How Data Plays A Key Role In Product Development
Whether you work in marketing, mining, risk analysis or technology, you need to have excellent data that drives your decision-making. But in this day and age, there are so many avenues of data, how do you know which is the most accurate? Where can you find the best data? What do you do with the data? There are so many options and not all of them will be the right ones. So how do you move forward in your own projects?
Performing data fishing
Let’s say you are at the start of a project, and you are trying to figure out what you need to do in order to build a unique product. You will need to ask yourself the following questions.
What are your immediate competing products? Formulate a list of what they are and why.
What will be the potential features that make your products better?
What is the price range that will be your niche?
What is the history of products that have tried to fulfill the role that you seem to want to fill?
Do you know what the length of term will be, for the project as a whole? How long will it take from start to release?
Your risk analysts should perform this search for data and allow them to fish for the right answers. They will scour the market and try to find what could be a rival product, which you will need to be ready to react to. Make sure that you’re not performing a design overlap and potentially be enthralled into a copyright infringement lawsuit.
React to the market
Regarding the cost of your product, you will need to keep a close eye on the raw materials required to build it. For example, if you were going to enter into a new market you would want to know how viable it would be. You would want to find out how popular the industry is right now, is it bullish, is it bearish, or is it dovish? For example, if you were going to be doing something in the oil and gas industry, you would want the best oil and gas production data. This software is perhaps the best in the world, not just for investors but for businesses. The legal maze and the challenges of the industry are all presented in one dashboard, so your lawyers can inform you of certain traps and pitfalls. You can perform lots of criteria searches to find the exact data you need. This type of software is what you need to download or buy for your own business, so you can react to the market and study the sentiment from investors and other businesses.
Analyzing data during progression
Project progression includes all the phases in the project aside from beginning and end. The start is where very early data fishing is observed and the end is when the final product is put together, ready for compliance greenlighting and committing to orders. However, the meat of the project is where the true analyzing of data is done.
The questions data analysis could answer are…
Have the various factors lived up to their estimations?
Material strength, cost, pliability, etc.
Is the project running to schedule?
Have you locked in clients who are willing to buy the product in bulk, i.e. wholesalers like Amazon and Alibaba?
Have you achieved the design that you set out for? Have they needed to be changed and if so, for what reason? Could you have avoided this?
Are you able to buy raw materials in bulk for multiple batches of products?
Are you able to accurately extrapolate how much the production of the products will cost as the design progresses?
Are your departments maintaining expenditure control? Many departments can go over their allocated funds and keeping managers on track with cost management needs is so important.
Always commission risk reports
When should you commission a risk report? Well, this is really an ongoing thing and you should commission one risk report at the beginning and add to it as you go along. As the project progresses, you will need to commission small updates of the situation but it's a good idea to commission a mid-stage risk report to check if the project is on track. This can be done in-house or by a risk analysis company.
Data plays such a critical role in how new products are born and released into the market. Without proper data fishing and analysis, you will miss out on many opportunities but step into many threats.
