Consumers today are bombarded with choices related to smart products and solutions. To succeed in such a competitive environment and stand out from the crowd, organizations too have to step up their game in terms of both innovation and quality. However, developing quality digital product development and solutions is far from easy.
It requires robust and prolonged planning and resourceful completion of several steps within the allocated time. Organizations have to anticipate and prepare for the hurdles they might face during the product development journey.
This will allow them to stay within budget and complete even long projects on time.
In this blog, we will list eight common challenges that organizations face while developing digital products along with their solutions. Read on to embark on a smooth product development journey:
Unclear Strategy:
Organizations often discount the importance of this step while developing digital products or mobile apps. After presenting the strategy to the stakeholders, they tend to forget about it. Lack of proper planning and inability to carve out a roadmap impacts employees’ daily assignments.
This is because they feel unclear about the kind of objectives they have to fulfill. Unsteady progress, therefore, becomes one of the biggest reasons behind the failure of projects related to digital products.
Solution:
To avoid this problem, organizations should carve out a clear roadmap in advance. They should take all the stakeholders’ expectations into account and plan every employee’s daily objectives towards the digital product development process successfully. Besides that, organizations should track progress on a weekly basis to ensure transparency and timeliness.
Vague Product Idea:
Before jumping into product design and features, it is important to fully know the kind of product that you want to develop. Many organizations don’t have any clear idea about the kind of product they want to develop and only rely on technology.
This can create huge problems in the long run. This is because developers might fail to come up with the design and feature strategy, and the whole project might collapse.
Solution
To avoid this challenge, make sure to answer these few questions regarding product or app development before even starting the planning process:
- Why do you need to develop a product?
- How will it function?
- What kind of design will it have?
- Who will be the audience?
- When should we market it?
These questions will give you a direction regarding the kind of product that you should develop. You should also discuss it with your teams to finalize the product definition before its development.
Unknown Audience:
You might have an excellent product idea but might fail to think of the right audience to cater this product to. This is one of the common and fatal digital product mistakes that organizations make. Not knowing your audience and their preferences can make you waste both time and money.
The product might turn out to be truly unique and innovative, but it will fail to deliver value if the audience is not interested.
Solution:
To make your product successful, make sure to answer these questions before proceeding with development:
- Who is your audience?
- What kind of preferences does it have?
- What kinds of products are already trending?
- Will your product appeal to the customers?
You should also do some research on your competitors and their products to know about their winning strategies. It will help you determine the kind of unique elements that you could offer to win your customers.
Unbalanced Approach:
Having the right approach towards efficiency in digital product development is crucial to wining the product or app development game. If your employees rely too much on upper management, product development and decision-making might become too time-consuming and slow.
On the other hand, if your management gives too much independence to the developers, your product might not turn out to be what you expected. All of this can cause project delays and confusion, and eventually loss of direction.
Solution:
Make sure to keep a balanced and straightforward approach towards the digital product development process right from the start. Plan your development team’s involvement in key decisions and set out clear KPIs for them to maintain direction. At the same time, track their progress and set checkpoints to ensure upper management’s involvement in the process.
Multiple Stakeholders
Organizations might want multiple stakeholders on a project to raise maximum funds and resources. But too many stakeholders might also translate into too many problems. Each stakeholder might have his/her own concerns and expectations. And for organizations, fulfilling all these expectations while also developing the exact product that their audience wants might become the biggest challenge.
After digital product development, continuous back and forth with the stakeholders can also become quite frustrating for the developers. This is because it wastes precious employee time and resources.
Solution:
Never aspire to have too many stakeholders on a single project. Decide your budget and plan, and discuss it with the stakeholders to ensure transparency and clarity in direction. Also, maintain only one communication channel with the stakeholders to avoid confusion or miss out on any important detail. Finally, keep stakeholders in the loop throughout the journey to address their concerns side by side.
Unskilled Team:
Most organizations have brilliant digital product ideas at the start of the project. However, as the project progresses, the development teams fail to build the product as envisioned. This is because they are untrained and unskilled for a certain project. That is why they fail to plan and execute the product according to expectations.
This can waste an organizations’ time and money along with an innovative and unique vision to develop a transformative product.
Solution:
To avoid these functional hurdles, make sure to invest in a highly skilled team for your project. You should also ensure adequate training to avoid any delays in the progress that you expect. Keep track of your employees’ attendance, availability, and progress on the project to make sure that they comply with the schedule. Finally, encourage and appreciate them now and then to boost their morale.
Not Focusing on the End Product:
No matter how much effort you might have put into the digital product development process, customers will only see the final product. So, if the end-product does not appeal to the customers or is poorly designed, customers will not be interested in it.
Another important feature that most organizations overlook is the user experience. While the product itself might be of excellent quality, it would be useless if not user-friendly.
Solution:
Organizations can ensure that their customer encounters no problem with the product by answering these simple questions beforehand:
- Does the product have any internal issues?
- Does it address the requirements of the customer?
- Is it user-friendly?
- Does it deliver value?
- Is it easily accessible?
While the technology behind the product is essential, it shouldn’t overpower the end product’s design and interface. Careful consideration of these factors will easily make the product a success for the organization.
Discounting Marketing Value:
Finally, the product can quickly fail to deliver value and covert if organizations don’t market it the right way. Your product might be innovative and unique. But if you fail to attract the right audience and create buzz, all of your efforts can go to waste.
Therefore, it is very important to market the product enough before its launch for marketing can easily make or break the product’s success.
Solution:
To ensure the success of your product, you should first determine the proper marketing channels for your products. Next, you should shortlist the audience and carve out an exciting marketing strategy. Finally, it would be best if you came up with creative campaigns to excite the audience about your product.