The agile processes behind innovative product development

We all know that modern businesses need to innovate constantly in order to stay relevant, keep customers happy and, ultimately, survive and thrive

Often this means introducing new products or rolling out new digital tools and processes to improve the customer experience - but that alone is not enough. To keep up with changing customer demands, the way that you go about designing, building and delivering your innovations is just as important as your final product. Agile project management methodologies can help organisations innovate in iterative, customer-centric and collaborative ways that provide the best chance of success but, because there are hundreds of ways you could apply these methodologies across your organisation, adapting to this way of working can be a challenge - especially if you’re new to it.

The right approach for your project will depend on your specific goals, timeline and available budget, but the following examples of how ORM incorporates innovation into some typical product and service development scenarios might help you determine your next steps.

Opportunity Assessment

An opportunity assessment helps you to establish whether there’s a solid business case behind a product or business idea. The process generally takes 2-4 weeks and is based on a design sprint approach where a multidisciplinary team investigates the potential business opportunity to understand the market analysis, sizing and business impact together with customer desirability analysis and user research. If the opportunity assessment has a positive result, it will likely lead to prototype development.

Rapid prototyping

Rapid prototyping allows you to create a “quick and dirty” clickable version of your end product so that it can be tested with potential users. This process helps business leaders to visualise, gauge the appetite for, and understand the commercial viability of your initiative before making a full financial commitment.

Prototyping might take the form of an innovation accelerator, where a dedicated team focusses on a single product, or involve a hackathon where a number of teams develop different solutions for assessment. Either way, the prototype(s) will typically have a very short lifespan and will ultimately be thrown away – even if testing is successful – because the focus during rapid prototyping is on quickly creating an output for testing and continuously pivoting rather than building a robust product.

Product Development

If the financial support to develop a solution for your business idea, opportunity or challenge, is already in place, and you’re satisfied that the key criteria have been met in early testing, the focus moves to designing and building the product in the chosen technologies. During this process, versions of your product are built and released iteratively, with testing and customer feedback at each stage. This way, the product goes through incremental improvements until a version which is desirable, viable and feasible can be released to the broader market.

Innovation, by its nature, is not rigid and there is no one-size-fits-all approach to agile project management, but an experienced partner will be able to help you choose the approach best suited to your goals and guide you through the process to ensure that your innovative ideas realise their potential.

Download ORM’s latest ebook, “The future is agile: a guide to digital innovation in business” or get in touch with our team to find out more.