GID is a product manufacturing company that assists its clients throughout the product development lifecycle, from product research and custom product development to quality assurance and maintenance activities. We also guide our clients in selecting appropriate technologies, platform and features before committing to any large financial outlays.
Reduce Time To Market Your product
In today’s competitive world and stiff market conditions, smart entrepreneurs must carefully allocate every penny. Not only money, but even time is critical in any product development because, when you plan to develop a product or service, you cannot be sure that your competitor will not introduce a similar product before you do. Therefore, time will decide the success or failure of your product introduction to the market.
There are many ways by which you can reduce a product’s time to market. A few of useful ways to reduce the project time is listed below. The points / tips are a good sample of the most common approaches taken by experienced project managers to reduce the project’s time to market:
Incremental Development
Incremental design and development is essential in decreasing product’s time to market and must be considered as the primary tool when starting a complex project. By incremental development, you can pick a subset of the features of the product specification; you work on that subset, test it and weigh it. The product is shown to the customer and to all stakeholders for comment. Finally, you can choose to release this subset to the market or move to the next step and pick other features from the specifications and include them to the product.
The beauty of this approach is that at any phase, you have a product which is functional and could be released to the market. In addition, by showing the product to the customer, you get instant reviews at the end of every cycle in product development. With this method, there are no hidden surprises, and the development team and the customers are in sync throughout the product development lifecycle.
Testing and Re-evaluation
At the completion of every development phase, the product is tested thoroughly and prepared for the launch. This does not contradict the concept of continuous deployment. The product is constantly tested and evaluated. As time progresses, the product gets more and more polished and functional. At any stage of the development life cycle, the product can be shown to the customer or stakeholders for evaluation and feedback. The motto behind this evaluation, at the end of each lifecycle, is to determine whether the product is meeting the specification or not? Whether, new changes are required or not?
Regular testing and evaluation helps to reduce the risk of project failure or delay.
Cross Functional Teams
For the desired result in the limited period of time, the product development company should have different teams of experts, which includes R&D, manufacturing, marketing and engineering. Keep the size of the team as small as possible, because as the member of the team grows, its efficiency is reduced due to maintenance and management factors needed for larger teams. Increased number of members in a team also increase the chance of rivalries and politics, which you don’t need in your team.
Agile Methodology
Agile methodology is an old yet an effective product manufacturing concept. There are several advantages of agile methodology for product development and even the most renowned design and development teams in the market today are practicing agile methodology. In the latter, the product is divided into several phases or so called sprints. At the completion of each phase, the team has a functional product which could be launched to the market or be used as the platform for the next phase. Agile reduces time to market substantially for most product developments and as an added advantage, it decreases the manufacturing cost.
Conclusion
A complex project development takes a lot of time and resources to come to fruition. Time to market plays a crucial role in the success or failure or any product. By employing the above mentioned tips / steps, a product manufacturing company can reduce time to market, manufacturing cost, and can have a better quality of products for their customers.
For more information or for custom product manufacturing, feel free to contact GID at www.gidcompany.com/contact-us
