A product engineer takes the role of programming and development for a product. They work with the product manager (PM) and UX (user experience) team to create a product that meets specific need of users. Product development involves a Product Manager, UI/UX designers, and product engineers. The entire development process involves thorough collaboration among the three teams.   

The task of a product engineer is to build the product. However, before beginning to code, they have to define the technical architecture of the product, the infrastructure it will run on, decide on a programming language that’s suits the product best, an appropriate database, etc. The technical specifications need approval from the project manager. Here’s a list of tasks that a product engineer performs during product development:  

1. Documenting the initial idea and goal of the product.  

2. Creating a pipeline for product development.  

3. Developing the product/writing code.  

4. Multiple iterations of product testing.  

5. Reviewing the product and releasing it.  

6. Upgrading and redevelopment to let the product evolve.  

We know that a product engineer does not work in silos. A team is at work with a product manager acting as a catalyst to transfer knowledge about the project and a designer/ team of designers sharing design ideas for the product. Once the design is finalised, the product engineer is responsible for the engineering delivery. They think about the technical strategy, integration architecture, engineering standards, and best practices while writing code to deliver quality software. 

Here are a few benefits of having a product engineer on board: 

• There’s a clear roadmap for successful product development. 
• A product engineer can pre-plan the strategies to appropriately handle the development process. 
• And use product engineering methods to deliver best-in-class product functionalities. 

Building a product is about providing value to the end user. To build a product that adds value to people’s lives, the team must think beyond technicalities. They must build something meaningful and easy to use. This is the reason why multiple experts are involved in understanding the market need for the product and delivering quality solutions. A team that has a product manager, product designers, and product engineers is responsible for transforming ideas into reality. Hence, good coordination is expected amongst the experts involved in product development while performing their tasks independently.

Launching a new product is all about hitting the right buttons in a customer to motivate them to purchase your product. Today, customers don’t seek a representative to boast about a product. They have the power, choice, and resources to make purchase decisions even from the comforts of their home, by clicking a few buttons. 

Customers take referrals from friends, families, and even influencers, before buying a product. Your product must fulfil their requirement like no other to make it to their preference list. You must know what complements the customer research, shopping ideas, and purchase habits. It requires a lot of effort to understand your customers deeply. You must know your potential customer, specific markets, and how you can influence them to make purchase decisions in your favor. Without research, you may develop a product that doesn’t measure up to the user expectations. If users don’t like it, they know their way out of unfavorable items. 

What is market research? 

Market research means collecting information about the specific market to know if your product can compete. You can verify the product’s success and how to draw more customers to utilize it. Thorough research will help you understand the market / potential customers and how to deliver them value. Once you know how to deliver value to customers, you can build strategies around your ‘how?’.  

Why is market research crucial before launching a new product? 

Market research is important for several reasons. It can make your product a big success. Let’s take a look at a few of the reasons why you can’t skip market research before a new product launch: 

• It helps you know your customers and their pain points. 

• When you are specific about which pain point you can resolve for which category of audience, it can draw a larger audience than your competitors. 

• You can gather information about unaddressed customer needs and turn them into selling opportunities. 

• It gives you information on what’s trending in the industry and among your potential buyers. 

• You will know whether there’s demand for the product or service you are investing in. 

• Market research helps you scrutinize where your current and potential customers research for products. 

• You may be able to influence customers to make purchase decisions. 

• You can learn about customer attitude about pricing, brand, etc. of a product. 

• With all the information, you can create a product that naturally appeals to them. 

• The market research also helps you meet the buyer where they are and simplify their purchase experience. 

How to conduct market research before a new product launch?  

Primary Research – It helps to gather first-hand information from your potential customers. Here’s how to do it: 

• To conduct market research, you must first know your target. Be specific about your target audience based on age, gender, location, job title, etc., depending on your offerings.  

• Now, look for the right people to engage with. Access people through networks, social media, and an active customer base. Always plan an incentive for the participants as they are offering you some valuable information. 

• Prepare a questionnaire to learn about them. Your questionnaire can be specific about resolving an identified problem. Your questionnaire can also be open-ended around potential problem that people haven’t identified yet. 

• Keep the records safe to get back to whenever necessary. 

Secondary Research – Secondary research helps analyze your competitors. 

• You can use the public resources provided by the government. 

• You can also use the commercial reports that come in a portable and distributable format by paying them a cost to download the information. 

• You can also utilize the market data your organization has internally. 

• It can help you build a good understanding of your competitors and how you can do better than them. 

Market research offers critical pieces of information that lead to the success of your product. It’s an inevitable step for a successful products launch. 

Product designing can be nerve-wracking for the challenges it brings. How well you approach users’ problems and the value you bring to the table decides the market competition for your product. A wrong idea can plummet down sales for your brand, so you need to watch out for the risks involved. 

