Product Development and Consultancy Services

Product development is an extensive process and often involves multiple complicated steps. You have to go all the way from coming up with innovative ideas, market research, and gathering a suitable team to drafting a prototype, building the product, budgeting, marketing, risk assessment, and much more.

There is an easy way out. You can bring on the services of a Product Management Consultant on your next project, and the expert will take care of all the details. By hiring the services of a consultant, you will be able to get your product to the market sooner and at a cheaper price.

So, why and how do you go about hiring product management and development consultancy services? Here is a complete guide for you. Keep reading.

What Comes under Product Development and Consultancy Services?

Let’s begin with understanding product development and the services you can get from hiring a product development consultant on board.

Product Development

Product development is the journey of conceptualizing a product, building it by the efficient use of resources, and then getting it to the customers in the market.

The process of product development starts with ideation. You must have an idea for a product before you even begin to create it. Ideas for the product can come from anywhere. For a completely new product, you could have grabbed the idea from a customer review, feedback, or comment. You could have researched the demand in the market and just created a product to fill it. Ideas can also come from brainstorming sessions with the employees, or they can be the birth of the mind of the genius CEO.

The next step is research. This research involves different sub-categories. You need to research the market and the viability of your product’s idea in it. The desired functionality and estimated features have to be decided upon. You may have to research what functions people in the market are looking for and how you can embed them in your product.

After you come up with a loose structure, you need to build a neat draft of the product in the form of a prototype - a minimum viable product. Then the prototype gets refined and detailed designing before it is formed. When some samples of the product are built, they are launched in the market for testing and validation. If it performs well, the product is manufactured on a large scale for commercialization.

The ‘Soft’ Parts of Product Development

The whole product development process is the hardware of the system. Many product-adjacent steps like meeting budget goals, risk assessment, meeting marketing goals, the productivity of the team, finishing on time, hiring the right people to build the product, making sure no protocols related to the product’s category are being broken, and more need to be taken care of.

A product development and management consultant will handle all these mentioned tasks. They can also work on parts of this process according to your business needs, but their skills encompass managing product development and related tasks.

Apple and Its Product Development Team

Take notes from one of the largest companies in the world, Apple, about why a great product development process is a treasure to protect.

The product design team is kept away from the rest of the business and the daily politics of the offices. They report directly to an executive and work without other workplace concerns over developing new products and improving the process.

This is how important precise product development is for your company. It is the core and has to be done just right.

Why Do You Need Product Development and Consultancy Services for Your Firm?

Mostly, when a company begins on a product development journey, they need people with appropriate skills to manage that project. The team is usually assembled from within the company. But employees may not have specific skills to take a product through development stages since most of them may not have experienced it before.

A product management consultant has an entire career devoted to just that - bringing a product to life. To become a consultant, they have worked for decades to gain essential knowledge and expertise. An inexperienced leader or manager can cost you millions of dollars in inefficient practices and mismanagement of resources. An expert can save you millions due to a solid grasp over their field.

Your firm needs a product development and management consultant because they can do the following for your company:

●     Assess your current product development system and point out the glitches

●     Develop innovative product strategies

●     Build a sustainable system for product development

●     Manage your product development portfolio

●     Balance the resources

●     Simplify the development process

●     Gauge and enter new markets with your products

●     Improve time required to finish and launch a product into the market

●     Optimize the performance of the product development team for best results

●     Integrate mergers and acquisitions

●     Analyze the system for product development before you make an acquisition

●     Deliver training and seminars on new product development strategies

●     Reduce financial risks by completing the project by meeting budget goals

●     Ensure low risk of the product being recalled from the market

●     Sometimes do grant writing as well

How Much Will It Cost to Hire a Product Development Consultant?

The cost of hiring an expert consultant depends on several things. The more experienced professionals will certainly charge more than the ones with a few years under their belt. The consultants who work in a specific industry or niche charge more as they tend to have unmatchable knowledge of working in that particular area.

What you need to know is that you are hiring an expert and professional advice doesn’t come cheap. But the benefits your company will gain from the expert’s hands and the amount of money you would save will far offset the expenses of a skilled consultant.

Generally, you could expect to pay between $50 to $100 an hour for a product development consultant. Highly experienced consultants can even charge more than $100 an hour. A few top industry experts charge at least $300 an hour.

Conclusion

A product management consultant can accelerate your development process and lead you to new heights of success. Whether you are a big corporation, a medium-sized firm, or a small business, your company can always do with a maestro in their field.

Leave your best tips for hiring a management consultant in the comments.