The digital product development process is a crucial part of any thriving business. Competitors change, markets change, and so do the customers. As a result, even the most seasoned enterprises can’t stand still. Digital product development is all about the creation of digital services for the benefit of people at large.
All products are created with a twofold purpose: value for their creator and value for their end user or consumer. The creator or maker of the product earns this value in the form of profit generated by selling it. The end user, on the other hand, gains value by using the product for a specific purpose. Digital products are primarily tools or services that you utilize via a digital medium. Your banking application is a perfect example of the digital transformation of banking services or digital product development services. It provides services online in a more convenient and faster form.
Difference Between a Digital Good and a Digital Product
All downloadable assets are considered digital products. This includes video and audio content, graphics, eBooks, graphics, and more. But, e-commerce, falls under the concept of digital goods. And it is more relevant to the value they bring. Digital product development is a pure work of art and technology.
- Digital products are programming code-based assets that bring a coherent value proposition to the end-user. So, digital product development undertakes several programming efforts. These are mostly mobile, desktop, web apps, digital dashboards, control applications, and much more.
- Digital goods are intangible digital assets that are present in digital form. Some digital goods can be used in physical form too. Examples digital product development are ringtones, video tutorials, electronic books, wallpapers, mockup images, and more. Additionally, video editing tools are a crucial category of digital products, empowering users to create and manipulate video content with precision and creativity.
What is Digital Product Development?
Often people ask what is digital product development. Digital product development is a comprehensive process that revolves around conceptualizing, designing, creating, and launching digital products or services. These products are typically software-based, including websites, mobile applications, SaaS (Software as a Service) platforms, and digital tools. The objective of digital product development is to bring innovative and user-centric solutions to the market that cater to specific needs or solve particular problems. Digital product development aims to develop unique digital products.
Often the digital product development process is all about the engineering of software and applications that bring a user experience. Through digital product development, engineered products and services improve the user experience and journey. It is aimed to improve total or a part of the experience driven by the products online. Digital product development process consists of agile development methodologies used to perfect and deliver products at an escalated speed with ample and regular testing and iteration. This iteration depends on stakeholder input.
What are the Basic Requirements of a Digital Product?
People often think that web applications and websites are real digital products and digital product development is a piece of cake but that’s not true. There is a misconception that web applications and websites are real digital products. They are just product implementations present on the web. As a result, one cannot conclude that Uber’s mobile app is a separate and distinct product.
Digital product development is a way to bring value to users of smartphones and tablets. It means that you can implement any digital product using a website, web app, mobile app, or desktop version.
Here are three things you need to know about the basics of digital product development.
- A value proposition intended to solve a specific problem
- Digital interaction point or interactive UX
- Power to generate revenue
Digital Product Development Cycle
When it comes to the digital product development life cycle, the low-level cycle is determined by your development approach. However, high-level digital product development workflows are typically the same. Therefore, you can adjust digital product development according to the complexity and requirements of the project. There are three primary stages in the digital product development cycle: Ideation, Design & Development, and Growth. Let’s go through the stages of digital product development:
Ideation
The initial and first step is the idea or thought. However, more than 10% of digital product ideas turn into successful products and can bring value to end-users. The thinking phase is aimed at finding out if your digital product can avoid failures in the first place. Traditionally, this section of digital product development is about problem identification and problem-solving. Ideation in digital product development might include thinking, research and analysis, measurements, and other activities.
The main goal is to demonstrate, with evidence, the value of your digital product.
Vision
The motivation for developing a digital product development process is its primary vision. Digital product development acts as the compass that guides every stakeholder. A successful vision reveals the context of the product and shows where it is supposed to go. It may be as short and international as Disney’s “To Make People Happy” or as comprehensive as “Helping Content Creators Around the World to Find a global audience” for Netflix. The vision behind digital product development should focus on the potential of your digital product and its long-term goals.
Strategy
A product strategy in digital product development relates to how you are going to bring your product vision to life. It defines your product team’s direction through implementation. One of the main reasons that startups fail is that their strategy is based on inspiration. A winning strategy depends on a product roadmap with well-defined objectives, success metrics, competitive analysis, value proposition, and other important data.
Market Research and Analysis
It is one of the most important stages in the digital product development process. At the market research and analysis stage in digital product development, product owners need to:
- Research the market thoroughly to identify the target audience
- Analyze the strengths and weaknesses of competitors
- Estimate product-market fit
- and other relevant statistics.
The essence of this section is to integrate your digital product strategy with market needs and expectations.
Budget
You need to define available financial assets and forecast costs you’ll encounter in the short and long term.
Value Proposition
At this stage of digital product development, you need to check the suitability of your digital product. In the value proposition, you identify the advantages and disadvantages from the end users’ point of view. It is a powerful analytical method that can be performed using a value proposition canvas. As an outcome, you will get a detailed picture of the performance and features required by a particular category of users.
