Design, leading to development with numerous team communication and reusing software components giving rapid prototyping of the project.
Another effective method of implementing rapid application development is by utilizing dedicated object-oriented programming languages. The Digital Product Development example of programming languages include Python, JavaScript and Ruby.
Lean Development
The lean development approach is the transformation of Toyota’s lean manufacturing to build digital products. It generally relates to removing wasteful processes. This improves businesses’ efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
While implementing this method, digital product developers and engineers should consider all the processes and eliminate their down-streaming effects while developing a digital product. It improves visibility, coordination, and workflow throughout.
Feature-driven Development
It is one of the agile development offspring where companies shift from phase-based to iterative approaches. The approach is design-oriented and split into parts namely features. The process cycle of a feature-driven approach involves overall model development, a list of features, planning and designing, implementation, etc. However, small projects are unlikely to benefit from such an approach.
Hybrid Development
Where most startups are adapting to agile development, many others are demanding a hybrid approach- a combination of agile and waterfall development. You can customize the approach according to the development and requirement of the product. The dependencies between the two methods will synchronize as the waterfall approach focuses on upfront planning and agile prefers a progressive plan at every stage.
SEE ALSO: Improve Organizational Efficiency With Hardware & Software Integration
Why do You Need a Digital Product Development Firm?
Digital Product Software Development is not confined to just developing an App. It is way beyond that and this is the reason many companies hire Digital Product Development Firm to handle all the hassle and get the job done promptly. If you are presently looking out for a DPD firm, the below reasons will strongly support your decision:
When you have finalized your decision, now it’s time to look for the best DPD firm to kick-start your unique project and develop your dream product.
Which Approach is the Best for Your Digital Product Development?
There is no such thing as “the best approach” for your digital development product. Moreover, most startups stick to one method during the entire development process.
Having said that, the most preferred approach is the agile method. It is said that the “Global Demand of Agile Development and Testing Services Market Size Will Exceed USD 30 Billion by 2026.”
A highly adaptable process that focuses on breaking down the large project into smaller parts for improvements.
Agile methodology helps in testing the performance during each iteration to identify the issues and lead to quick modifications. Agile methodology with modern digital engineering services can create wonders.
Final Words- Digital Product Design & Development
From ideation to the launch of a new product, a digital product development agency follows the stages mentioned above.
To launch a successful digital product, the Agile Digital Product Development approach suits best. If you are about to plunge into product development, partner with Excellent Webworld for expert advice on how to go ahead with the stages and which approach is right for you. It’s the best digital product design & development agency that knows how to leverage the data and provide you with the possible foundation to launch a new final product.
Along with discussing the idea of developing a product with their digital product engineers, you can also take a step further to develop an app after the launch to reach out to a wider audience.
Along with discussing the idea of developing a product with the embedded software engineer, you can also take a step further to develop an app after the launch to reach out to a wider audience.
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