In this post we share the ultimate guide to launching new products people actually want, using 3D design services companies. Product market launch doesn’t just happen. It’s not like you already have a finished product lying around, waiting to be released into the market. As a matter of fact, market launch is the final step in a series of new product development processes. It all begins with an idea, followed by concept development, before stepping into the design work. The product also needs to go through prototyping, testing, refinement, manufacturing, and eventually market release.
There can be many factors that determine the success of a market launch. Chief among them is the actual product itself. Having a good product designed by expert product designers improves your chances of achieving a successful launch a great deal. Combine that with strategic marketing and excellent timing, and the product is on its way to becoming a profitable venture. On the other hand, a poorly-designed product is likely doomed to fail no matter how much money you pour into the marketing budget. Most users don’t really care if the launch is surrounded by a massive fanfare; what they need is a product that’s purposeful, easy-to-use, reliable, and worth the money.
Believe it or not, product launch isn’t actually as challenging as it used to be. Thanks to the proliferation of e-commerce platforms and social media, where you can engage with potential buyers almost anytime, anywhere, it has become easier and more cost-effective to connect with potential consumers. The question is no longer about how to get in touch with buyers to introduce your product, but whether the product is actually good enough that the market launch can immediately trigger signs of success.
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A successful product launch can only happen if the product itself is worth launching. You can’t just launch a low-quality product and expect to receive an overwhelmingly positive response from the public following the release. Designing a new product that’s functional, useful, aesthetically pleasing, and good value for the money is a monumental undertaking best left to professionals. Here at Cad Crowd, you can connect to experienced industrial designers with good track records of transforming mere ideas into not only tangible but also marketable and profitable products.
Starts with a vision
The phrase has been thrown around all over the place to the point where it sounds like nothing but a cheap cliché, but it’s a cliché only because it’s true. Just like everything else in life, the result reflects the efforts you put into it. Within the context of product development and launch, the “vision” here refers to the sort that extends beyond a short-term result. It’s a vision for product launch that probably takes about two or three years before you get there; give it six months for ideation, one year for development, another year for prototyping and refinement, and a few more months to get ready for release.
A vision, however, would fail to go anywhere if you don’t care to grow the passion for it. When you have the passion to go along with the vision, you tend to strive to achieve your goals and make a conscious effort to get the job done. But then again, a vision and the passion for it won’t likely get you anywhere closer to product launch without the wisdom to safeguard the two from going off track in terms of project timeline, budget, or even the design itself.
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A common example of this lack of wisdom is when new product designers think they can learn what to build from consumers. What appears to be as plain as day, a brilliant idea on the surface, is in fact an outright foolish one. This is especially true in tech products (because everything is advancing so fast these days), but it is applicable to just about everything else. It’s not the consumers’ job to figure out what’s technically possible, even if they think it is. People see and define the world based on everything that already exists in the market. Furthermore, every consumer wants a perfect product, no matter what it is, and trying to make a perfect product for everyone is as fruitful as chasing the end of a rainbow.
Despite all of that, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t talk to consumers. In fact, the opposite is true. As counterintuitive as it may sound, the most effective way to overcome the issue is to talk to many consumers. The big difference is that you’re not in the mindset of asking customers for the next big idea; you’re testing the ideas on them to see if anything works. In short, you have a bigger chance of creating and launching a successful product when you have the right vision for it, are driven by a passion to persist with the undertaking, and have the knowledge to overcome challenges.
The culture of product discovery
A different concept product design team may implement a different development method. And there are all sorts of methods with emphasis on “sprint” iterations, rapid prototyping, virtual simulations, linear approach, and so forth. Each methodology has its own strengths and weaknesses, but in general, everything is just a big guideline to keep the development process in check and easy to retrace. When you’re talking about “new” product development and launch, however, what matters the most is the culture you’re bringing into the design space.
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Suppose an engineer and a designer disagree on a particular feature; the designer likes to see the feature included in the product, whereas the engineer thinks it’s going to cost a lot of money and make the product too expensive for the target consumers at the end of the day. This is a fairly common situation in a product development process. If anything, many instances of disagreement are expected to happen within a good team. They have different opinions and perspectives on what makes a product great, and any compromise born from the situation is the result of well-informed decision-making. In the likely instances of frequent disagreement, the right product development culture doesn’t call for endless discussions and meetings, or worse, terrible escalations; instead, the team should test all the iterations and see which one performs better.
Mindful development
Much of a successful product design is determined by the quality of market research you do. Among the core aspects of market research is being aware of your target audience, meaning you should be able to identify them and see the product from their viewpoints. You need to be mindful of their perspective and understand their expectations, too. A mindful product development carves the path that leads to a product design people actually want. And there’s no better way to understand the consumers than engaging in a direct dialogue with them. Once again, the idea behind this communication is not to formulate an idea of a product but to test whether your concepts are viable.
