Product Development Department

A company which cannot offer anything new to be released at the market for a long period of time is a company that seriously risks losing its competitiveness and being thrown out from its niche by defter competitors. New product development (or development of existing ones) is just necessary to maintain market share , as far as demand for the most brands or products tends to decline over time. That’s why a plenty of large and medium companies have established specific product development departments to take care of the following functions:

• Creating conceptions of new products and services ( conceptualization );
• Exploring potential of the existing products/services to better their features and quality;
• Ongoing research and development on technologies;
• Concepts testing and approval;
• Prototyping and modeling;
• Economic and market research (this can be delivered on demand by Marketing dept);
• Researches & recommendations on positioning, pricing, packaging, distribution, and promotion;
• Researching possible innovations and rationalizations;

Review of typical Product Development Duties:

Different product development roles are established to carry out specific jobs at this department (or in other alternative functional structures of the company). Typical product development company’s activities need a qualified team to be managed, therefore let’s briefly consider different kinds of product development specialists to know their responsibilities:

• Product Development Manager – a key role in the department, he/she assumes all traditional managerial practices and duties (planning, supervision, reporting, etc). Usually this role is also called a corporate product development director.
• Product Development Coordinator – a position that is usually established in smaller companies that don’t have spare resources to organize a dedicated department. In such companies functions of product development are allotted among members of different regular departments (such as Sales, Productions, Marketing, etc), so the Product Development Coordinator directs their contributions and efforts to streamline activities of such a cross-functional team;
• Product Development Team – a unified workgroup of qualified specialists taking efforts at researching and developing new products and services. Such a team may include:
• Product Development Engineers – highly-educated technology experts who constantly work at conceptualizing, prototyping, testing and approving new products. Actual range of their duties covers a wide area of everything connected to designing new products:
• Conceptualization and elaboration of technical projects;
• Computer aided modeling, prototyping , and feasibility study;
• Creating physical prototype s or mock-up s;
• Testing the product and its accessories in typical usage situations;
• Creating technical documentation and user-manuals;
• Designing and improving production processes, logistics, etc;
• Product Development Officers – qualified business Analysts who assume monitoring and analyzing the outside market environment, including studying current situation with customer demand, market trends, competitive landscape, collecting data and original ideas on creating new products and services . Their tasks comprise the following ones:
• Researching customer future needs, suggestions and promising ideas;
• Researching existing competition and market tendencies;
• Researching advantageous features to be incorporated in the new products;
• Assembling focus group s and conducting surveys to approve new concepts;
• Investigating intellectual property issues;
• New program s and projects initiation;
• Product Development Assistant – office clerks who maintain records along with concerned documentation on product development tests, patents, ideas, concepts, etc.

VIP Task Manager is a software product designed to cover a wide functionality including product development resources such as tasks, costs, goals, priorities and timeframes. All helpful product development skills such as creativeness, analytical and innovative mindset, healthy skepticism, etc can be supported and promoted with a help of this tool.