What is a Product Development Template?
A product development template is a pre-made or ready-made checklist for product development or other related tasks. A product development checklist is often used by project managers, product development heads, quality managers, marketing managers, engineers, and operation heads.
What are the 7 Stages of Product Development?
The stages or possible roadmap of new product development that businesses can follow are:
- Stage 1: Generating ideas and discussing concepts – The project management team, led by the project manager along with the product development lead, and all other team members or stakeholders will come together to brainstorm ideas for a new product based on current customer needs or problems to address.
- Stage 2: Studying the feasibility of the ideas – Those involved in the idea generation process should discuss their feasibility and if there are enough resources to carry them out.
- Stage 3: Building the vision – If a certain plan has been deemed feasible, the team shall then begin creating a list of steps on how to execute it. This includes defining the purpose of the product, specifying the product strategy, envisioning how customers will use it, the goal it aims to achieve, and the positive impact it can bring to the business.
- Stage 4: Testing the product – Now that the product plan is in place, it’s time to create and test the product, also known as the prototyping phase. This stage is often handled by engineers and manufacturers, but the project head or product development lead should still be very involved.
- Stage 5: Validating the product – After testing the product, the team behind it should then validate it if it meets their expectations and achieves their goals. This is also the stage to see if the product fits the market or audience the production and marketing teams are hoping to target. If not, they shall do further testing to make tweaks in the product.
- Stage 6: Launching the product – When all tests and studies have been done and considered a success, it is time to launch the product publicly. This can mean sending it out to stores, or having it go through small markets first before branching out to larger ones.
- Stage 7: Reviewing – A review or evaluation shall be conducted on the new product following its release. This review is meant to look for quality issues and points for improvement, check if it conforms to its ideal lifecycle, and collect customer feedback. Although a product may be successful in fulfilling its purpose, the product development team should strive to continuously improve it wherever possible.
Importance of a Product Development Template
Creating and developing a product is a team effort, and involves many processes. There are multiple parts and people involved in the process of product development, which can be hard to keep track of. For this reason, having a dedicated product development template can be a big help to the product development process.
A product development template can help dictate project heads, managers, and the like to know what needs to done, how, and in what order. It can also help different leaders and departments communicate with each other, as a checklist can help set expectations and the flow of work processes.
Digital checklist in particular are a big help as they can also be shared across multiple platforms and people, anytime and anywhere. Templated, this can help streamline the product development process, even when the team behind it isn’t together in one place.
FAQS about Product Development Templates
Product development is sometimes referred to as “product management” in different situations. In other cases, “product management” instead refers to the act of managing the different tasks related to product development. In which case, “product management” is an aspect of product development. For both cases, a product development template can help streamline the list of tasks to accomplish and improve efficiency.
There are many ways to measure product quality, but the most well-known way of doing so is to analyze data about it. Doing so will give you a deeper understanding of your product’s possible flaws and benefits to customers. Having a product development template can help with this, especially if you use one from a software that can generate analytical reports for you after.
A successful product is one that:
- Has a solid value proposition that is easy to understand and explain
- Addresses any problems its customers may have
- Improves the quality of life of customers and is easy to use
