How do you design a product? Designing a product involves a lot of moving pieces. It often requires a process to break down the needs and desires of the product in consumable chunks. For any startup, here’s a list of steps that you want to take as you build your product.
- Brainstorm some solutions to the problem you want to solve. Before you design a product, you have brainstorm. This is a great exercise to help picture your idea. If you have a nebulous vision, try to put it on paper as best as possible. Try to keep an open mind during this step. An idea may have more worth than initially thought.
- Define the product. If you needed to summarize your product, how would you do so? What are the requirements for this product? Answering these questions help mold your initial idea. Keep in mind that the final product may differ from the output of this step.
- Research. Perform user research. Understand the market that you’re preparing to enter. What do your potential competitors offer? Are you actually solving a problem your customers have? How about the economics, does that work out? Answering these questions will set you on a path towards moving forward or revising your product. Google Forms or Amazon MTurk are two platforms that may be useful to you during this phase.
- Prototyping. Build a prototype of your product. Whether hardware, software, or a service, doing this helps realize your concept. In addition, you may notice that some of your initial expectations need some adjustment.
- Testing. Test the product with customers. Make sure that you have the proper channels in place to gather feedback. Make sure that you’re hitting the target demographic.
- Feedback. Do you need to adjust? Are customers responding well to the product? Try answering these questions to see if it’s time to return to the drawing board. One item to remember is that it’s essential to remain flexible while sticking to your vision. Sometimes, the outcome of the product differs from our initial expectations.
Feel free to add additional steps to the above depending your product. The goal is to create a product that will appeal to consumers. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Working through these steps will help you answer the question, “How do you design a product?”.