Roleplaying for shortening the Product Development cycle…
Hi all!
This is the first article in a new series about using roleplaying during the product development cycle to help get a more solid product to then take into further testing with real customers or users.
I am a long-time roleplaying game junkie, I’ll be the first to admit. I’ve been gaming more than 25 years now and have enjoyed playing a variety of games. But I’m also a technical writer and a software developer. I have seen from both sides of the desk the many benefits of putting products before actual users to get feedback and make better or stronger products or go back to the drawing board.
What I propose is that the same skills that make roleplaying so much fun for games can be used during the product development cycle to make sure when you start actual testing with your customers that you want to make sure you’re on the right track before your customers see anything. This should shorten the process at the customer end so you’re ensured a more successful outcome when development is complete.
So the basic product development process can be broken down into a series of steps:
- Find a niche that you think you can develop a product to help fill a need
- Do some research to see what other products are in this niche and get a list of the services or qualities they provide their customers
- Ask customers in that niche what they want the product to do
- Combine 2 and 3 and this becomes your list of product requirements
- Develop a product
- Take the product to your customers to “beta” test or review to make sure it meets their needs
- Revise the product after any feedback from the customer
- Release the product
- Maintain the product and start looking at new features for the next release
Pretty straightforward, don’t you think? Very market-driven, with the goal being a product that you can develop and market to a variety of customers to solve their needs so your product and therefore your company or yourself succeeds and lives to develop more products and gain more success…
Easy enough, right? Probably not. I’ve been involved in a few projects where we’ve developed products based on requirements and when we finally got it to the customer, we looped through steps 5, 6, and 7 several times to come up with a product useful to the user that they would accept and therefore pay for.
So where does roleplaying come in, you might ask? Well… I believe it fits in between steps 5 and 6 to help hopefully shorten the number of times you have to repeat steps 6 and 7 to get a useful product for your customer.
That will be the next article in this series… How to develop personas or “characters” based on your understanding of your customers and customer needs and how to approach your product accordingly.
Thanks for your time and I hope you come back to read the next article!
–Fitz
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[…] Hopefully you’ve had a chance to digest the last article in this series (which you can find here), which served as an introduction to a process you might use to develop products for your markets […]