Research and development

You’re a growing business now with some credible experience in market development. Now you feel it is time to apply a bit more research into further product development to grow your business, brand and product lines. 

But what are the next steps involved for you to diversify your product lines and add another string to your business bow? The competition is fierce - you have to ensure you don't forgot about your existing product range or you may risk the market share you've worked so hard to achieve.

As a business professional who's officially off the ground, you’ve had a taste of the product development cycle before, but here’s a reminder of the fundamental tasks involved:

• Investigate and plan your idea
• Build and test your prototype product
• Experiment, test and refine your design
• Handle your intellectual property

You’ve also got experience in planning, design and build, with strong and cemented relations with the people that built it, and insider ‘know-how’ that packs a punch. You can talk the talk and understand the terminology involved, like:

• Low cost
• High margin
• Market share
• Growth rates
• R and D Output

And if that's not enough, you've had one of the steepest learning curves going - namely the priceless experience you went through when you designed your prototype product. So you'll understand what works, what doesn't, what the pitfalls are, who the disruptors and innovators are.

Whether it's luxury candles you make and want to add, for example, a collection of new scents - or perhaps a child's toy that has more sophisticated learning capabilities than the one you developed previously, you'll have your work cut out. But it's nothing you can't handle if you've done it before.

Product lifecycle steps tend to follow the same pattern, regardless of what you're building or your level of expertise in this area. Putting together a detailed 'product road map' that covers everything from specifics of the product to strategic rollout is all part of the road mapping process. The devil, as they say, is in the detail.

Here are some of the key steps involved in product road mapping:

• Product Detailing – put together a case that details the product and its high-level capabilities
• Implementation – start to implement the project and assign the tasks once you’ve nailed the product specific details
• Design and Build – map out the design, then start to build the product to the high-level build specifications
• Test – submit your product for specific product testing and wait for a ‘pass’ or ‘fail’ response, then act accordingly based on the responses
• Plan a strategic rollout to allow your product to be ‘user tested’ to either a niche and manageable audience or plan for full market rollout 

Even the world’s most successful brands undergo the typical product cycle, which includes rigorous product testing. Why build a smart phone, for example, and distribute it to tens of millions of people just discover flaws and bugs or faulty hardware? Isn’t it easier to sample-test your product to a small group of organised testers first?

One particular mobile phone manufacturer has pioneered the way when it comes to product testing, adopting an 'invitation only' programme that invites people to test pre-release software products and provide them with 'real-world quality and usability feedback’. 

If applicants are successful and accepted on to this high level programme, there's an expectation that the participant will:

• Share their user experience
• Complete engineering questionnaires
• Fill out bug reports and enhancement requests
• Participate in online discussions

By creating a forum of highly skilled product testers, they're continually reinforcing the importance of the cycle of:  

• Initial testing
• Reviewing
• Product detailing
• Design and build review
• Further testing

And that's what you need to do too. Design your product, then test it over and over again!