Digital Product Development – Your Complete Step-By-Step Guide

In the digital landscape of the present era, there’s no stopping technological innovations and growth. Businesses are leveraging the potential of modern-day technologies to keep up with the latest demands and trends in the market. As a result, they are more inclined towards developing modern digital products to align with the same.

Businesses tend to hire a proficient product development company to hand them out their projects and put up a requirement for user-centric outputs. However, achieving success in a product development project depends on a lot of things that go into the process. The thumb rule is everything you focus on while developing a product must end up enhancing the user experience.

In this article, you shall get a closer look at every process that goes into developing a new digital product for your business. This will help you plan the best for your product and make it win in the competitive market. So, read along till the end!

What Do You Understand by Digital Product Development?

For you to better understand digital product development, it is a holistic approach that consists of the creation, refinement, and launch of a solution that can enhance the overall user experience. A digital product might be a website, digital service, mobile app, or software. But, the design and development process of these digital solutions demands a specific approach, which goes by:

• Conceptualization
• Designing
• Development
• Testing
• Deployment

When you hire an e-commerce developer to handle your project, they will assign a team of experts to deal with various operational roles to bring your digital solution to life. You will be assigned designers, QA testers, developers, and product managers, who will collaborate and share their expertise to help create proficient products for your business.

They leverage the use of various technologically advanced tools, frameworks, and technologies for turning your ideas into reality. Moreover, your team of experts would also be monitoring the digital product and would collect the market demands and user feedback and improve the features or functionalities.

What are the Steps Involved in the Process of Developing Digital Products?

Have you finally chosen your ideal product development agency from the crowd of options across the internet? If yes, you must know that they will be with you throughout this development journey and make you part of the six crucial steps to complete the process:

Strategy Creation or Ideation

Here, the experts would settle down with your team to discuss the ideas that interest you and align with your business goals. Generate or brainstorm various ideas as a team, and then let yourself explore the sense of creativity to add uniqueness to your digital product. The expert developers or designers you have hired will help you in this quest.

Some of the things you can approach for a better ideation are:

• Run a detailed problem analysis approach, where you will understand the pain points, challenges, or goals of the customers.
• Analyze the benefit structure, where you will get an idea of how the product concept is going to benefit your business and compare multiple options to see what fits best.
• Do a proper SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis for every idea that comes to your mind.

Screening and Research of the Idea

When your ideas are shortlisted and discussed as a team with the outsourced product development experts, it is time to let them initiate detailed research. The professionals would engage themselves in a few activities revolving around the research efforts of the idea, which include:

• They will be running surveys to validate the demand associated with the product idea.
• A PPC ad campaign will also be launched to check if your digital product is gaining attention from the target audience or not and to increase the click-throughs.
• Create a landing page for the digital product to track any on-site behavior.
• Run a competitor analysis to identify any potential gaps or explore the opportunities.

Create a Prototype

It is the first actual development step where the team you hired will start generating visual concepts. You must know that the prototypes are created mostly in two forms: lo-fi and hi-fi. The lo-fi product prototypes come with a very minimalistic layout, interactivity, and navigation. On the other hand, hi-fi prototypes are considered quite sophisticated, with more branding, colors, and interactivity.

Under this step, all the detailed plans associated with the development of the product will be implemented, and the required specifications will be decided on. These specs will highlight the features, technical attributes, and functionalities of the digital product you are about to develop. Some specific user stories will also be created in order to get an idea of how users might interact with the product.

The things that developers would do under this step are:

• Create the basic UI layouts and wireframes.
• Develop visual design mockups.
• Build prototypes to represent the user interactions and flows.
• Run design iteration based on testing and feedback.

Understanding the foundational role of wireframing in this process can greatly enhance your approach to prototyping. For more on this, consider exploring the benefits of wireframing.

Get Along with the Development

It is the actual step where coding is invoked, and the development process begins for your digital product. MVPs (Minimum Viable Products) or prototypes are used to demonstrate the standard functionalities or features. Following that, the developers get along with their process, which includes:

• Set up a detailed technical infrastructure such as databases, development environments, and servers.
• Write code for your front-end UI and back-end logic.
• Implement functionalities and features as per the design or specifications.
• Be open to making timely refinements to make the digital product stand out in the crowd.

Proper Testing & Quality Assurance

The QA team assigned to your project will then take up the digital product and examine it thoroughly for any defects, issues, or bugs. Upon executing this QA analysis, you can ensure that the product is functioning the way it was intended to and provides optimal experience to the users.

Launch or Deploy the Digital Product

Under this step, the developers will configure the servers and prepare the product environment to make it ready for deployment. Experts shall help you create a proper deployment plan that will take note of certain steps or contingencies.

Once everything seems sorted, you can then permit the deployment of the product to a targeted environment, whether it’s the servers, websites, or app stores. The experts shall continue to monitor the app closely over the initial period to detect any potential issues and amend them.

Parting Words

With the right assistance from a product development company, you will be able to create an astoundingly high-performance digital solution for your business to thrive. It might seem like a complex process, but the right team of experts can help break it down into understandable and approachable steps, just as stated above.

The more efficient your new digital product development will be, the better will be the response from the target audience. So, it’s high time you emphasize introducing what’s best for your brand.