When you’re developing a product, there’s more than just the ‘development’ to manage. You have to juggle between prioritizing various aspects — from your user needs to the project owners.

This is where a strong product development process is needed. A good development plan can help you manage and effectively prioritize all these aspects.

In this article, we’ll walk you through the basics of product development and how you can create a plan.

What is Product Development?

Product development refers to a product’s entire journey, from ideation and strategy to planning, building, and successfully launching. Although it generally focuses on developing the product, but also includes tasks such as roadmapping and strategy.

Product development can often be confused with similar terms. Here’s a clear differentiation between all of them:

Product management involves creating a strategy managing various aspects such as roadmap creation, marketing, and more. It leads the product development plan.
Product strategy and roadmapping are more focused on the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of the product’s lifecycle.

Lastly, product development is a granular plan that focuses on the actual product development to achieve your long-term vision.

6 Stages of Developing a Successful Product

It’s easy to confuse product development as solely the developing and launching phase. While this is partially true, there’s a lot more to the product development process.

When you break it down, the process has mainly 6 distinct stages. These include:

Market research
Ideate
Validate
Plan
Develop and launch
Iterate

1. Conduct market research

Market research can allow you to develop specific features and elements for your product. In the context of product development, market analysis considers the following aspects:

What the target market needs from your products
What gaps in features or functionality exist in competitor solutions
Where can you identify competitive advantage
Competitive business analysis

The only way to conduct good research is: Talk to your target audience as much as possible. Understand your customers’ needs to truly build a product with strong demand.

2. Create a vision

Product development cannot be successful without a clear vision. Creating a vision may seem like a part of product strategy but actually, it’s also crucial for development.

Your product vision should define what exactly you want to create, and how. This vision involves high-level idea generation, such as your long-term goals and your unique value proposition. In addition, your vision can include ideas and prototypes.

3. Validate your ideas

Before you create a product development plan, you need to validate your ideas. There are many tools for app idea validation, such as prototypes, wireframes, and minimum viable products (MVPs).

Idea validation is important for your product’s success in the later stages. Conceptual frameworks and MVPs can help you get user feedback. It can lead to iterations, creating a strong product-market fit.

Early feedback can save your time and resources into building a weak product. The earlier to validate your idea, the higher chances of success are.

4. Build your product development roadmap

Once you’ve validated your ideas, you can finally start planning your product’s development. That’s when you need a product development roadmap.

A product development roadmap allows you understand how much effort will go into the actual building. It reveals all the work that needs to be done, keeping your current stage of development in mind.

5. Launch your MVP

After creating your roadmap, it’s time to build your app’s first version and launch it.

Nowadays, most founders prefer to launch a minimum viable product (MVP) for testing and validating their ideas before building the actual app.

But here’s something more: In an age of AI app builders, developing an MVP traditionally can exhaust your resources and time. Isn’t it better to launch, iterate, and build an actual app faster with no-code AI tools?

Natively allows you to build your app’s first version efficiently. You can gather user feedback, iterate, and launch exactly how you would with a traditionally developed MVP.

The only difference is: it takes minimal efforts, time, and resources to build with an advanced builder like Natively. In fact, you can see the results from day one.

6. Iterate on feedback

The last and most important step of all is iteration.

You need to gather customer feedback and iterate to develop your app’s final version. This involves user interviews and user testing. Hence, all your efforts lead to an app that aligns with your vision.

What is a Product Development Plan?

A product development plan creates a detailed course for your product development process. It covers the steps, outlines, resources, and processes involved in the entire process to launch. Essentially, the plan works as a roadmap.

An effective product development plan should include:

Target market and competitor analysis
Product vision
Product ideas
Feature breakdown
Technical specifications
Design guidelines and wireframes
Product launch plan
Budget and timelines
Potential risks

In simple words, your plan should include everything that you need to know before actually building the app.

How to Create a Product Development Plan That Works?

A product development plan can help you design a product roadmap aligned with your vision and goals. So, here we’ve listed the five steps to create a cohesive product development plan:

1. Set your goals: Determine your goal for specific product development phases, making sure that they align with your larger goals and vision.

2. Choose a roadmap framework that works: There are two types of roadmap frameworks: waterfall roadmaps and agile roadmaps. A waterfall roadmap is suitable for traditional development while an agile roadmap is best for agile startups. Pick the one for your brand.

3. Detail the product development process: Consider the milestones you want to achieve and map out the tasks you need to complete to achieve them.

4. Confirm with the project owners: At this stage, you need to discuss the development plan with those in-charge. In addition, your development plan is the one thing that aligns project owners before the work begins.

5. Monitor and adjust: Create an iterative review process for when you forward with the tasks. It allows you to adjust your roadmap as things evolve. Thus, the roadmap stays fresh and up-to-date.

Bottom Line

After the product development roadmap comes the actual development.

With AI app builders like Natively, you can easily develop your app’s V1 in minutes. You can speed your development process efficiently without writing any code.

The best of all features: Natively lets you build, iterate, and deploy within the agent. That way, you build an app that’s scalable and matches your vision.

Build your MVP on Natively and launch it by the next hour. Start now.