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New Product Research or Processes
New product Research or Processes
Worried that the Engineering or the Developers are not making the right decisions? Do you need an honest and unfiltered opinion on product viability and advice on future direction?
New product development is the lifeblood of every high technology company. In many successful companies, Product Management drives the business success of the product throughout the organization, using a top-down approach to make the appropriate product decisions that impact business results. Top-down means doing extensive homework for both the market and customer research in defining the next-generation products.
In addition, there is no one uniform method for a new product process. One size does not fit all. A successful new product process requires the use of extensive market research matched with organizations' cloud experience, budgets, engineering talent, timelines, and corporate goals.
Optimize Marketing can provide services for both new product research as well as provide guidance on the best method for the product development process that matches the needs of your organization.
Common Mistake #1 Inadequate Research
Doesn't it seem like there's never enough time to perform a task well, but there's always seems to more than enough time to perform it twice? Fortunately or unfortunately, product management decisions have the largest impact on an organization, more than development decisions. The wrong decision by Product Management can cause delays in success by months or even years, particularly if the wrong product has been developed to match the target market.
With over 50 years of experience, Optimize Marketing has a successful track record of developing the right product for the right identified target market. We not only follow the Pragmatic Marketing principles, but we have enhanced this proven methodology with what we call Evidential Marketing. In short, Evidential Marketing includes concepts such as the buyer's value hierarchy and their hierarchical decision criteria.
Common Mistake #2 Vague Requirements
User stories and their corresponding tasks are the central lifeblood of an agile/scrum development methodology. Some organizations create user stories as tasks for engineering to develop. even though the classic scrum methodology says otherwise. Unfortunately, this leads to confusion and frustration by the development and QA team, with product development inefficiencies borne by all groups who touch the development pipeline.
While classic user stories include three components (actor and user role, user activity, and user benefit), the most important aspect of each user story is the details on acceptance criteria. Many times, the acceptance criteria are left to the engineer to decipher which makes it even more difficult for the QA team to verify, prior to final story acceptance by product management. Product managers need to make the additional efforts to provide very detailed acceptance criteria, or better yet a detailed written specification on the requirements with a practice run-through asking yourself "How do I know this is done?" as the criteria for documenting the acceptance criteria.
While classic user stories include three components (actor and user role, user activity, and user benefit), the most important aspect of each user story is the details on acceptance criteria. Many times, the acceptance criteria are left to the engineer to decipher which makes it even more difficult for the QA team to verify, prior to final story acceptance by product management. Product managers need to make the additional efforts to provide very detailed acceptance criteria, or better yet a detailed written specification on the requirements with a practice run-through asking yourself "How do I know this is done?" as the criteria for documenting the acceptance criteria.