5 common pain points found within product development strategies and how to overcome them

Product development is a journey, from initial inspiration to ready-to-ship items. The process of designing, testing, and perfecting a product varies depending on your industry, the size of your business, your design team, and your budget. Regardless of the product and its uses, you need to keep consumers’ needs, preferences, and budgets in mind during every step.

It’s essential to create something that meets customer standards for functionality, reliability, and aesthetics. However, you should also use solid data on your target market to help with design and development decisions, as well as when planning your marketing strategy. For instance, with the right information, you can optimize your advertising budget so you don’t overspend or promote beyond your target audience.

You’ll undoubtedly run into challenges during product development. Here is a look at some of the pain points that might come up along the way.

1. Product practicality

It’s possible to get carried away with a good product idea and lose sight of the most important requirement: your customers must find it practical. It needs to be something consumers will want to use. The most well-made, cleverly designed product won’t be successful if it does not address a specific need.

You can assess a product’s practicality with market research data. Such information will help you evaluate the behaviors and needs of your target customers. This assessment is an important step during the initial stage of development when you’re measuring the viability of your idea. If you use data to confirm your ideas, you can move from having an opinion about the demand for a product to seeing the demand in market data.

You can also collect information on your customers’ online browsing and shopping habits. Are site visitors looking for similar products or using search terms related to your product idea? This type of activity shows whether there is demand for your idea. Also, with online activity data, you can personalize web experiences to direct customers to your new product after it’s available.

2. Product viability

In the early stages of development, it can be difficult to assess a product’s long-term viability. New trends could emerge, and industry changes could make a tool or piece of hardware obsolete before it even reaches the market.

Market research is essential to address this potential pain point. Early in the development process, look at what your competitors are doing, assess market interest in similar items, and decide how to differentiate your product from others. You can also interact with potential customers to see how they respond to the unique traits that make your product different from your competitors.’

Another step to assess viability is to plan a minimum viable product (MVP). This is a basic version of your item that you can give to customers to test. You can use feedback from these early adopters to make changes to your product and measure its overall viability before you invest in a larger production run.

3. Communication

Communication can be a challenge throughout the product development process. First, the person with the initial idea needs buy-in from other members of the team and company. Miscommunication or a lack of direction can lead to some team members not understanding the process or making their own plans and strategies that don’t align with everyone else’s.

In some industries, such as tech, collaboration is essential during development. Different specialists will handle part of the project and they need to coordinate their design, testing, and debugging phases to ensure a smooth process. Without communication, there can be delays and quality control issues.

To avoid communication problems, clearly define the strategy for development. You can use frameworks, such as Agile or Scrum for tech products, to guide the process. You can then reassess and communicate changes in strategy after each phase of development.

You also need to communicate with customers. If you announce the product during development, you can get feedback and collect data based on customer interactions. Customer input can help guide product development and marketing efforts. As with every other step in the product development process, one of the biggest mistakes is not getting data or feedback from customers.

You can also use tools like personalized emails to connect with customers. With an email system, you can send communications based on customers’ interests and let them know about upcoming products. If you’re in a competitive market, you may be able to convince your customers to wait for your product rather than purchase something else.

4. Bad timing

Timing is essential throughout the product development process. You want to start each phase of development so that you can continuously move toward the release date without having the steps overlap. For example, you don’t want to start marketing until you have enough data to create relevant ads and target the right audience.

You can address timing issues by creating a clear product development roadmap and launching the next phase after the previous one is complete.

Some timing issues are beyond your control. You might release a product at the same time as a competitor and have to compete for customers. Other timing issues may involve supply chain problems or the spike in the price of a commodity you need to produce your item. While there is no way to predict these issues, you can try to come up with contingency plans to deal with unforeseen roadblocks.

You’ll have control over timing as it relates to marketing and the release date for your product. You’ll want to run targeted ads to reach customers who have the most interest in your product. However, you don’t want to run them before the release date, or they won’t generate sales. This problem can be amplified if you need to repeatedly use targeted ads, which consumers may find intrusive. If you time this form of marketing with the release of your product, you can minimize any negative feelings about these ads while still reaching your customers.

5. Setting goals

During product development projects, each person or team involved in the process needs to meet specific deadlines. If someone misses their goal, it may threaten to delay or even derail the entire process.

Limit this problem by making sure everyone understands the goals and is working within the same framework. Set smaller goals or establish benchmarks to help teams stay on track and to give you an early warning when someone is falling behind.

In some cases, you can build your framework of goals and benchmarks around deliverables. In other cases, you may need to use other indicators to measure performance. For example, key performance indicators (KPIs) give you a way to quantify successes. If you’re marketing a newly developed product, you would need to establish KPIs — such as user engagement, clicks on ads, actual sales, or signing up for an email list — to track success.

With all goals, be sure you are using the same data to assess performance and the same indicators for each team. You need to document the goals you set, but you also need to establish a way to track progress accurately.