A practical method to reach as many potential consumers as possible is to first connect with “ambassadors” from outside the design team. Think of the ambassadors as product advocates who can offer fresh perspectives and a valuable partnership during the product development process and market release. Ambassadors serve an important purpose to help you test ideas, discover pain points, and prevent you from setting unrealistic expectations. Coming from outside the 3D design team, biased opinions are highly unlikely. Because you have direct contact with these advocates, it’s easy to invite them to the development facility (or the design space, wherever it is), so you can present the product for criticism and feedback.
For this method to be effective, the ambassadors must consist of multiple individuals who represent each demographic within your target market. The idea behind the process is to expedite the trial-and-error phase, allowing you to focus on improving what works and fixing what doesn’t. One of the fine examples of how product ambassadors could provide useful insights into product design was observable during the development of the ORII smart ring. The design team discovered just the right ambassadors among attendees at an electronics convention. It quickly transformed into a partnership where the designers almost always released an updated version of their product at similar events, so that the ambassadors could be the first to test it.
This kind of interaction happened multiple times, allowing the product development designers to gather valuable user-experience data from reliable sources. For the test results (data) to be accurate, the ORII design team made sure to only pick individuals within the product’s target demographics to be the ambassadors. It turned out that introducing early versions of a product to a smaller yet refined audience could lead to well-informed design decisions that contributed to a successful market launch at a later date. OrangeMonkie, the company behind the Foldio lightbox, also implemented a similar process. Most people behind the brand are Kickstarter veterans, with a great history of launching a number of successful foldable lightboxes through crowdfunding.
The first generation, Foldio1, was backed by more than 3,800 supporters and materialized into a real product. A few years later, the third generation of the same product, simply called the Foldio3, raised at least $800,000 from over 4,500 backers. The company is still going strong today, offering all sorts of mini home studio kits and accessories. OrangeMonkie made the case for how giving a platform for consumers to test your ideas and actually listening to what they have to say could help you stay on track to build and launch a product people actually want.
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Active listening
Product conventions and Kickstarter are excellent platforms to engage in direct communication with consumers, but they’re not the only options available. You also have online communities and forums, as well as social websites like Facebook Groups, to help you discover like-minded people interested in your product ideas. In some cases, even the old-fashioned email surveys still work wonders for this purpose. Any platform that can facilitate a dialogue and provide means to reach a larger audience will do. A potential caveat of using online pages as a channel is that every single word anybody writes about the product will be immediately available to the public. Even in the widely popular crowdfunding platform, Kickstarter, there’s still no guarantee that someone won’t copy or steal your ideas and beat you to the launch. Unless your idea is patented or licensed somehow, it’s a persistent risk, but that’s a discussion for another time.
Keep in mind that no matter the platform, the conversation has to go both ways. The ambassadors offer honest, constructive criticism of the product, followed by tangible improvements based on that feedback. This is active listening in action. You’ve seen many times in crowdfunding platforms how consumers express their appreciation for a product, but they wish it brought more features or that it could do one thing or another in a better way. It’s also pretty common to see someone try to tell the 3D product designers how to do their jobs by giving an ambiguous outline of a process to fix a problem or two.
Not to be repetitive, but you’re not asking the ambassadors to solve any pain point; you’re only expecting them to identify issues. Figuring out how to make the product better is solely the designers’ responsibility. The eventual expectation is that you get a consumer-driven product built by professionals. Based on consumer feedback on the current version of the product, the design team rushes to build an improved iteration that addresses the most concerning pain points. That said, not every problem should take its place as the top priority.
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There needs to be a scale of urgency where designers can set aside minor issues to focus on the critical ones. A lot of manufacturing companies, especially startups, are too afraid to fail that they actually put the product development process in complete isolation. In an attempt to create a good product, it’s foolish to dismiss consumers’ opinions and ambassadors’ insights. As a result, they end up presenting an irrelevant product on launch day, sending it to market oblivion.
Consumer-driven product
Companies can say that every single one of their products is consumer-driven just because it’s intended to be an object that consumers may use for any particular purpose. In practice, the term “consumer-driven” refers to a much broader sense of product development approach. A product is consumer-driven not only because it’s available for them to purchase–it also has to be influenced by their perspectives, opinions, demands, and actions. By giving the consumers an opportunity to contribute to the design during the development process, you open the doors to a fruitful relationship with the user base.
