Oxford dictionary of business and management defines NPD as follow: 

"In business and engineering, new product development (NPD) covers the complete process of bringing a new product to market. A central aspect of NPD is product design, along with various business considerations. New product development is described broadly as the transformation of a market opportunity into a product available for sale" 

Why it matters ?

Product failures are expensive. And they’re common. Even the largest, most famous companies fall short sometimes when bringing new products to market. Nobody needs these failures, but what choice is there? Few companies succeed in the long term if they don’t continually reinvent their offerings.

The good news is that many of the problems underlying failure are preventable. The economic attractiveness of new (and existing) products can reveal itself via thorough examination of market, channel and customer behaviours. Add an understanding of competitive action, cost dynamics and internal capabilities to the mix and you’re looking at untapped opportunities for new product concepts.

There is no time for try and error. You want to reduce the costs from fewer product failures and therefore you need to work with a group of consultants who have proven track record of developing and delivering products that helped teams from 17 different countries to experience growth.  

It is all about opportunities and the best time to hit the market . Our focus is to ensure that we can work together with you to develop the final product as fast as we can. That does not necessarily requires more developers to work overnight ! this requires a dedicated team of technology experts who have a great understanding of development tools and technologies to draft the product architecture by utilising existing open source tools and frameworks that can help the rapid development of the product.

We Understand Business Needs

We understand that a technologically advanced system does NOT necessarily address a business need better than others. We  bring a customer-centric lens to the development of our solutions.  It is interesting that we often have many happy clients coming to us explaining the pain they had gone through with other companies and below simply explains that.  

Does above sound familiar ? Don't worry, You will experience the difference from the very first consulting session with us that I bring a customer-centric lens to the development of new offerings. As part of this service, I can:

• Understand customer needs — both met and unmet — from your own product offerings plus those of your competitors in order to identify new opportunities

• Uncover new product opportunities within markets, consumer segments and distribution channels

• Establish a process for seizing new product opportunities

• Explain the business case for developing a new product

• Develop and test new product concepts, including formats and pricing

• Project sales, profits and market penetration under a variety of scenarios

• Build go-to-market product launch plans

• Identify ways to commercialize the data you collect

• Identify other ancillary revenue strategies 

• Retool product and service portfolios, including areas where existing products need to be repositioned or rationalized

• Assess the effectiveness of your product development process

• Look for opportunities to reduce development time and costs

• Create an innovation capability within your organisation

We Understand Technology

From concept to architecture, Engineering the product using the combination of the best technologies in the market is what we do best. It is in our DNA to engineer it by knowing a great range of technology stacks that are hot in the market.

If you have ideas about the next Uber, Be sure you share it with a team who can understand the complex technology stacks beyond a simplified user interface.  Uber and other successful apps are powered by such a complicated architecture with sometimes hundreds of services that work together to make the magic happen.

Below is borrowed from the Uber Technical blog. Uber heatmap that shows the density of vehicles driving passengers. This is called deck.gl and is just one of the tools they designed to simplify high-performance, WebGL-based visualisation of large data sets.

This is just an example, There are many other tools like Storm and Spark that can crunch data steams into metrics that can be useful to track and visualize in Uber Platform. The point is that If your software architect doesn’t know what they are and how they play their key role in the overall system architectures in Uber like platforms then he might not be competent to be your technology partner to build the next Uber !  

Selecting the right combination of technologies during your new product development is crucial to ensure that the final product can scale up and allows you as the product owner to introduce new features or expand it to larger markets without worrying about the underlying layers.  This is one of the common mistakes that many companies even the larger ones sometimes make. Changing the technology stack and platform after going live with your app if it is not impossible but very expensive, time consuming and a complicated task. 

An elegant solution architecture from the day one design is simple but yet powerful enough to let you focus on your product features and add more weight to the system without worrying about the architecture. Technology should NOT drive the business but it is you idea that should drive the vision of your product and technology should be the tool to support your product idea and it's growth.