Product development, the complete journey of transforming an idea into something tangible that people can actually buy and use, can be broken down into phases.
You will get different answers to what the phases are depending on who you ask, but if you want to build a product that people actually want, there are best practices that are logically better and that most will agree on. In this article I will cover those best practices.
These are the 5 phases you follow to take your product from concept to market:
- Find a problem
- Define a solution
- Verify that demand exists
- Build the product
- Market the product
Find a problem
The first step of product development is finding a real problem to solve with your product. A real problem means three things: a significant amount of people experience it, the problem has a significant impact, and people are willing to pay for a solution. There’s a clear reason why you begin with finding a real problem, and it’s to avoid the common pitfall of creating products nobody wants or needs.
How:
The easiest way to find a real problem is to look at your own experience, specifically three things:
Pain
What is something that has caused you pain, or is currently causing you pain in your life? If it causes you pain, chances are it's causing someone else pain too.
Profession
What do you do for work or what have you done in the past? Take the problem you were solving at work, take the skills you learned from working on it, and create a business around it.
Passion
You’re an expert in your passion. You know all the ins and outs and you know what problems there are within your passion. Passion helps you create great products because you truly care about it.
When looking for problems you also dive into who experiences the problem. There’s no problem without anyone experiencing it, and understanding who experiences the problem gives clarity and helps with defining the product later on.
Want to quickly find a problem to solve and get a solution idea for it? Try our free tool that generates business ideas based on problems in an industry of your choice.
Define a solution
After you have identified a real problem to solve, it’s time to define a product that solves the problem. This phase is about defining the product concept, not actually building the product. Building comes after you have verified that demand exists for your solution.
This phase is all about thoroughly thinking through different ways the problem can be solved and then picking the best solution. When you have a specific solution in mind, you define it clearly enough for your target audience to understand the value of it, so you can verify that they actually want it before you build it.
Verify that demand exists
Now it’s time to actually verify that demand exists for your specific solution. This phase is about reaching out to your target audience to understand them better and to find out if your solution would be valuable enough for them to pay for. Verifying demand is also known as idea validation. You can learn everything you need to know about idea validation in this comprehensive article covering it.
Different methods to verify demand:
- Surveys
- One-on-one interviews
- Landing page test
Build the product
If your product concept made it past demand verification, and your target audience actually wants your product, it’s time to build it. This is quite straightforward. Develop the product that solves the problem, use the insights you got from your target audience when you verified demand, and keep the product simple. You want to build a minimum viable product (MVP), because you’re still only testing the product. Building an MVP allows you to launch faster which means people can start using your product and give you the feedback you need to shape it into what the market really wants.
Market the product
Once you have the product built, it’s time to tell the world about it. Different products will benefit from different marketing methods. At its core it simply comes down to finding where your target audience spends their time and meeting them there with your product. They experience the problem that your product solves, otherwise they wouldn’t be your target audience, and since you have worked hard to create your product, it actually solves their problem. You are helping them by offering your solution to their problem, keep that in mind when doing marketing.
Are you developing a product? Do you want to follow structured phases and get guidance along every step of the way to make sure you build a product that people actually want? Then Buildpad might be for you. Buildpad guides you through a 7-phase framework, beginning with finding a real problem to solve, helping you through validation, and ending with a development plan for your product. Try it now and find a real problem to solve for free.