Proof of Concept
Proof of concept or PoC allows you to test the practicality of a design concept. For this, some experts assign PoC to the wireframing or prototyping category. However, we take it as a pre-development phase because it answers the question of whether a digital product can be developed. Once you are done with the PoC, you can start engineering the product.
Design and Development
After the idea (if it is successful), you are ready to move on to the next step of digital product development and think about how your digital product should feel and look.
Prototype
Prototyping enables you to understand how to build your digital product. It is the initial and first attempt to introduce UI and UX visually. The prototype mostly has a basic design and limited functionality. Its purpose is to lure investors or get feedback from the first adopters.
Pilot Test
Pilot testing in digital product development aims to refine the digital product before beta deployment. It allows you to estimate how a product has been developed from the end user’s point of view and what changes are needed as soon as possible.
Alpha / Beta Release
Each version of the product is intended for different purposes. It is not the only misconception of the famous MVP. Alpha is the first practical model intended for internal performance testing and design. It is followed by a beta release, which collects feedback from UX and is publicly available. Both versions pursue the aim of creating a bug-free, refined, and ready-to-go product.
MVP
The Minimum Viable Product or MVP is the version with both UI and some basic functionality. It is an essential step of advanced digital product development crucial for the validation of the idea. It also enables you to learn from the feedback of users. Depending on the method you select to build MVP, it can be a simple idea visualization or a working prototype.
QA testing
Quality Assurance in digital product development is a particular set of testing activities to refine the quality of a product development partner. Simply put, it is intended to eliminate bugs and different defects. There are many QA strategies to choose from, depending on your development strategy.
Growth
Go To Market
This is the development stage that every product owner looks forward to. The digital product is ready to go to market at this stage and take over a particular niche. Although much effort has already been put forth, there are still many challenges ahead. The first among them is to create a pre-launch strategy, which includes:
- Landing page or teaser
- Email marketing
- Guest posting
- Social media campaign
- Pre-released reviews
- Influencer campaign
- Various promotional campaigns
The market launch is not a one-step stage; in fact, it is a set of tasks aimed at gaining a large audience for your digital product leads. You know your target audience from the ideation stage, so it’s time to come up with your marketing plan, which includes:
- Website
- Social media content
- Referrals
- Advertising
- Influencer campaign
- Email marketing
Ongoing Development
The post-launch life of a digital product is a kind of maturation period. It is often characterized by continuous product engineering, customer support, building new features, and updates. The main aim of ongoing development is to improve user experience, keep up with the time, meet new needs, and ensure product growth.
Product Evolution
Ideas for the digital product are not limited to design and launch strategy. They include the need to adapt to the ever-changing environment and the needs of customers. Therefore, you should ensure that your product changes and evolves according to price, quality, performance, security, and other factors.
Different Approaches to Digital Product Development
There are different processes to increase efficiency in digital product development. However, every product owner is free to choose the one according to the development methodology or approach of the project.
Waterfall or Traditional Development
Waterfall development lifecycle is one of the well-established approaches that offer a linear and logical life-cycle model of development. The name of the waterfall means from the top to the bottom as water falls on the ground.
As a rule, this method includes the following steps:
- Conception
- Analysis
- Design
- Implementation
- Testing
- Deployment
- Maintenance
Waterfall development is an ideal approach if you have a reasonable budget and strong requirements for the technical stack, timeline, and documentation. As a rule, this approach is the choice of large companies for their internal projects.
Pros
- There is no requirement for customer presence.
- There’s an established timeline and scope.
- Understanding the complete scope means that there is a complete product at launch.
Cons
- It has a longer timeline.
- The needs might be difficult to define.
- It is inflexible. It means you’ll get what you plan. The software requirement specifications (SRS) don’t allow you to evolve much.
Agile Development
Flexible and rapid response to change is the most amazing feature of the agile digital product development process approach. It includes the division of the development cycle into iterations, or you can say short time slots. The iterations are meant for each feature or task of the digital product depending on the digital product development company. The agile development approach offers the same progress for different teams and a significant reduction in time costs. This decision of approach is made by the digital product development company. Here are the common life cycle processes for Agile development:
- Conception
- Inception
- Iteration
- Release
- Production
- Retirement
Agile development practices in a digital product development company emphasize face-to-face communication. At the same time, it reduces the role of documentation as compared to other approaches. This approach in digital product development process is subject to alternatives, some of which we will introduce below.
Pros
- Quickly creates the basic version of the product.
- It offers greater flexibility, which means software requirement specifications (SRS) can evolve.
- It tends to be more user-centric.
- Offers high adaptivity. The customers get to solutions sooner because they are involved constantly.
Cons
- There are shillings at scale. It works great if you have 10 team members, but not for a team of 500.
- The costs and timeline can be uncertain.
