Developing a product can be tedious and repetitive — but it can also turn into a thrilling and profitable venture. The biggest fear, though, is that you’ll make a product that the market will reject.
Truth be told, that’s what happens to most products. So, how do you get around wasting time and funds investing in a product that won’t succeed? And even more importantly — how do you get a well-developed product?
All of this depends on your product development process.
Do it right, and you’ll know you’ve developed a top-notch product. Ignore the steps, and your grand idea might become just a scrolled-past ad.
So how do you avoid this? Let’s see what the product development process is, its stages, and some tips you can use to make your product truly shine.

Table of Contents
What is the product development process?
The product development process covers all the steps that will take a product from an idea to its launch on the market.
Thinking up an idea for a product is simple enough — a couple of brainstorming sessions can have you thinking you got the golden egg. However, that’s rarely the case.
The road to a successful market launch is costly and time-consuming. You want to do it right because odds are, you won’t be able to do it again.
That’s why the product development process involves researching and validating your product over and over again. The primary goal is to ensure the quality of the end result.
Product development vs. product management
The most important distinction between the two is that product development ends when a product gets launched, while product management covers the whole product life cycle.
More accurately, both start at the ideation stage, but product management continues even after launch — it encompasses marketing, future improvements and updates, and much more.
That said, both of these processes are spearheaded by a product manager.
💡Plaky Pro Tip
If you want to learn more about product management and see how it differs from project management, check out this useful article:
Who is involved in product development?
The product manager is in charge of the product development process. However, it takes a whole team to make a successful product.
This team would usually be divided into several departments, including:
- Project management — Project managers handle individual teams, following the product manager’s vision and making sure all project deliverables are met. They also determine specific task delegation and enable cross-functional collaboration.
- Finance — The financial department determines the distribution of financial resources, creates a cost management plan, and makes sure you can afford everything you want to make.
- Development — Developers make the actual product. Most commonly, this refers to IT development. They’ll make your MVP (minimum viable product) and every other iteration, and work closely with the design and testing departments.
- Design — Designers create the product design concept. This department will make sure that the visual language of the product aligns with your brand image.
- Marketing — Your marketing department leads the marketing campaign and makes sure that the product launch is well received. They’ll track customer feedback and measure the product’s success.
- Sales — Even before the launch, the sales department will have their hands full. They’ll come up with a sales strategy and perhaps even contact early adopters (more on them later) for preorders.
- Testing — Quality testers will make sure that the product is working as intended and report any errors or areas of improvement back to the development team.
The 6 stages of the product development process
Product development involves many people and many moving parts, so it’s frustrating to have no idea where to start — or even an idea for your product.
As with any complicated process, we can divide product development into 6 actionable stages:
- Ideation,
- Definition,
- Creating an MVP,
- Iteration,
- Testing and sourcing, and
- Launch.
Stage #1: Ideation
You probably think this stage involves lots of brainstorming sessions — and indeed it does.
However, be careful not to get swayed by product ideas that have randomly occurred to you. Use the results of informed research as the starting point for these brainstorming sessions.
When thinking of a product, you need to mind a few key factors from the project environment:
- Market — Who will be using your product? Do they actually need it? Talk to potential customers, focus on the issues your product can fix, and try to find their pain points. Who are your early adopters — the customer profile most likely to buy your product first?
- Competitors — Is the market full of competitors? Are their current customers satisfied with their products? What pain points do they have that the competitor’s products don’t address?
- SWOT analysis — What are your product’s strengths and weaknesses? How can you take advantage of opportunities, and how can you minimize threats?
By the end of this analysis, you want to have a complete customer profile — and most importantly, a breakdown of their problems. You need to empathize with your customers for this stage to be effective.
The next step is to outline how your product will solve these problems and consider your competitive advantage. In one sentence, you should be able to state how your product solves a problem, and why it’s a better solution than your competitors’.
💡Plaky Pro Tip
If you want to be more in tune with your customers, check out this article:
Stage #2: Definition
Now that you’ve confirmed that the idea is market-viable, it’s time to see if you have the resources, expertise, and time to handle it.
In this stage, you want to focus on:
- Cost analysis — How much will it cost to produce the product? Who will you have to pay during development, and after? What materials do you need?
- Revenue analysis — How will you profit from the product? Will it be subscription-based, or a one-time purchase? Can you establish multiple revenue streams?
- Marketing strategy — Which marketing channels should you use to get to your customers? You need to start marketing plans early because a determined brand identity gives your design and development teams an idea of what the product should look and feel like.
- Success metrics — Determine key performance indicators (KPIs) that you’ll use to track the success of your product. Maybe it’s the number of paid subscriptions, or something even simpler, like the number of downloads or products bought.
Pro tip — if, at any point during the first 2 stages, you notice that your idea isn’t viable, waste no time! Bin it and restart. Sifting through ideas like this will pay off.
In the end, you’ll have a developed idea that you firmly believe in. After that, all that’s left is to go through the other 4 stages.
Track your project’s success in PlakyStage #3: Creating an MVP
A minimum viable product (MVP) is the version of your product with just the bare necessities it needs to function.
Say you’re making a communication app — your MVP would just be chat boxes with different users you can add. Image sharing, stickers, stories — all of that is nice, but not necessary.
You use the MVP for 2 reasons:
- To finalize the test of validity for your product — Do people actually need a communication app?
- To make further rollouts and the launch of the full version easier — The framework has already been built.
After the MVP is done, you can plan further development. Above all, you need to delegate tasks, create a project timeline, and complete your marketing plan.
Make use of Plaky’s marketing strategy templateStage #4: Iteratation
Once you’ve rolled out the MVP, your early adopters will most likely — well — adopt it. Mind their reactions carefully, as they’ll give you the perfect insight for this stage in the product development life cycle.
The design team will finalize the visual language for the product, aligning it with your business goals and brand image.
Next, the development team will start their work on the product. This will be done in iterations.
It goes like this: the team will develop a feature, and then the key project stakeholders and the testing team will review it. Combined with that and user feedback, the development team will create a new, better version. And so on, until they reach a finalized product.
With this cyclical type of work, you might want to implement an Agile framework — like Kanban — during development.

