4 Reasons Your Project Needs External Product Development Support

Companies are often keen on hiring consultants to provide them with support regarding marketing, financial management, or legal advice to move them forward. These same companies, however, don’t consider this kind of support for product development, the very process that creates the items they brand and sell to consumers.

Whether you’re building your first product or your twentieth, product development requires big time resources including time, technology, expertise and funding. Hiring an external product development firm can help relieve your company from some of these resource saps. Here are 4 reasons your next project will benefit from product development support:

1. Concept Refinement

A company’s developers and designers can be biased when it comes to their ideas and innovations. After all, these projects are their personal endeavors. A third-party product development consultancy firm can come in, objectively vet the idea, rapidly prototype and test it, and determine if it is cost effective and will be profitable in a short amount of time, saving your operation time and money.

2. Established Success Formula

Product development companies have established processes that have a proven track record of success in today’s markets. A quality product development firm will research the market and identify key elements and components that make other similar products best in class. These components can then be compared with the user’s needs to determine how the product would perform with the identified demographic. Next, it’s concept generation time, followed by technical planning and implementation. Once the design is solidified, it’s time for the prototype and real world testing to finalize the last minute details before it’s officially manufactured for distribution. It’s an end-to-end proven formula that will help any business create successful products right from the start.

3. Cutting Edge Technologies

Not every product development team has access to or knowledge of the best design and technological tools in the game today. Product development consultancy firms are constantly experimenting with the very best and newest technologies. Hiring a product development company like this allows you to leverage these advantages in your product development process that simply isn’t possible with your in-house support. Technologies such as 3D scanning, 3D printing, and 3D modeling have developed significantly in the past 5 years and if you’re not taking advantage of them you’ll be left in the dust. Using these technologies gives clients a distinct advantage over the competition and leads to greater overall product success.

4. Prototyping

Nothing is quite as assuring in the product development process as having a working prototype built and tested to validate your idea. The one true way to guarantee your product success is by bringing it to life before it is sent to market. Product development consultancy firms will oversee the prototyping of your product and work with you throughout the iterative process.

Prototyping takes time, infrastructure, and resources to be successful. Many companies don’t have the facilities or the means to have a quality prototype made once, let alone multiple times as the design is taking shape. That’s where product development consultancy firms step in.

You don’t have to be in this alone

The product development process can be overwhelming when trying to fit all the pieces together. A product development firm can relieve some of the burden by ushering its clients through a structured and established development process. These companies also have access to advanced technologies and prototyping capabilities that could ensure you meet your project goals as effectively and efficiently as possible.