Scrum Development
Scrum is the perfect way to build complex products with flexible needs. Every workflow contains sprints (periods of two to four weeks), and each sprint is the start of a complete product life cycle:
- Initiation
- Planning
- Implementation
- Retrospective
- Release
The scrum approach is one of the most flexible ones in digital product development process among others. It encourages and enhances verbal communication within the project and embraces a factual mindset. It means that when there is an agile response to challenges, it exceeds the effort to fully understand the problem.
Lean Development
Lean development is often characterized by quality-focused progress and quick product delivery in digital product design and development.
Following is the lean digital product development life cycle process.
- Ideation
- Exploration
- Validation
- Growth
- Sustaining
- Retire
Pros
- Very scalable.
- It is highly efficient because in digital product design and development it saves money and time (hinges on eliminating all waste).
- Software requirement specifications (SRS) can evolve.
Cons
- Success depends on how stringent the documentation is.
- Success depends on how cohesive the development team is.
Feature-Driven Development
Among many digital product development services the popular one is FDD. FDD is another type of Agile Development. Ideal for companies that are changing from phase-based to iterative methods. Feature-driven development empowers digital products that require continuous updates. It is a design-oriented approach, and each project is divided into small features or parts. Such digital product development services prove to be impactful.
Here is the FDD process cycle:
- Model development as a whole
- List of features
- Planning and prioritization
- Design
- Implementation
This approach encourages rapid development and successful product evolution. Contrary to that, smaller projects are less likely to benefit from FDD.
Rapid Application Development
RAD is an important part of digital product design process. It relies on prototyping as a key part of the product development cycle. The time costs of prototype delivery increase due to cutting planning tasks. Pipeline acceleration is usually achieved through the use of focus groups to collect needs, multi-team synchronization, rapid prototyping, reuse of software components, user testing of design, and other methods.
The RAD life cycle looks like this:
- Requirements planning
- User design
- Development
- Cutover
There is another way to implement rapid application development, and that’s the use of dedicated object-oriented programming languages in combination with digital product development services. Some of them include Java, Python, and Ruby.
Hybrid Approach
Today, many startups mostly opt for Agile Development and other derivatives. However, another progressive choice sought so far is a combination of Waterfall and Agile approaches. This method allows you to customize the process and tailor it to the needs of your project.
The idea is to have independent groups and integrate them into a common environment. In this case, the level of interdependence between them will determine the alignment of the output as the waterfall teams focus on advance planning and the agile teams choose continuous planning at each stage.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to developing any digital product. Moreover, companies mostly use more than one methodology for the entire pipeline. For instance, some outsourcing businesses use a blend of Lean, Scrum, and Agile.
Thus, you can make the best of specific development approaches and implement them in your project.
Maintenance and Support
After digital product development, the next important thing is digital product management. People often overlook maintenance and support during a process to avoid digital product development mistakes. But if your product turns out to be a success, then it will be the longest stage.
Maintenance and digital product management might end up costing you much more than the launch if you don’t plan overhead and safeguard proper resources for it. Often the development partner offers long-term maintenance and support services. You need to clarify this with the provider upfront, whether it’s a development team within your organization or an external company. Digital product management is as important as the digital product development process.
Digital product management will help you avoid the nightmare of post-launch bug fixes damaging your product reputation.
Conclusion
With the rise in the digital product development process, startups need to opt for a well-elaborated plan of action to avoid any undesirable risks. It is essential to understand your target audience, market, budget, and goals and do a lot of research as well as testing to step up your game in the market. Digital product management is essential for all digital products to perform well.
If you are new in the market and finding it difficult for the first time, Xavor Corporation has a solution. We have all the relevant professionals and years of experience that ensure a flawless development process. A digital product design process ensures your product is flawless. Digital products development is all about taking care of the digital product development lifecycle.
We are well-versed in digital product development, digital product development lifecycle, and know how to do market research offering you the possible robust foundation for the development and launch of a new product. Reach out to us to get started on your digital product development journey!
The timeline for digital product development can vary significantly based on factors such as project complexity, team size, and the nature of the product. However, a standard timeline may range from a few months for simpler apps or websites to a year or more for complex software platforms.
Identifying your target audience involves thorough market research. You can analyze the demographics, behaviors, preferences, and pain points of potential users. This data helps in creating user personas, which are detailed representations of your ideal customers.
User feedback is crucial throughout the development process. It provides insights into user satisfaction, identifies issues, and suggests improvements. Feedback informs iterative development and ensures the product aligns with user expectations.
Security is paramount in digital product development. Employ best practices such as secure coding, regular vulnerability assessments, and penetration testing. Additionally, keep the software up to date with security patches and maintain strict access controls.
A prototype is a visual representation of the product’s design and functionality, typically used for early validation and testing. An MVP, on the other hand, is a functional version of the product with minimal features to gather user feedback and validate the concept. An MVP is a step closer to a fully functioning product, while a prototype is more focused on design and concept demonstration.