What is a Product Approach in Software Development

The product approach to development is the process of building a valuable product and bringing it to the market. It may be a mobile app, a website, dedicated software, or its new feature. When resorting to this approach, your priority should be the benefit and value of the product for the target audience.

The product approach assumes that a given IT service solves a specific task. This fact seems obvious, but developers know how often a project starts with the idea like “let’s digitize such-and-such a process, and then we’ll see.” Then, after six months, it turns out no one actually needs it.

When a product team designs a software solution for you, it has to consider your business objectives and development plans.

How does the product approach to development differ from the project approach?

The easiest way to explain the difference is through an example.

When you build a food delivery service, you create a product. While developing a website for this service and attaching a payment gateway to it, you deal with project development.

Product development equals customer development but not the development of the functional product part.

An American entrepreneur and scientist, Steve Blank, developed this approach to building a business based on his experience with dozens of startups and companies. The essence of the technique lies in the following: the essential asset of the company is its customers but not the product; the product has to solve customer problems and create value.

We can distinguish 4 vital stages within this approach:

• Research — What is the customer goal?
• Confirmation — How can we solve this problem? Can we sell the solution?
• Development — Can we sell the solution multiple times?
• Growth — How can we scale the business?

Thus, product development is somewhere at the intersection of research, confirmation, and value creation.

How a Product Approach to Development Works in Practice

The team tests the idea, interviews focus groups, posts surveys on social networks, and analyzes what means are currently used to solve this task.

If the research team sees that the idea has a chance of success, the developer offers an action plan, with a prototype and testing, to the customer. If they comprehend the concept will not work, they directly tell the customer about it. The development team does not do any work just for work’s sake.

That is a kind of format where the development agency is responsible not just for the software application and its technical support but also for the product itself, its development, promotion, and user attraction.

The customer deals exclusively with business processes (investments, revenue distribution, scaling, etc.).

In this case, the agency covers all implementation tasks, hypothesis testing, and results analysis. That means we not only create design and code but also arrange a correct process. We both cover expert assignments and determine which expertise is necessary for the project. That is a holistic product approach to software development.

Measurability and Results Evaluation

A product approach to software development brings measurable results. At the same time, the team should think of value for the business but not of the “tasks.”

That can be achieved by excluding some links in the chain of decision-making. For instance, automatic validation eliminates the obligation to bring a piece of paper to some office.

Another step is to speed up data processing — the mode the underwriting currently works when checking loan requests through the dedicated app. The process takes a little more than a minute and a half, and none of the “live” specialists takes part in it.

In most cases, you can estimate the effect by the number of new users or sales growth rates.

Summary

A product approach to development is a possibility to build a software solution focused on business goals and with an eye on customer benefits (ordering customers and their target audience).

It is impossible to constantly ignore the fact of who will use the system, what actual tasks it will solve, and how much money it will save. If you neglect all these aspects, it will ultimately turn out that no one uses the product as it does not solve any practical tasks but requires constant investments.

Eventually, the development team will have to resort to a product approach, in which case the endeavor will require a lot higher costs than it could if everything had been done correctly right from the start.