How would you go about launching a digital product?

So you have a good idea. Its niche. It hasn't been done before. Or has been but you have a better way to do it.

Now what?

The importance of building a good product.

New products have a failure rate of somewhere between?40% and 90%, depending on which source you believe so it is clear that failure is a very real risk when launching a new digital product. It is extremely important to ensure that you build a good product that fits the needs of the target audience in order to maximize its chance of success early on.

The best products prioritise user experience. Your thinking needs to shift from product-oriented thinking to customer-value-oriented thinking. Consider how to build a product, begin by asking the following questions:

• How will your customers use your product?
• What frustrations could they encounter while using it?
• How can you update the product to remove those frustrations and provide a seamless and smooth experience for your customers?

Ultimately, consider that a product is like a living organism. It always changes its own state. Its not static as that can mean stagnant in the business world. The microbiome is always changing in the digital landscape and to survive you must adapt.

Innovation is vital. Without ongoing updates, digital products offer decreasing value to the customer. It is important to target your product precisely to the audience that you expect to use it. To do the targeting successfully, you need data. Invest in customer research, rather than relying on assumptions about how they want to use your digital product.

Test the product. Use the product yourself on a regular basis so you are familiar with its strengths, weaknesses, and pain points. Only by understanding what your audience wants and needs can you build a digital product that delivers satisfaction to them.

Ok fine, this makes sense. But what is product design?

There are five main stages involved in the building of a digital product and you should never be tempted to skip over any of them, or you are likely to end up with a product that is poorly targeted or offers a poor customer experience.

1. Identify product need

The first question to ask yourself is what problem is your digital product going to solve? You need to know who your target audience is and what pain points those people face in their daily lives or work. How will your product address their daily frustrations and make it easier for those people to achieve their goals?

Don't rely on assumptions. Talk to the real people who you expect to be the audience for your digital product. Find out what they are trying to achieve and what barriers they face.

2. Make your product a solution

Once you know what problems your audience is facing, you can design a digital product that provides a solution. In this stage, you don't have to make a perfect product with the world's slickest interface. It simply needs to solve the main problem that your audience faces.

Once you have a usable prototype or?MVP (minimum viable product), it is vital to test it for solution fit. Does it solve the users' problem? Do they get value from it?

3. Test the market demand

Do they need it? What attracts the users to your product. This means that you need to consider competing digital products and work out how you can make your product better than the most popular alternatives. Once you can show that your product provides increased value over its competitors, building and maintaining a user base should be possible, even if the adoption rate is slow at first.

4. Grow your product reach

Once you demonstrate that your product provides value to users, it is time to start scaling up its reach. When you gain more users, it is important to ensure you have enough resources to be able to provide them all with support. If you let the user experience decline at this stage can lead to your digital product getting a poor reputation, which will be very difficult to overcome later on.

5. Digital Innovation

Continue to innovate. Digital products cannot be allowed to stagnate. You have to keep innovating and evolving your product so that it meets the changing needs of your users. Pay attention to the problems your customers are continuing to experience and work out how you can evolve your digital product to address them.

Consider reducing time to market for your product

It is important not to rush the launch, as you must take the time to ensure that it is well-designed and provides a solution to the problems your customers face. However, time to market (TTM) is an important factor to consider in the eventual success of your digital product. Research shows that the first entrant into a new market niche often takes up to?70% of the market share, whereas products that are launched later often end up with much lower user bases.

You can speed up TTM with agile development, allowing you to bring a digital product to market quickly, without compromising on quality or market fit. It is important to always focus on the principles of good digital product design to ensure you end up with a product that gets it right the first time.

Do you have any tips for launching a product? If so please share in the comments.

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