Beating the Competition to Market with Rapid Product Innovation

As digital screens permeate consumers’ lives at home, at work, in the store, in their car and even at the bank or hospital, so many industries are finding ways to enhance their digital product, software and service experiences in order to grow their business. There are some clear yet important challenges that product managers and marketers face when bringing digital products to market today.

• To start, it is increasingly difficult to understand what will resonate with customers as their expectations and preferences quickly change due to the pace of technology innovation.
• New entries into the market from smaller, nimbler competitors make it harder to sustain your competitive advantage.
• As disruptive competitors battle for your customers and you start to experience churn, it’s become necessary to constantly acquire new customers just to maintain the existing base and revenues.
• Communications among more distributed teams and partners inflate the cost of doing business rather than reducing it.

But knowing the obvious doesn’t help you succeed and produce the results you’re being held accountable for. So we reviewed the challenges of 20 of the top companies producing products in consumer technology and entertainment industries today. This is what they identified as what they need to help overcome the challenges above:

• Better understand different customer segments to penetrate underserved markets and find new ones.
• Create products that are “complete solutions” designed with an evolutionary path.
• Simplify internal processes and increase operational effectiveness across business units and partners.
• Accurately forecast emerging market trends and position for the future.

All of these challenges roll up to a single observation; it is essential to product managers they better understand customers and use this customer insight to more efficiently plan and execute the entire product development life cycle. Or as one CEO put it:

“In our industry, lack of focus on the customer, complacency and failure to innovate are the mortal sins.”

For over ten years, we have worked with product owners for leading software manufacturers, device OEMs, chipset companies and digital content and service providers to uncover the unmet needs of their customer segments and improve how they come to market. For our team, this experience has resulted in a refined process that produces better products that attract and retain more customers while operating faster and more efficiently that we at Rosetta call Rapid Product Innovation (RPI).

The foundation of this methodology is the customer. They are not only at the center of product strategy, but they’re also the enabler of more efficient team dynamics leading up to launch, and ongoing optimizations of the product roadmap to keep you ahead of the competition.

Published at: Rosetta’s Currents Blog