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What is product development?
Product development is the driving force of any product-driven company. From conception, to design and ultimately execution, a great new product helps you stay one step ahead of the competition, capture new markets and drive profits.
However, new product development is not a simple process. With multiple stakeholders involved throughout the process, it can quickly get messy. Following a clear, systematic approach will help maintain control and efficiency, creating less friction along the way.
To help you structure your ideas and create a clear, strategic overview, we’ve created templates for each step of the new product development process.
What is an example of new product development?
Apple inventing the iPhone is an example of new product development. Nike’s new Go FlyEase shoes that can be put on without using your hands is another example of new product development.
What are the 7 stages of product development?
To help you navigate this complexity, it helps to break the product development process up into seven stages. The seven stages are:
7 free Product Development templates
To help you navigate each stage, our free templates will help you focus on the big picture, visually organize your ideas and work collaboratively with your team. They are perfect for teams following Agile methodologies, or models such as Waterfall or the Stage-gate process.
And of course, as they are all available on our collaborative online whiteboard, they are suitable for remote or distributed teams.
So let’s take a look at the seven product development stages and corresponding templates.
1. Concept/Ideate – Generate new ideas
The product development process begins with extensive ideation brainstorming sessions. This stage involves all stakeholders and participants engaging in ‘Blue sky thinking’- brainstorming without limits! The objective of this stage is to spark inspiration.
Given the sheer volume of ideas generated, it is important to have the right tools to facilitate this. The Crazy 8s template is an excellent technique to produce a wide range of diverse ideas from the whole team. Give each team member eight minutes to sketch out eight ideas on a Crazy Eights template.
The frenzy that follows can produce some pretty wild, unfiltered ideas, and one of them might just be your new product. Simply click on the image below to use the template now.
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2. Feasibility study and design planning – Making the right choices
After extensive brainstorming and idea generation, product managers look for actionable insights that can translate into products and features. This stage in the product development process is perhaps most critical to the product’s long-term success.
The sheer volume of ideas generated can be overwhelming for product managers, so how do you choose the right product that matches the set goals?
This simple Priority Matrix template helps prioritize from within a list of possible product ideas and organizes them in a convenient matrix. Prioritize products with greater product/market fit and shelve low-priority ideas with this simple yet powerful tool.
Simply click on the image below to use the template now.
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3. Design & development – Building the vision
Envisioning the purpose of a product, the intention behind creating it and how customers will use it prior to building it will ensure everyone starts off in the right direction.
The Product Vision Board is a simple template that focuses on five key components of the desired product: The overarching vision for the product, the Target Audience, why their needs, the key functions of the product and how it achieves the business goals.
By completing this before, you get too far down the process, you will ensure you are designing a product with customers in mind. Simply click on the image below to use the template now.
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4. Testing & verification – Prototype, iterate, rinse, repeat
Now it’s time to put your hard work to the test. Take the prototype to your customers and collect their feedback to identify any possible issues or roadblocks. Whether it’s a new website, or a new piece of technology, it’s important to show, not tell.
By putting it to the test in, you can gather real feedback. Don’t be afraid of feedback, both positive and negative, will help you continually refine your product.
A useful template to compile the feedback of each test phase is the Retrospective canvas. It prompts you to answer: What went well? What was bad? Further ideas? Possible actions?
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5. Validation & collateral production
User panels help you better understand product-market fit and make last-minute tweaks to the product. A customer journey map not only captures feedback during test panels, but also helps you garner a deeper understanding of your customer’s motivations, needs and pain points.
Use this opportunity to understand preferred touchpoints and refine the go-to-market strategy for the product launch. Simply click on the image below to use the template now.
6. Manufacture/Launch – Building your product
Now that all stakeholders are aligned on the project milestones and responsibilities have been assigned, it’s time to get down to business! It falls to the Product Manager to ensure all deliverables adhere to projected timelines.
The sheer number of moving parts in this stage can make it a project management nightmare. The Product Management Canvas is a product manager’s best friend. Designed to act as a checklist when undertaking product planning, but it’s also the perfect tool to capture the current state of an evolving product, especially when multiple departments are involved.
Simply click on the image below to use the template now.
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7. Continuous improvement – Feedback and review
While we’ve outlined the important stages in the product development process, the process itself is by no means linear. Constant user feedback and analysis of usage data should feed into the development at every stage. This is especially true post-launch. Once the product has been launched, it is time to revisit the process and understand opportunities for future optimization.
While it is important to recognize and acknowledge what went right, it is equally important to understand and analyze what went wrong.
