In today’s competitive marketplace, offering consumers quality, innovative products is only half the battle. The market can quickly become diluted with products from competitors, offering similar features at comparable price points.
Take smartphones, for example. Apple entered the market with its original iPhone back in 2007, introducing a touchscreen display that set a new standard for smartphones, tablets, and even computers worldwide. 14 years later, the brand continues to dominate the U.S. market share with a commanding 53% of all smartphones.
For product-based business owners, product development requires a delicate balancing act between developing a valuable product for consumers and beating the competition to market.
If you’re too quick, you risk a lackluster product that leaves a poor brand impression on your audience. On the other hand, if you’re too slow, you risk losing your market share to the competition. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to quickly delivering a product to the masses.
The Benefits of Accelerated Product Time-to-Market
There are several benefits an organization may gain from an accelerated product time-to-market. These include:
- Greater profit margins and revenue from a longer period on the market
- Increased market share and competitive advantage
- Reduced research and development (R&D) costs
- Better insight into developing market trends and an increase in product opportunities
- Improved consumer relationship and satisfaction
To be successful in a consumer-driven business, it’s essential to deliver quality, innovative products, and fast! Accelerating your new product’s time-to-market can help your brand become an industry leader and stand out from the competition.
Eight Strategic Techniques to Quickly Get Your New Product to Market
Here are eight strategic techniques to quickly get your new product to market:
1. Develop a comprehensive product strategy
Consider your product development strategy your roadmap to success. It should cover every step required to take a new product from initial concept to final distribution to make sure you’re well-equipped for the project ahead.
The more detailed and coherent your plan is, the more effective your delivered product will be. A business product development strategy is a useful practice to help organizations clearly communicate product objectives, prioritize tasks, and build the best team for the project. Not to mention, a thorough product development strategy can assist in identifying any process gaps that require further attention before they become costly.
2. Focus on your workflow
Your company’s workflow ultimately translates to your organizational efficiency, which can either help or hinder your product’s time-to-market.
A solid workflow has the potential to accelerate a product’s time-to-market by improving overall productivity. This may include streamlining or automating tasks and minimizing the potential for risks within product development. To improve your organization’s efficiencies, consider each step of the development workflow and the processes and procedures involved.
Are there any steps or tasks which can be simplified? Work with all product stakeholders to review the product workflow and to identify areas that can be streamlined to increase efficiency.
3. Target quality rather than features
Loading your innovative new product with all the bells and whistles can be time-consuming. After all, adding excessive features demands more time and effort and presents opportunities for errors or costly delays.
Instead, focus on developing a high-quality product that solves a problem for consumers. What elements offer the greatest value for your target audience? Seek feedback from customers to determine which features are “must-haves” in your product development.
4. Use what’s available to you
Developing every element of your product from scratch is not entirely necessary. It can be a major time consumer when rushing to get your product to market before the competition.
Repurpose components, devices, or modules, or leverage third-party tools available to your business. Purchasing or reusing elements within your product development is a strategic way to cut time and associated R&D costs within your product development cycle.
5. Don’t be afraid to outsource
Knowing your strengths and limitations can help achieve rapid time-to-market for your new product. Outsourcing whenever possible allows your organization to efficiently create the desired product experience for your consumers.
If marketing or manufacturing is not your specialty, find the right partnership to help you achieve product objectives. Creating reliable third-party relationships in product development can help bring your product to market at an accelerated speed.
6. Endorse agility within product development
Today’s marketplace and consumer demands are constantly changing. Business agility allows product development to respond to these changes and create innovative solutions to emerging challenges and obstacles.
The key to agility within product development is adaptability. To become agile, product development teams must focus on customer involvement. Facilitating consumer feedback and dialogue throughout the development process will result in greater inherent value for the final product.
7 . Track results
R&D is quite often the most critical part of a successful product development cycle. It can help your organization better align new offerings to the expectations of consumers while creating an innovative product.
Measuring your process and product results is a key element to accelerating your development process and quickly entering the market. Using the product’s established key performance indicators (KPIs) as a guide, project stakeholders can quantify the success or failure of the product and make changes as needed.
8. Improve data accessibility
Data accessibility goes hand in hand with tracking product and process results. Ultimately, greater data transparency helps to accelerate decision-making and improves organizational agility. By increasing data accessibility for the right parties, your team will be equipped with the data needed to make the best decisions for the product, and without a major lag in development times.
But data accessibility is critical for your organization’s success far beyond the product development process. Data attained throughout development can help predict future industry trends, identify new opportunities for innovation, and help businesses generate new revenue streams.
Conclusion
In the end, getting products to market before other brands can give your business a significant competitive advantage. What’s important to remember, however, is that quality should never be sacrificed as a result of pushing products out the door faster.
To learn more about effectively managing your quality control process, learn more about GlobalVision's quality inspection system or request a demo with a product expert.
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