Building and releasing a new product is one of the most exciting things that a business can do in the long term. Not only will you be able to call this product your own, but you’ll be able to show your clients and customers that you’re a business that’s developing, innovating, and learning as you go.

This vitality, along with the sales boost that your new product will catalyze, will help your business grow into the future. But a new product takes planning to get into the market and that’s where the below tips come in.

Brainstorm

If you’ve decided at the executive level that you should develop a new product for your business, it’s time to get some heads together around a table, or on a video chat, to talk about how you can best serve your customers. Some of the questions that you should be asking involve:

• How much time it might take to develop a new product
• The budget you’ll put in place for the product development
• The expected return on your investment of time and cash
• Whether your product will fit into your existing market or expand your market reach
• How much of your new product you might expect to sell in the first year of its release

This brainstorm is the initial part of your journey towards creating a new product and it’s a stage that you should relish and dwell upon before you make decisions pertaining to the future of your product.

Setting a Roadmap

Once you’ve come up with a plan and your executive team agree that this plan will help you to build better business in the months and years ahead, it’s time to set the roadmap. Put simply, a roadmap will help you plan the stages of the product development, outlining the objectives you’re setting, and the timescale you feel is appropriate for those goals.

Importantly, you’ll be able to map this on one of dozens of product roadmap tools, helping your team understand the priorities in the weeks ahead. You can also use a counter to count down the days until launch and tally up the sales post-launch.

Collaboration

New products are best developed when you’re managing collaboration well within your firm. Your product development teams will need to communicate with your finance teams to get the funding and investment that they need. Your marketing team and sales teams will need to know when they’re to push the product to customers.

And, meanwhile, you are going to need to ensure that your roadmap is being adhered to as closely as possible to get your product to market without any delays. This means chasing leads, ensuring that your teams are working as hard as they can, and motivating different individuals to get your product closer to launch day. Make sure you plan an appropriate launch day reward for your workers after all their hard work.

There you have it — three simple things to keep in mind when you’re planning a new product for launch this year.