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Ways to Stay Innovative in Today's Economy: Product Development during the Recession

Focus on the key products in your product line up and shelve the rest. To prioritize, spend time looking in two very different areas: your target users and your individual product's time to market. First, deepen your understanding of and empathy for your users. What do they value? Which are the most compelling unmet needs that you can fill? Second, analyze which products in your line up have the quickest time to market. Then, take both into account and weight them appropriately. Create a decision matrix that allows you to consider and weigh each criterion for your company's unique needs. This will allow you an objective method for getting products that resonate with users to market quickly. Whatever you do, do not sacrifice early product research and design. This is a more important time than ever to make sure that your product meets an existing need. Otherwise, it will fall dead in the water. While there is never any guarantee of a product's success, keeping user needs at the forefront of the decision process increases the odds of success dramatically.

Expand your definition of "customer." The days for traditional market demographics based solely on age, gender, race, and socio-economic status are gone. Industries that are remaining successful are looking at deeper values and other lifestyle factors that drive customer loyalty. People's underlying values-including eco-friendly living, status-seeking, social liberalism or fiscal conservatism-cross traditional demographic lines and point to deep-seated purchase drivers. They can be key indicators to product resonance and customer loyalty. It is also important to expand your definition of customer to include stakeholders. Stakeholders can have a deep impact on a products success. They could include business partners, manufacturers, regulatory agencies, your sales channel, or employees to name a few. Often a product has two to three different user "groups"-each with competing needs that must be taken into account and balanced effectively.

Designing before you build seems like a straightforward concept. When it comes to building cars or houses, this is the exact process that is followed. However, too often software and services companies skip over this step-or do it in parallel with development. While at face value, this may look like it compresses your time to market, it actually causes long and expensive delays. It can lead to complicated bug fixes much later in the development cycle, with deep impacts on time to market. It also dramatically increases your chances of releasing a product with a design that is not intuitive or usable for your customers.

Product development driven by features lists has much less chance of hitting the mark than one driven by the user experiences you want to enable. While this might seem like an issue of semantics, it actually has deep and lasting impacts on your product development process. When you shift the conversations from "the product should have X" to "users should be able to do Y", the approach of the entire team, from marketing to design to engineering, shifts to include an understanding of the customer. Moving from features to experiences also allows for the flexibility required to innovate mid-stream. It frees up team members at each stage to make decisions that expedite the product development timeline because they understand the underlying goals of the product, rather than just a grocery list of their responsibilities. It also increases the chances that decisions won't be made during implementation that jeopardize the original intended design of the product-ensuring that what you get at the end is what you paid for at the beginning.

Getting the right design to market as quickly and inexpensively as possible is always important. Right now, it can be imperative to a company's survival. Developing low fidelity prototypes of product concepts early can help you accelerate decisions about the experiences you are trying to enable and the gaps that your product will address. Don't wait until a product has a highly functioning prototype. Low fidelity, quick user tests can help you understand usability but also how the overall features and value propositions resonate with your target audience when there is still time to make changes with little impact to time or budget. And remember, your users are your stakeholders, too. Show things to them early in the process as well. Innovation is fueled by participatory design sessions with the very people you are hoping will use your product down the line. Start them as early in the process as possible.