In the previous module, we covered the seven P's of marketing. You recall one of these was products, and part of your business plan needs to describe how you are going to continually develop your products and services to meet evolving customer needs. So for example, how you will be meeting these needs is that change over time? And how will you be adapting to changing markets. Module seven is going to focus on the key strategies that you can follow to product development. It's going to give you some important considerations for product and service development.

And finally, it's going to end up with a summary of the production service development lifecycle. As we discussed in the profit potential and durability section, it's important to be aware of the fact that both environments and your customers will change over time, and you need to determine how your business will produce and sell goods and services to these new and evolving customers on an ongoing basis. For instance, what approach would you take to improving existing products and services, and what approach would you use to develop new products? Will you, for example, employ a product development team? Or would you outsource this? Or will it be up to you as the founder of the business to continue to develop these products and services.

There are a number of approaches that can be taken here. Many organizations are happy to play a copycat role and essentially follow the leaders of a certain market. This however, can change over time. Consider the example of who I a Chinese electronics manufacturer operating in the mobile telecommunication space. Many of their products such as the routers and switches were designed and bolts to deliver the same features and benefits is one of the market leaders in the space Ericsson. Of course, the Hawaii equipment was priced much lower.

And this was attractive to mobile telephone operators, who I was happy to take this Follow the Leader approach for a number of years. But then at one point, they started introducing a number of features and innovations that were not available in the competitor offerings. The Products then became even more attractive for the network operators they were cheaper and featured, better benefits. There may be a number of things that drove us innovation and among them, it could be the market leaders dropping their process to remain competitive, or in fact, who I improving their ability to innovate as they matured in the market. Needless to say that because the market changes, so does your approach and your strategy need to as well. Other organizations such as Apple are very good innovators, and often develop products for which there's no apparent need.

They launch these far ahead of the competition, and they create demand for these new innovations. Take a look at the iPad or the iPhone. When he's launched. They had few applications that ran on them. Now there's over half a million applications that are available in the Apple App Store. And the iPad has become indispensable to most users.

There are not many businesses and organizations that are able to innovate in this way. Traditional thinking also states that businesses first need to add identify a need or demand, and then the need to satisfy this with some form of offering, not apple in this case, no Henry Ford. He was another example of this. He once famously stated, if I had asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse. Obviously, he proved us wrong, and his ability to innovate led to both the Model T Ford and the beginnings of the modern production line. By and large, the most use strategy to product and service development is the more traditional approach of identifying a market, understanding this market and understanding the needs and desires, seeing where a gap exists, and then plugging this gap with a relevant product or service.

There is of course, no one size fits all strategy. And you need to understand your business's strengths, your business's weakness, as well as your abilities to craft a strategy that is best suited to the market you wish to serve. In order to help you determine what this this approach should be and how you should approach product and service development. Let's think about the following points. Firstly, you need to review the current status of each of your products and services. Which of these are immediately for sale?

And which require completing? If there are ones that still need competing, what are the steps that you require to complete this development? Get these products ready to sell to your customers? Does your organization currently have the skills to do this? And can you bring them to market? Are there any gaps that exist?

Are they any existing or prospective customers that are helping you in developing your products or services? And if not, is there an opportunity to get some friendly customers involved? Do you anticipate any major problems in this process? And do you have any plans to overcome them? So do you anticipate a shortage of skills? engineers?

Is there a shortage of raw materials and how are you going to plan to overcome these factors? What would the effect be on your revenue and profitability or indeed your overall business plan if you couldn't complete your new part by using new products and get these to market on time? need to include any information relating to trademarks or copyrights or any other intellectual property protection that you already have or planning to apply for. This is very important for investors, you want to make sure that your business concept your business idea, or your products or services can't easily be copied by competitors. And finally, have you lost since any specific technology or any kind of production or design methodology in developing your products. Once you've got an understanding of these, you can then follow a structured approach to the development of your products and services.

And these structured and ordered steps you're going to follow are as follows. Firstly, you need to generate a number of ideas that you think will satisfy the opportunity you've identified. Nothing is silly at this point, so don't be afraid to come up with crazy ideas. It's the next step where you'll narrow down these ideas. Try and eliminate any ideas that you don't think are reasonable or achievable. Then take the ones that are left over, fully define each of these ideas describe how difficult it would be to develop this product or service.

Do you or your plan business have the necessary skills to develop this product or service? You know, there's no use and thinking about what it'd be great to put a satellite into space. But you know, you only got a couple of software engineers. Just because you conceptualize this product service for your customers, trying to understand how well it will really suit your market and your customers? Is it something they're really going to buy? Is it really going to hit a gap or a need that that your customers have?

Then think about how this product or service will align with your broader business objectives? Let's, for example, take a situation if you were a photographer, you might have an opportunity to produce portraits of children in junior school. The strategic approach to your business however, might be fashion photography, and how do these two align How does this new offering fits into your longer term plans will build the business will have contribute to it will dilute the business. Next, try and develop your concept as either a prototype or a pilot App Service, trying to understand what your minimal viable product is. That is what are the minimum or the core features that your product needs to contain or your service needs to contain before you can deploy it or sell it to a customer. This is very prevalent in the software industry, where when kind of version one of a product launches, it will be very basic, but you can get into the customers hands you can start generating revenue, and you can start getting some valuable feedback from your customers.

Next, you need to test your product or service identify a select set of customers who can test this product and give you honest feedback. And this honest feedback is going to enable you to tweak and improve your product or service or worst case scenario. It's going to prove that there's no requirement for your for your product, which at least will stop you spending any more money on developing it. Then you need to plan your product launch, go back to your overall plan. That is your marketing plan, and understand how you'll be promoting this product, how you're going to sell it, and how you're going to be supporting a new product or service. Think about what your competitors are doing.

And is there a possibility that they'll launch a competitive product or a competitive service and beat you to market? What is the worst case scenario here. Finally, you'll also then need to manage your products and services throughout the lifecycle. And you'll need to keep on evaluating how relevant these products and services are for your customers and your prospects. In summary, then, we've understood the importance of meeting customer needs as they change over time. We learned how we're going to be adapting to changing markets.

We've learned what some of the key strategies are to developing products. We know what the important considerations are for developing These products and services. And finally we've understood the products and service development lifecycle and why it's important