There is no shortage of ideas out there, as the saying goes “ideas are a dime a dozen, but those who can put them into practice are priceless.” You may have had a few of your own ideas over the years or maybe you have an idea you are ready to make a reality? But, do you know how to create a successful product that is ready to market and guaranteed to succeed?

These days there are many successful products already available in the marketplace from apps that let you hail a taxi no matter where you are to products that monitor your daily activity. Customers have access to any product or service that suits their lifestyles, at any time. So understanding your customer’s needs and knowing how to map to your product in this crowded space is essential.

We like to say that innovation is just like being a scientist, it is about experimenting and testing to fine tune how the solution aligns between your business model and the customer’s needs, which helps create a ready to market product with a much higher chance of success, so let's take a look at what it takes to make your idea a reality.

The way we see it, product development is really an extension of research, and should be treated as such. Research has two parts: Attitudinal and Observational. The two go hand in hand and provide feedback to each to help position and design products successfully. We don’t just build products, we build learning platforms that deliver a rich stream of analytics to help understand how customers use products.

First Step to Creating a Successful Product

Coming up with ideas is simple enough, in fact, most people have one that they think will be the ultimate winner but creating a successful product that customers want to use, is another thing. Before you can launch a successful product, you need to consider some of the following questions:

What is the business problem or opportunity?
What is the customer problem you are trying to solve?
Is there a gap in the market for your idea?
Who are your competitors and what are they doing?
What is your USP?
What would anyone buy from you?
How are you going to test and validate your idea when it goes to market?

Perhaps the most overlooked question and step with creating a product, is the testing phase. Teams tend to be eager to rush from ideation to a working product, without really adopting a rigorous innovation process that stress-tests the viability of their idea. Who wants to be the messenger of bad news?

Why Testing Your Product Is Important

Too often, many ideas, products or service ideas are not successful when they launch because they haven’t been tested, wasting not only budget but precise time as well. In fact, despite being surrounded by successful products, known as the survivor bias, it is known that 9 out of 10 startup business models will fail, with an 60-80% industry failure rate for tech solutions.

By investing in innovation, you are able to collect feedback from your potential customers about your prototypes and use this data to develop and pivot your ideas based on firsthand insight. Although you may feel like this is a lot of effort, without testing how are you truly going to understand your product and your market and in turn, create a successful product?

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The Importance of Value Proposition Mapping

Creating value for your customers is the ultimate goal to creating a successful product or service that has longevity. In order to understand which of your ideas is going to help your customers, you first need to know who they are and how your product or service can fit into their lives.

To do this, map your ideas directly to your target customers, we use something called the Value Proposition Canvas - a visual tool designed to give you insight into how your product or service answers the problems and desires of your users / customers.

A successful product starts by understanding who your customers are and what they are trying to achieve; their end goals. To do this construct well researched ‘personas’ providing insights into their goals, behaviours, demographics, attitudes, skills and most importantly, your customers current pain points and frustrations. By understanding these elements, a clear picture develops of the simplest possible things you can do to best serve your customers, the scope of the Minimum Viable Product.

Once you have identified your personas, you can then start mapping their needs, frustrations and interests back to your ideas on your value proposition diagram. By doing this, you are able to filter your ideas down to one that specifically answers their needs and you know is going to add value to your customers life.

Our technology team can help you innovate with the customer in mind so you can understand how your product would work in the market and minimise risk of failure.

Managing Product Development with the Innovation Loop

There are a number of skills and steps required to create a successful product that has been tested and ready to market.

The Innovation Loop technique underpins the structure of our innovation process, providing you with a clear structure and understanding of the process we undertake for you. Each stage of the Innovation Loop is a collaboration with you, feeding into one another until your product or service has been stress tested and ready for launch.

Let’s take a deeper look at each of the stages.

Engage

To begin, several kick off workshops are scheduled as part of the engage stage, which will involve ideation and scoping out the concept, ensuring it aligns with wider business goals. We will help capture and filter all the ideas using several value proposition mapping techniques.

Explore

Once we have identified the winning concept, it is time to validate the idea typically with further industry and customer research. This process can take a couple of weeks whilst we elaborate on the customer personas.

Design

This step requires specialists in UX design to build the user journey and experience of your products or services. They have the important task of ensuring your customers have a positive experience from the moment they enter your landing page to the moment they leave.

Build

The build step presents the highest risk, requiring the most intensive investment of resources in the overall process. Each of the previous steps exist to validate the concept before we start this step. Building the Product typically takes a couple of months and the aim being to keep this step as short as possible to get real world customer feedback. We run this step in “sprints” providing demos and collecting stakeholder feedback every two weeks to correct and perfect the product as we go.

Review

Once the designs are built, the review stage gives you the opportunity to look closely at the product in place and identify if it is meeting your goals. At this stage, our team works closely with you providing customer analytics to answer any questions you have and decide whether or not to loop back around to the design / build stages for re-testing.

Scale

The final stage would be to scale the end results, you would then take your ready-to-market product following our rigorous testing and implement the maintenance of this whilst scaling the revenue.

By first testing your conceptual products and services, you will be able to gain insight into how they perform in the real world thus avoiding failure and allowing you to create a product where you understand your customers and how your services can help them.

For information and help on how our team can help you with the development of ideas and test your products, please contact us at hello@rare.consulting

We get your ideas ready for the real world.

Ideas to Innovation: Creating A Product Ready To Market