We will talk about some famous product design failures and why they failed: 

Google Glass 

The device stirred up the market with its appearance in 2012. It was seen as the future of AI, in which users could command the device and get relevant information displayed on the glass screen. However, people were unwilling to overlook the flaws. There were many health and safety concerns, which made Google Glass a miserable failure. 

• People could exploit Google Glass to intervene someone’s privacy. The device could take photos and videos of people without prior information. 
• Carcinogenic radiation from the device was harmful and one could only use it when kept in contact with the forehead. Prolonged exposure to carcinogenic radiation could cause skin cancer. 
• The device was unappealing and felt more like a prototype than a final product. 

Facebook Home 

Facebook Home was released in 2013, and could change the entire look and feel of its users’ phones. It acted like a Facebook wrapper on a phone’s home screen, displaying status updates and photos from friends. A user could like the content they wished from their home screen. Within a month of launch, the Facebook Home saw a dip in popularity index. The reasons were: 

• An app that continuously displayed status updates and photos was a distraction. 
• It consumed heavy data to show updates. 
• Facebook Home hid other apps with its menu beneath. 
• It was compatible with only a handful of devices. 

Although it had over a million downloads, Facebook Home could only procure 2-star ratings and a trail of negative reviews. 

Microsoft Zune 

Microsoft Zune, a 2006 competitor of iPod, was a big failure because it entered the market late, yet didn’t deploy any new features. The product could have drawn more attention if it addressed the downsides of the iPod. Instead, Zune only stood as a similar product in the market with nothing innovative, hence short-lived. The reasons why it failed were: 

• No feature set it apart from iPod. 
• Users already placed their trust in iPod, and without any new feature, Zune couldn’t broaden user preferences. A wider perception developed that Zune was not a good product when compared with iPod. 
• It was not marketed to a broader audience and failed to draw attention. 

Apple Newton 

Apple Newton’s killer feature was to recognise handwriting besides taking notes, storing contacts, and managing calendars. While we only remember the products that captured the attention of the masses, there were innovations by Apple that failed, and Newton was one of them. Steve Jobs himself hated the product for its low performance. The reasons why the product’s sale couldn’t take off were: 

• As the news of the product launch spread, competitive devices were planned, which shortened the timeline for Newton’s launch and Apple launched an incomplete product. 
• It only offered 140kb of storage, which could be expanded with 1MB, 2MB, and 4MB flashcards. 
• The device had handwriting recognition as its main feature, which worked poorly. 
• Despite the bugs, the device models were not affordable. The senior model cost $5000, a mid-size model cost $2000 approx., and the junior cost $500. 

As the experience was not so promising, the sales for Newton bombed. 

Key takeaways for product designers from the failures of tech giants 

• A product should resolve users’ problems and not complicate their lives posing health and security risks. 
• Unappealing product designs fail to attract users in the long run. Even if the design is minimalistic, it should not look like a prototype that still needs to evolve. 
• A product must serve a purpose or solve a problem, such as providing knowledge, counselling, entertaining, building a skill, meeting a daily requirement, etc. However, it should not become a distraction or hindrance for performing the other essential tasks. Users should be in control of when they want to use a product. 
• In this growing digital age, products must be created for diverse audiences and not limited to a few. 

• You can only shift users’ interest in your product when it is unique. A copy of an existing idea with no novel features cannot help you build consumer trust. 
• Product planning is crucial to undergo multiple user tests before launching. A rushed process may lead to a faulty product with bugs, which will take down the sales sooner than you expect. 
• Consumers are willing to pay more for a trusted brand, however, the product should fulfil the promises. Else, you might have to kill off the product line. 

A skilled product designer understands such challenges and helps design a practical product that users like. Every product that has made its success in the market involved critical thinking keeping the end-user in mind. 

Product development includes ideation, development roadmap, time-bound milestones, designing, marketing, and more. It is a step-by-step process to manifest an idea into a product. Often, product development is misunderstood for product engineering. Wrong terminologies can result in miscommunication and aggravate risks in the development lifecycle. Let’s learn the difference between the two – product development and product engineering. 

What is product development? 

Product development is the process that begins with discovering a new idea to launching it as a product. It calls for step-by-step planning to avoid imperiling resources. The different phases of product development are: 

1. Discovery or ideation 

There are two ways to conduct product discovery: 

Inductive methods – An already existing idea/product is improved here. It involves data collection to find the shortfalls of competitive products and create a new product without those shortfalls. 

Deductive discovery – A team introduces an original idea. The solutions must solve a task for its users when nobody else has made such an approach. 

2. Defining the minimum viable product 

A minimum viable product (MVP) must have the core deliverables or features so that it can be rolled out to users for quality feedback. It is created by keeping open discussions with the product development team to define achievable objectives for everyone. The set of steps must be such that it doesn’t require much capital. 