The Lessons Learned template is one of our most popular retrospective templates to capture feedback. It promotes positivity as it places equal emphasis on documenting the failures as well as the wins, so they can be replicated for future projects. Alternatively, check out one of our other popular retrospective templates here.
Simply click on the image below to use the template now.
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The templates outlined are extremely useful in the product development process as a means of organizing, prioritizing and presenting complex information. Feel free to explore our entire template library to see what other templates can help you, or read some of our recent articles:
Conceptboard is an online-whiteboard that helps you collaborate visually and seamlessly with your team, regardless of location. Discover how to simplify your product development workstream on a daily basis using Conceptboard here.
Give Conceptboard a try by signing up for a free 30 day trial now.
Tradeoff decisions must be made. While a feature idea might excite customers, you may find it will take more effort to build than you deem it is worth. And other popular ideas may fail to make the cut if they do not support company or product goals.
These nuances are what make feature definition and prioritization such a crucial piece of a product manager's job. It takes an ongoing commitment to the product vision, customer research, and cross-functional collaboration to cut through the noise and find what matters — identifying features that people will use and love.
Let's walk through how to define product features in detail — including a template and examples. Use the following links to jump ahead to a specific section:
A product feature is a specific function or characteristic of a product that provides value to customers. It can include capabilities, design elements, or performance upgrades. For product managers, defining and prioritizing features to build is a key aspect of the role. You are responsible for ensuring that any new or updated product features align with your business and product strategy.
To do this, most product teams follow a consistent, repeatable method for writing product features. That way you can reliably communicate new functionality to stakeholders and tie everything back to your goals — avoiding a hodgepodge of enhancements that customers do not need or want.
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Product development terms could fill a dictionary (which is why we wrote one). When learning the lingo, some folks might get confused about what differentiates a feature from a product, benefit, or other increments of work. Before we go any further, let's clear a few things up.
A product is an offering you sell to customers to satisfy a need or want. Products often encompass more than the item or service itself — including elements like sales, support, integrations, and other touchpoints that people interact with (at Aha! we call this the Complete Product Experience).
A feature is a discrete area of functionality within the product. While important, it is only one small piece of what customers are actually buying.
A product feature is a specific piece of functionality that provides a corresponding benefit or set of benefits for the customer.
A benefit is the positive outcome or advantage gained from using that functionality. In other words, benefits describe why a feature ultimately matters to the customer.
Below are a few examples of the difference between product features and benefits:
Product/Service
Feature
Benefit
Automobile
Reverse automatic braking
Enhanced safety
Financial reporting software
Custom analytics report
Flexibility, configurability
Online training portal
Search and filter options
Time-savings, interactivity
Along with features, product teams leverage epics, user stories, and requirements to describe what you will build. The table below details the most common usage for these terms. Depending on the development methodology your team uses, the terms may have slightly different meanings.
Epic
A group of related features or user stories that share common business objectives. Epics are larger bundles of work that tend to span multiple releases.
Feature
A slice of functionality that describes a product's appearance, components, and/or capabilities.
User story
A product feature that is described from the perspective of the end-user. The user story format is helpful in relating features to benefits.
As a [type of user], I want to [action] so that [benefit].
Requirement
A defined capability that needs to be completed in order to deliver a feature. A single feature may have multiple requirements.
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Before you write a feature, you need an idea. Ideas for new product features can come from anywhere — you, your team, customers, and other stakeholders. But not all ideas become features.
As a product manager, it is your job to gather, assess, and prioritize ideas to identify which ones are feature-worthy. For most teams, it is impractical (impossible, even) to build every suggestion that comes your way — you have to determine which ones will have the greatest impact. This process is called idea management and it is the precursor to the feature definition process.
With your best ideas identified, you can start writing features. Defining a product feature means clearly communicating what you want to build and why. A well-defined feature should describe both the functionality as well has how it addresses a customer need. These details align the broader product team on the problems to solve and how to approach them.
For example, a detailed feature provides engineers with the context to help them decide the best way to implement the new functionality. For product marketing, it helps highlight which benefits to showcase in the go-to-market strategy.
When you start defining a product feature, consider these questions to help clarify the details:
How will this feature contribute to our goals and initiatives?
What challenge will this feature solve for?
What capabilities or user experiences need to be designed and built to deliver this feature?
What is the timeline for delivering this feature?
Which customer segments or personas will be served by this feature?
Who is responsible for delivering this feature?
In the tutorial video below, Aha! product expert Rose Thompson will help you understand the flow of ideas to features as well as how to approach feature definition. The next sections will explore feature components, templates, and examples to help you get started.
Editor's note: Although the video below still shows core functionality within Aha! software, some of the interface might be out of date. View our knowledge base for the most updated insights into Aha! software.