An Interactive Guide to Tackling Product Development Barriers

A product design journey can be challenging, barriers are present throughout that can be hard to conquer. Approaching a team of experts can also seem daunting when explaining your ideas and transforming your passions into a product. We understand that these passions are personal and exposing them to a group of people can be one of the hardest hurdles to overcome. Our aim is to build our clients’ confidence up to a point where they feel like they understand key considerations at the start of their journey so that they can navigate their project and desired outcome assuredly. To enable this, we have created four interactive guides covering the topics we believe assemble the backbone of a successful design project.

The first guide to be released focuses on return-on-investment, a topic that is extremely important when justifying the initial cost of a project. Return-on-investment is a financial calculation that can be used to determine whether your project is commercially viable. The guide includes useful tips; a straightforward and easy to use calculation; examples of how to use this calculation; and an interactive section to calculate your own results. The aim of this guide is to enable our clients to see the ‘bigger picture’ when initially investing.

The second guide centres around how to create a project brief. Establishing your project brief is a crucial starting part when embarking on your product design journey. It is an effective way of communicating your ideas, which helps generate a solid understanding of what it is you want to achieve, and the processes used to reach this end goal. We have broken down these processes into four stages that include: product placement; audience; cost; and time. This guide includes questions you should be asking yourself, in relation to each stage, to help you develop a deeper understanding of what is needed to be considered when developing a product.

The third guide focuses on generating an understanding of intellectual property. Intellectual property is, in a literal sense, property of the mind and can be claimed as your own. There are four types of intellectual property the guide highlights, this includes: copyright; registered design; patent; and trademark. This guide provides an in-depth description into these different types of intellectual property and explains what each one protects. All four do not necessarily need protecting, deciding what intellectual property you want to protect comes down to what works best for your business. There is also an interactive section in the guide that explains how to search for features of existing products that have already been protected, to ensure infringement is avoided.

The final guide created focuses on understanding your target audience. Through determining your target audience and then recognising a problem this audience faces, you can start to develop your product successfully and use this knowledge to inform design decisions. The stages used when understanding your target audience include recognising a problem; customer insight; and learning from your competitors. This guide also has an interactive section where you can record the data collected.

We hope these guides are helpful and build upon your ambition to develop a new product. They can be found via our website and subscribers to our newsletter receive exclusive excess.

DECEMBER 13, 2021BY LM