3. Product designing 

A MVP is an optimal solution planned for users. Once you objectively plan your deliverables, it’s time to design the concept. The designers will come in strong here and design the user navigation journey across the product. Infographics and screen images are used to replicate this journey. It will include all the features (and their design) that you plan on having in the product. 

4. Implementing the design 

After designing, the project manager prioritizes product specifications and assigns tasks to developers and engineers. The development runs according to the priority order of specifications, followed by functionality testing. 

5.  Marketing 

Marketing must start early in the lifecycle a product so that you can reach maximum people by the product launch. A campaign with a straightforward message keeps the target audience informed about your deliverables. However, refrain from overpromising your audience about the unique features. You may talk about improved features instead. In case there are some entirely new features in your product, you may also consider training before launch. 

6.  Launch 

The last (although not the final) step is to release it in the market. 

This entire six-phase process is known as product development, which doesn’t stop here, a project manager continually evaluates: 

• To keep/improve/remove existing features. 

• Additions to improve the product. 
• How to reach more audience. Etc. 

What is product engineering? 

In the above process of product development, steps three and four fall under product engineering. It is the process of manufacturing or developing the product and testing its functionality. Without engineering, an idea cannot come to fruition. Engineers bring an idea on paper to reality. However, engineers can only work when a project head or manager specifies tasks. Therefore, the two concepts are interconnected. 

Here’s a quick comparison to look at: 

Both product development and product engineering are crucial to creating a successful product. However, remember the difference between the two to avoid using the terms interchangeably.

Facing the least market competition is every product developer’s dream. However, the competition is tough today as we live in an era where the tech evolution will reshape each product by 2030. Not knowing how to conceptualize your product and prepare for the market can be detrimental. Today, we will consider a few product development risks, if taken care of, can help to create a successful product. 

Here are some product development risks to keep in mind: 

1. Not planning enough – Let’s take the example of a mobile application. Apps that appear simple and minimalistic stand on the pillars of exceptional planning and hard work. It’s a misnomer that simple-to-use apps are also simple to develop and can be accomplished without much planning. For any kind of product development, you must assess your goals, and then map out a plan to achieve them. It will lower the potential risks of product failure. 

2. Working in a silos – When working on a new concept, it is best to share your idea with relevant departments of your firm. Each one can offer helpful feedback, such as the developer team may also come up with new widgets that can add appeal to your product. 

3. Not defining the minimum viable product (MVP) – Rolling out the first working prototype of a product with the basic minimum features is a good way of getting feedback from early customers. Let’s take the example of an app – by keeping a set of clear deliverables in a MVP you can avoid additional coding in the initial stages. It is usually recommended that you expand the product only after gauging user interest and engagement in the category via a MVP. 

4. Not sticking to a well-defined MVP – Once the minimum deliverables are set, focus on gauging the user engagement. Including any additional feature will only invite costs and time. Set a clear focus on the problem you are addressing through the product and how you can solve it with minimum features. 

5. Not creating a team for product development – Identifying your team makes the product development cycle a seamless one. People tend to miss on it, paving their way to product failures. You must have a team for the development process with who you can have brainstorming sessions and sounding board meetings. If the in-house team is not adept at the latest technologies, you may want to plan on outsourcing some work or augmenting your staff. To bring an idea to life, you need dependable and skilled talents. 

6. Not creating a beta version and trying to implement all features in one go – Your product may have only a few hundred users in the initial stages. Instead of including all the features at once, you can include core features first and eventually include other features as your client base increases. Also, implementing all the features may delay the launch. You can create multiple beta versions to see which one gets the maximum engagement. Based on your observations, you may proceed with the development process. 

7. Not considering a marketing approach – Not having a marketing plan at the right time can result in fewer users at the time of product launch. This is not exactly a risk to the product but right kind of branding and marketing can get information about your product out in the market. The marketing team can popularise your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) and promote it on different platforms.  

8. Not learning from user feedback – This can keep you from improving your product. Ideally, most of the decisions in product development are user-driven. You are helping users solve a problem; therefore, it is your job to offer them a seamless experience when using it. It is best to constantly take feedback from prospective users and keep improving the product. Resolving one negative feedback can solve the problems for other existing and potential users. 

9. Trying to satisfy all users may kill your business – You can avoid the risk by taking balanced decisions. Understand that meeting every user’s demand is not possible. If you are using the latest technology, applying the right techniques, receiving positive feedback from most, do not worry! Keep strengthening your brand. 

10. Not planning customer support – Firms that do not plan on customer support may lose their users and market reputation. Unattended users become the source of negative popularity. Whether you have a few users or in millions, treat everyone with care. You can provide them with a support email and look to resolve issues privately. 

The product development cycle is continuously evolving; overlooking any of the mentioned risks can significantly decrease chances of success for your product. A sorted plan, clear communication, and timely decision-making can save you from pitfalls.