All products are expected to offer benefits for their creators and owners. Creators get income or revenue from selling, and, in turn, owners receive something that would help them with what they need. Digital products are tools you can utilise through online mechanisms.
As the digital world continues to expand over time, digital product development is something you should remember to do for your brand. Read this guide on starting and sustaining your digital product development.
Stages in Digital Product Development
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Developing Ideas
This is the starting stage of any digital product. This is where the conceptualisation happens. The specifics of the digital product are created here, and creators can check the potential that the product can do in terms of its usage for those who will purchase it.
Goals regarding the digital product will also be set here. The implementation of the development will greatly depend on the objectives that the creator would like to meet and accomplish.
However, it’s notable that many who go through the ideation stage do not necessarily go through until the end. Significant efforts must be put into ensuring the success of the ideation phase.
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Thinking of the Design and Development
Next, the design and development stage would be where you will be designing your digital product based on how you want it to look and feel for the customers. The phases included in this stage are the prototype, pilot testing, alpha/beta release, MVP, and QA testing.
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Taking Growth into Account
Now, the growth stage is where your digital product would need to sustain its digital presence through practical strategies that would let target audiences discover it. Pre-launch efforts would be integral in getting the word out about your digital product.
These can include teasers, publicity materials across social media platforms, email marketing, influencer campaigns, pre-release reviews, and more.
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Considering Post-Launch growth
Once your digital product has started its presence in the digital market, you need to make sure that online users continue to notice it. You can do so by using engaging strategies where customers would feel the need to continue using your product.
Customer support, regular updates, new features, and product engineering would significantly determine this phase of the digital product’s growth. By this time, you should assess what your customers need, and it is your task to adjust your digital product to ways on how it can keep growing.
Digital Product Development Strategies
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Waterfall or Traditional Development
A waterfall approach gives out a logical and linear development life-cycle model. It is one of the most common methods used. Its title reflects how the cycle goes, from top-to-bottom.
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Agile Development
An agile development approach leans more on a swift and flexible response to changes around a digital product. It uses iterations, known as the splitting of the development cycles into short time slots.
These are used for the tasks and features available with the digital product. This way, the progress of different teams are shown, and time costs are greatly reduced.
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Scrum Development
The Scrum development approach is often used to build complex products, and it is seen as one of the most flexible approaches you can use. It gives much importance to verbal communication and uses factual thinking.
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Lean Development
The lean development approach focuses more on the swift delivery of products and gives importance to quality control, regularly checking the progress. It is considered a digital transformation based on manufacturing practices.
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Feature-Driven Development
The feature-driven approach is somehow connected to the agile development approach. It caters to digital products that would need ongoing updates. This approach focuses on design, where the product will be divided into small pieces called features.
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Rapid Application Development
A rapid application development approach depends heavily on prototyping. Methods that are usually used to achieve the goals of this approach involve focus groups. There will be gathering requirements, testing the design, team communication syncs, reusing software components, rapid prototyping, and more to make things quicker.
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Hybrid Approach
A hybrid approach consists mainly of the strategies present in the waterfall and agile practices. This would allow you to customise what you will use and adjust them to your product’s needs. Independent teams will be gathered in a shared environment to test the dependencies between them.
Conclusion
In the end, it is up to you to choose which approach you will use for your digital product development. You can come up with your strategy too. Remember that time is of the essence, and you need to move fast to ensure the success of your product from the ideation stage until now.
If you need a digital marketing agency in Sydney, turn to Kiin Agency. We are dedicated to helping brands make their products stand out among competitors. Send us an email to collaborate.