Stage #5: Testing and sourcing
Minor testing is done during iterations, but after you complete the final product, it’s time for rigorous testing. You need to be sure that every aspect of the product works as intended before you launch it on the market.
If you’re creating an app, the testing will involve front-end and back-end testing, checking for errors, bug tracking, etc. If it’s a physical product, it depends — but it could include stress testing or quality testing — like making sure that a fillet knife is flexible enough or that it won’t break under expected pressure. Either way, the development team should fix issues as they arise in testing.
Sourcing, on the other hand, involves getting the materials you need to produce the product. For physical products, this is obvious — it can be as simple as buying wooden planks or as difficult as getting a diamond. But even for software, you might need to outsource or acquire servers.
Keep in mind that sourcing doesn’t just come from outside vendors — you can also make materials in-house. So, make sure to mind your materials and track your inventory.
Stage #6: Launch
And finally, you can make the finished product fully available on the market. But, that doesn’t mean the work is over.
It’s time for the teams who’ve been planning up until now to fully implement their strategies, including:
- Marketing — The marketing team will use the channels they’ve determined are best to start their campaign. Whether it’s social media posts or billboards, it’s important that they reach the right audience.
- Sales — Your sales team will implement their strategy by reaching out to users, vendors, etc. Make sure to determine the right price for your product before the sales team starts their work — even small price changes can lose you plenty of customers.
- Customer support — You should set up a customer support team that’ll answer important questions and deal with customer issues. This will boost loyalty in your customers and further affirm that you understand the problems that your product is trying to solve.
With that, the product development process is done.
However, product management needs to keep going. You need to measure project success and use that knowledge to further improve your product in the future — or just create new and better products.
How to measure success in product development
When you create a product, you’ll get plenty of reactions to every single feature it has. However, we’re not sure that “no itchiness of the back tag” on your shirt is a good indicator of success.
So, what is?
What you’ll focus on will vary from product to product, of course, but how you measure success stays the same. So, pay mind to:
- KPIs — The KPIs you determined in the second stage of the product development process are your bread and butter. You can use both product-focused metrics — like the number of products sold — or development-focused metrics — like iteration cycle length.
- Customer issues — During idea generation, you determined the key problems of your target audience. How well did your product solve those problems? Track your customer feedback through customer support data, reviews, or sales team reports.
- Competitor analysis — Have your competitors tried to imitate or outdo your innovation? If the answer is yes, you’re on the right track — keep innovating!
💡Plaky Pro Tip
If you want to learn more about project evaluation and measuring success, check out this awesome article:
Top 3 expert tips for an effective product development process
The road of product development is full of obstacles, so here are some tips we’ve gathered to help you along the way.
Tip #1: Focus on the pain points
Your product is made for your customers — so they should be your focus during development.
We spoke to Firdaus Sateem, an expert with over 6 years of marketing and SEO experience, who says that the best products focus on the customers’ challenges and pain points:

