How $25 could help you save $5000?

Investing a lot of money for advertising a product without proper research on marketing and customer requirements is a peril. In this blog, we will discuss how to be proactive in the process of building a good product in the most effective way and marketing it without wasting time, effort and money.

“Don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers”

-Seth Godin

Before we get down on how to build a product is that is a definite success and we need to understand what the pitfalls of building a product development are.

How did products fail?

1.Developing products based on competitor’s success without proper insight and purpose:

Many companies launch products based on successful ideas of the competitor without analyzing whether it is really significant to develop a feature similar to it. This doesn’t draw the attention of customers.

For example, Google+ was developed as a competition to Facebook. Though the large extent of people uses Gmail, they are not active on Google+. Whereas Facebook is still consistent with their success. So It is important to analyze your resources and choose an appropriate competitor.

2.Without proper marketing research:

Products should be developed based on customer requirements if not, then it becomes pointless because customers won’t buy it if they don’t require it.

To start with, You need to decide your customers whose needs you are going to fulfill and what problem you are going to solve for them and the solution shouldn’t be an expedient solution which solves the problem only for a short term. This is the foundation of developing a product and highly effective to build a successful product.

3.Designing Bias:

Biases are common occurrences, if it is not confronted, it creates a negative impact on the product. During design reviews, there may be criticism which might seem nonconstructive, but ignoring it will make your product less effective or it can even become a failure. It becomes important to look into the feedback and see for deeper issues it might indicate.

Outcome bias is defined as evaluating the decisions made after obtaining the result. It must be thoroughly analyzed to get successful outcomes and to make better decisions in the future. Oversight of outcome bias leads to wrong decision making which ends up with the failed outcome.

4.Product testing failure:

Testing failure occurs due to mistakes in the requirements specification, design implementation. Products fail the test when it is developed without a clear understanding of the requirements and malfunction of the resources used. Inadequate knowledge of the tester to test the product can also result in failure.

A real-time example of testing failure: In 2016, British** **Airways developed a new global check-in system which faced 5 major computer outages between the months of May and September, resulting in thousand flights canceled or delayed. Cumulative stock market loss of 92.9 billion

5.Marketing strategy:

Marketing in today’s world is the biggest challenge as thousand different companies compete to sell products in a similar domain, so it requires a lot of effort to catch the customers’ attention. Marketing strategy fails when you don’t identify your target audience or when you fail to fulfill user requirements. If there is no clear marketing strategy, money invested in promotion and marketing campaigns can bring down the overall financial level of the company.

Example of failed marketing strategy: HP Touchpad tablet failed miserably because they did not choose a proper target audience and didn’t follow the current marketing trend. HP touchpad could have been a successful product if it accepted android which is the highly used OS among people. Failure of Touchpad, HP wrote off $855 million in assets and incurred an additional $755 million in costs to wind down its WebOS operations.

How feedback helps to overcome all these challenges:

All the above mentioned hard challenges can be easily retorted with Feedback. Starting from creating an idea for a new product lunch to selling it to the customers, feedback is the only tool that paves a potent way to success. Getting continued feedback from customers at every phase of product development will help you easily rectify errors, make changes, improvise and will fetch you with higher success and can forestall financial loss.