As a product rendering and design company, the time you spend and the effort you make to engage in a meaningful dialogue with consumers help establish a sense of trust that ultimately contributes to brand reputation. If the consumers feel that their opinions are heard and properly appreciated (as reflected in the design changes), they’ve quickly associated themselves with the product development journey to materialization and its launch. They want the product to have a successful market launch. Encouraging the involvement of ambassadors and consumers throughout the product development process is an effective way to build something they want.
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When profitability is part of the equation, you can’t just have the product built exactly to your specification down to the last detail. You’re creating a product for people to buy, so it’s imperative that the design caters to their preferences. There will be design compromises here and there, but everything is built based on real-world user test data. It’s not always about trying to build the perfect product, but one that resonates with potential buyers at large and is greatly anticipated for market launch.
Most ideas don’t work
Still remember that consumers are almost always right when they say things don’t work? At the early phases of a product prototype design development process, the rule of thumb is to brainstorm and collect as many ideas as you can possibly handle. You will need a lot of ideas simply because most of them are probably terrible. To make things worse, sometimes you don’t know if an idea is bad until you test it on consumers. And for ideas that are actually feasible, you may need at least three or four iterations to make them work as intended. But having a group of objective ambassadors on your side helps speed up the trial process.
There can be many reasons why ideas don’t work. They might be too complex for the average consumer to understand and use, impractical, or outright irrelevant. Sometimes, an idea is technically feasible, but it’s so complicated that it just isn’t worth the time and money to execute. However, ideas don’t work most often because the consumers just cannot care less. This is why you need tons of ideas to start the development; otherwise, you’ll end up creating and launching a product only to find out that it’s not what the consumers want all along. It’s the product modeling design team’s responsibility to separate the good from the bad at the earliest time possible.
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Know when to pivot
There’s a big difference between vision and illusion, in the same way that pivoting to a better idea isn’t synonymous with giving up on the product development as a whole. Professional designers are known to be stubborn when it comes to a product concept, but exceedingly flexible in terms of details. Given enough experience, the ability and willingness to distinguish real product vision and mere illusion should come as second nature to designers. A new product development is all about innovation, invention, and discovery. An idea (of a product) triggers the excitement to create multiple concepts. Designers work to materialize the most feasible concept and iterate until it becomes a tangible, functional, aesthetically pleasing product.
What most people don’t tell you is that there can be many pivoting points along the way. It’s pretty common in a product development process to reach a point where you realize an idea just won’t work. You decide to discard the idea and move on to the next. If the next idea also fails, new product development designers try another until you find the right formula. Apart from giving you the chance to test ideas, maintaining good communication with consumers also earns you a sneak peek into competitors’ products and what other alternatives are available on store shelves from their perspectives.
These insights might loosen the vision a little bit; perhaps there’s a way to try and change the problem you’re trying to solve, maybe it’s possible to either narrow down or broaden up the target demographics, probably replacing a feature with another can speed up progress, and so forth. You don’t pivot to the next idea because it’s easy, but you do it to improve the product’s chances of achieving success in the market.
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Iterate and validate
Every iteration must be followed with a validation, including the final (production-ready) version. You’ve probably done this numerous times throughout the design process with earlier versions of the product. You build an iteration, test ideas on consumers, and refine the product based on the test results. Some features are improved because consumers demonstrate interest, while others are omitted entirely due to the lack of positive responses. The next iteration, based on the feedback, is then validated once again using the same method. The product should go through this process over and over until the final version is ready.
When it comes to rapid prototyping services, never assume that the production-ready prototype has zero issues. Nothing kills a product launch quicker than a product that isn’t 100% working. While it’s true that this version is the result of multiple refinements and improvements, you can’t be really sure that nothing can go wrong. In fact, the consumer test of a production-ready version is of the highest degree of importance because it’s supposed to be the last chance you have prior to market launch. Do not frustrate your consumers with a terrible unboxing experience or a product that fails to deliver what it promises to do.
Takeaway
According to Clayton Christensen, a professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, there are nearly 30,000 new products introduced every year, and 95% of them fail. Product quality and price certainly have something to do with the failure, and so does usability and market fit. Even when the product is well-made by any objective measure, it still doesn’t contribute to market success if there’s little demand for it. In other words, you can’t expect to have a successful launch if people don’t want the product in the first place.
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How Cad Crowd can help
You might be able to develop a new product, but whether or not the consumers at large can appreciate its values is another question entirely. It’s therefore important to understand your capabilities as well as limitations, and hire (or more commonly outsource) the additional skills necessary to build a well-rounded design team. Having a wide range of expertise within a single team supplemented by a refined group of ambassadors can improve your chances of designing a great product and allow you to see the development process from a broad perspective. And this is where Cad Crowd comes in; with a heavy emphasis on the engineering and design sectors, the platform connects you with experienced industrial designers of various specializations to help you build a multidisciplinary team for successful product development and launch. Get a quote today!
