Digital Product development is about Products’ Connection with Users

The world has already seen all the routine work moving online. Companies must be always ready to cope up with the challenges in such a situation to come at par with their competitors. Last year has seen automation and digital  transformation taking control over all traditional forms of services and operation in companies. 

People are at a distance due to remote services but at the same time they are just one click away. This has provided gravity to digital product development to satisfy customers and also stand in competition. Digital product development is now more about having a resourceful service by brands or products to customers. Online or digital ecosystems have changed the way consumers perceive products. With more interaction through mobile apps or web applications, consumers are taking more actions on what they are viewing at landing pages, or posts in social media. This has raised the bar higher in terms of providing quality digital products and their interaction with customers.

According to a PWC study, digital product development is expected to increase efficiency by 19%, reduce time-to-market time to 17%, and reduce the promotion cost by 13% by 2025.  No matter which sector your company belongs to, it is important to find the right mix of digital tools and digitised processes for digital product development.  

What Digital Product Development Trends are Improving?

1. Drive competitiveness: Digital product development is paving new ways for enhancing revenue generation along with better customer experience. Clear strategy is helping to focus on business and keep your overall goal matched with customers’ needs. This also helps in maintaining return on investment of business.
2. Boost effectiveness: Companies need not to spend more on digital product development for better performance. Effective tools, methodologies, and underlying processes boost effectiveness in product development lifecycle. Concept of co-creation is also taking charge towards the development cycle. This approach invites stakeholders (usually customers) to participate in the process of designing or solving problems in order to achieve mutually beneficial results like new product ideas, methods to overcome supply chain problems, and even technical solutions to complex manufacturing problems.

Top 5 Digital Product Development Trends

The development team must foresee the outcomes before adopting new technologies in product development for building trust and better outcomes.

• Data Driven Development: With big data and data analytics in picture nowadays companies have various methods to gather data like mobile analytics, customer support tools, feedback from customer driven tools, etc. It’s always better to collect those data which explains more about the customer behavior with digital products rather than showing just the customer population using that product.
  Data science is more than just analyzing the past and the future, it also assists in developing products with hypotheses and its testing. The functionality of data driven approach is successful when companies are able to detect and solve customers’ problems, and measure the actual outcome. The role of data science is real as it improves the analysis of digital products, improves the effectiveness of the entire product development strategy, and enables companies to occupy a leading position in the market.
• Security Awareness: The product owner needs to understand how the data circulates in the application and how to protect the information block. Organizations are beginning to realize that access control must be implemented early in the product development life cycle. They should cover disaster and risk mitigation, password management, access to production data, and release upgrade procedures. There must be someone responsible for overseeing the implementation of the guidelines. Another step for penetration testing to become more natural is the company authorization before release.These steps can help organizations reduce the possibility of data leakage and eliminate security breaches.

• Remote Product Development: As companies find it easier to adapt to digital platforms and collaboration tools, remote development will increase, and companies will turn to this way of developing products in order to be more resilient and prepared for such impacts in the future. This will increase the main advantages of remote product development, such as cost control, scalability, multidisciplinary approach, faster time to market, and use of the latest technology.

Business leaders must see following approaches to strengthen remote product development:

(i) More digitized working model and reduced human interaction.

(ii) Cloud migration and distributed cloud for development.

• Personalized Data Driven Products: Mass personalization is becoming reality & the technological advancements have brought processes and resources to connect with the user feedback that provides them insight of how to make it more personalized with individuals. Businesses must also see analytics to make product development as they are capable of providing the right matching data and the right outcome according to customer behavior.
  According to Deloitte, customers are willing to pay 20% more for the products that are personalized.

• Predictive Analysis: This includes rigorous processes, optimized methods, and real-time analysis. Its goal is to enable companies that develop complex products to expand various data, identify and predict process optimization areas, achieve more strategic business results and achieve higher efficiency. For predictive analysis, it is important to have a clear understanding of the current product development process while maintaining sufficient flexibility to continue to apply best practices as events progress.

With the abundance of data available in the present scenario, the old tools are not sufficient. Organizations see following advantages when they choose predictive analysis:

(i) Improved quality of decision.

(ii) Improved future vision rather than looking towards retrospective insights.

(iii) Improving culture of organization to think towards insight-based and data driven strategies.

A well planned product development strategy can help companies save time and resources by organizing, planning and research, understanding customer expectations, and accurately allocating resources for projects. New product development trends are bringing competitive advantage to companies willing to adapt to change in traditional methods. Companies can reap more profit when adopting new trends that bring effectiveness in the product development life cycle.

Digital Product Development Catalyzing Digital Transformation

The integration of digital technology and business is reorganizing the organization to focus on quality customer service, business value, and constant changes. The digital transformation is not just a simple change in IT technologies such as hardware, software, or digital platforms but it touches the core of business processes and transforms them to take advantage of digital opportunities.

Whether it’s data driven or remote development, these trends are improving the roles and challenges of global product development. Strategic thinking, and technical knowledge have become key requirements for owners of agile digital product development. Data-centric product development is a way of creating products from data as an important asset in the technology. This method is more efficient, cheaper, and faster to produce products on a large scale. Every end user’s interaction with the organization is through digital products, so it’s important to make the end user feel privileged. Moving from traditional methods of product development to digital product development, there has been a rise of personalized customer experience, continuous product and service improvement through constant monitoring, and agile development with continual release. 

Most companies are coming up with creative product or application ideas to stimulate their audience by integrating new technologies in product development . Whether it is a company launching a product or a start-up company developing a new application, these trends will definitely help the company.