Customer expectations and supply chain pressure are pushing global enterprises, small businesses, and product design firms to design and bring end products to the market faster than ever before.
That process can be difficult. In fact, research shows that only 55% of products manufactured get to the market on time or faster than expected, while 45% do not. These statistics show that there are innovative companies that have found a way to bring products to market faster.
What’s their secret? Stick with us to learn how they achieve their success in faster market launches.
Why product design accelerates go-to-market speed
One way innovative companies ensure they bring products to market faster is by prioritizing their industrial product design. This involves a process where designers create and develop specifications and concepts, which optimize the value, function, and appearance of products.
What’s more, the product design does the following:
- Lays the groundwork for faster launches, as it reduces the risk of uncertainty and rework.
- Minimize costly revisions.
- Ensures companies can find issues with their product before development starts.
- Enables teams to build efficiently.
- Ensure cross-functional feedback, which helps to cut down iteration loops and facilitate faster market-fit launches.
- Reduce the chances of post-product launch redesign.
For businesses aiming to shorten development timelines without compromising quality, partnering with an experienced industrial product design firm, such as MMID, is a strategic move. These firms have years of experience and use a proven, structured risk-focused design methodology, which ensures that companies are better-positioned to move efficiently towards market-ready products without compromising quality.
Turning ideas into executable business plans
Innovative companies move quickly by transforming ideas into actionable success plans. They do that by asking questions, such as:
- How will this product operate?
- What are the target markets for this product?
- Why will the primary customers want to use the products we produce?
- How affordable is the product? How practical is it?
- Is it easy to manufacture?
- Where is the best place to manufacture the product?
- Is it something new in the market?
Once they answer the above questions, they go ahead to test their idea by building a minimum viable prototype (MVP). This helps them to:
- Test assumptions
- Engage with early users and get feedback from them, which the companies use as evidence for decision-making.
- Create executable business plans.
Aligning teams across engineering and operations
The speed of moving products to market faster improves when engineering, operations, and product teams work in sync from the very start. Innovative companies have mastered this.
They do that by:
- Using agile frameworks, such as SCRUM, which unifies engineering and operations, and eliminates silos that delay launches.
- Using shared tools, like Jira. These tools facilitate effective issue tracking, project management, ensure seamless handovers, and, what’s more, they reduce miscommunication by up to 50%
Reducing delays in product development cycles
Another incredible thing about innovative companies is that they have found a way to reduce details in product development cycles. How? Well, they mainly do that by using continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) automated testing, which reduces development cycles by automating testing and deployment.
Competing in fast-moving innovation markets
In addition to the above, innovative companies tend to achieve success even when they compete in the fast-moving innovation markets. That’s because they:
- Launch faster, which ensures they capture attention quickly.
- Validate demand
- Iterate ahead of their competitors.
- Conduct continuous A/B testing in order to ensure they’re ahead of their competitors.
- Adapt to changes more quickly than their competitors.