Agile Development Product Management Series 4: New Product Development

This is the first article in the agile development product management series. (Preface and set up iteration goals, product version planning, product user group planning, new product R & D, prediction meetings, product servant, product owner team, and product line management)

The new product R & D referred to here is not a new product of your own company, but a new product that is newly established in the industry with unknown future and still needs to be tested by the market. Agile development can greatly help the development process of such products.

Top priority of New Products

The top priority of planning new products is: who will buy such products? Why?

The top priority for developing new products is: what is the core difference between it and previous products?

It sounds hard to understand, but it is difficult to do it. Generally, product development is based on "the most important functions, the most basic functions, and the most influential architecture functions". This makes it easy to see the core differences of products after a long time.

Therefore, although it is impossible to completely break away from the constraints of importance, basic, and adequacy, it should still be noted that:The core difference between verification and previous products on the market is the top priority.

New Product Development

How to quickly reflect core differences (generally innovative values) is the center of New Product R & D.

There are many specific practices. The following is an example.

A game company once hoped to use the "wide range of small profits" method to create a new game. However, it is found that every game should be visualized, user login, store, NPC, scenario, and gang ...... These basic functions are often used in game development for a long time and cannot be seen as the most important core of the game "not fun. This greatly restricts the mobility of talents and funds.

Later they decided:Develop a basic platform to complete the above basic functions. Any team can directly develop "core gameplay" on the platform. at a specified time point, the company's leadership will review the playability of the game, to decide whether to retain. This is a way for the team to shift the development focus from basic functions to core gameplay.

Another example is my own.

There are already a lot of products we are developing on the market. Therefore, although we should make a "workable" product as soon as possible from the perspective of agile development, our actual process is the opposite.

We do have a "work-able" product, but it is limited to some functional points that reflect the core value. These functions alone make the entire product unable to run.The entire product does not run well. It is not a factor for us to evaluate the success of the product. Instead, it is a few non-coherent functions that reflect the value of our products.. Therefore, in the early development work, the entire product cannot "work" completely. However, those functions that reflect core differences can help us verify whether the entire product is worthwhile.

Help for agile development

Agile development can help you complete the above steps by taking advantage of practices such as priority sorting, review meetings, and iterative delivery.

Especially iterative delivery. Even if there is only three months of initial development, do not think that the time is relatively short, you can make a complete function or design in the early stage. Iterative development can ensure that, before the arrival of the judgment point of 3rd months, you and the arbitration can have multiple opportunities to communicate and improve the product direction. In addition, at the real time point, there must be deliverable functions, rather than a bunch of half-done documents.

Although "only a bunch of documents" may not lead the boss to cut down the project directly, it will at least make him very embarrassed. It is better to use iterations to give him some functions that "seem okay, but still need to be judged" to gain more opportunities.