“Focus on developing solutions that solve those problems directly. This will ensure your product is both valuable and highly relevant for them.
I’ve seen that prioritizing what users truly need saves time and resources. It also leads to stronger engagement and loyalty. Don’t try to do everything at once. Start small and scale over time based on user feedback.”
Creating an MVP also ensures that your product effectively and directly solves your customers’ issues.
That’s why it’s so important to have the development plan outlined — you need to be able to implement the feedback that comes from the MVP user base.

“Any product that solves a real problem will always stand out and stick to simplicity while maintaining user focus leads directly to success.”
Tip #2: Gather a competent team
Your team is the cornerstone of your product’s development. So, you need to build a strong, competent team if you want the end result to be a success.
During ideation, take note of the skills you need from your team to complete that product. Do you need to develop an app? Get the right IT experts. Is the app a mobile game? Get level developers and the right designers.
On the other hand, if your product is a self-watering flower pot, get botany experts.
This doesn’t just apply to the development process itself. For instance, if your marketing channels don’t involve a blog, you probably won’t need more than one SEO expert.
Tip #3: Strategize around risks
No venture is without hurdles, so even with product development, you need a great sense of risk management.
We talked to Saee Pansare, a product manager with 6 years of experience, who thinks that you should always have a strategy for dealing with risks:

“Go through the stakeholder list, customer problems, selling problems, etc., to anticipate the biggest risks involved in making the product a success. Then create a plan to mitigate those risks. Every product and industry is different, and it is up to the working team to assess the long poles and to manage them efficiently.”
When creating a plan to mitigate risk, consult with the appropriate departments and team members. Work with them to create the right contingencies, in case the risks do pop up.
Develop your products easily with Plaky
Iterating on a product is great for achieving success — but it can also lead to an endless loop of improving, adding, and ultimately creating an unnecessarily complex product.
Not to mention that no one has the time or the funds for that!
Luckily, you can keep your teams focused on one goal with Plaky — our project management software.
To keep your goals and product development direction clear, you must create a product roadmap.
Instead of creating a roadmap in classic spreadsheets like Excel, which are clunky and not suitable for project management — you can create and manage a product roadmap directly in Plaky.
If you need help getting started, just use our product roadmap template and get right into the action.
Get our product roadmap templateAlternatively, create your own roadmap from scratch and make use of Plaky’s:
- Fully customizable fields, which should cater to all your product development needs,
- Summary row feature, which helps you track progress and measure success, and
- Gantt view, which will make sure your product development timeline is on point.

Thanks to Plaky’s clear and simple collaboration features, your team will also stay aligned while tackling tasks left and right.
For example, testing and development teams can communicate, solve tasks more efficiently, and share feedback with the whole team within comments. Knowing the progress on their tasks can greatly help marketing and sales teams develop their campaigns too!

And if the process of product development seems too complicated to fit into a Plaky board — no worries! As part of Plaky’s paid plans, your organization may qualify for a dedicated success representative, who’ll provide personal consultations to help you get the most out of our app!
Don’t let the complexity of development stop you from making a great product. Sign up for a free Plaky account today!
Get started with Plaky