We live in a great time where, in most of the world, you can invent a new product or service and—with the appropriate up-front work—earn money from the value it creates for customers. This is remarkable!

Creating new products and services, however, takes a lot of thinking and hard work—especially in the technology space. Coming up with an initial idea is often the easiest part of the entire process. Forming the plan and doing the work just to get your offering ready to sell is where the big effort rests. How do you take a new product or service to market?

It goes without saying that the type of product or the nature of the service for your industry and potential customer base will differ demonstrably from that of other industries. That makes it tough to come up with a single set of steps everyone can use to build their offering. However, there are certain things that apply across the board. Taking the following five actions will help you get started in taking your offering to the market:

1. Establish a name. Whether it’s a product or a service, you will need to sell it, and to sell effectively you need an appellation by which to call that thing which you are creating. This becomes an important first step that everything else will depend upon. Take the necessary time upfront to do this right.
2. Understand the potential market. A market must exist for any product or service to succeed. Take the time, up front, to discover problems your idea might solve, interview potential customers and gather the data necessary to validate that a market exists.
3. Craft an initial plan. Building off the market research, you need to define clearly what you will create. For products it might constitute actual UX design and drawings; for services the plan will include what you will deliver and how you will produce value for your customers. In both cases you need to create a clear strategy you can build on.
4. Develop a pricing strategy. Establishing a pricing strategy takes a lot of hard work and can get complex. What’s important early on is to determine the best way to sell your offering: via a subscription, direct to customer, through a channel, or another way that works best. Then determine the optimal pricing strategy to maximize profits.
5. Position for the launch. Ultimately you need to describe your offering to make it resonate with potential customers, and to prepare it for release to the market. You need a marketing plan to build awareness and generate interest from potential buyers. You want to make sure your product is ready for the market when the time comes for its release.

These are high level steps. Ultimately, preparing a new offering for release to the market to be used effectively by customers requires a tremendous amount of effort and preparation. For each of the actions above there’s a half dozen more to make it right. The key is getting started.

Questions: What is the main driver for taking your new offering to market? Why will potential customers want to buy it? Please leave a comment in the space below.

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The Product Management Perspective: Taking a new product (or service) to market is at the heart of what we do in product management. It’s the type of work machines or AI will never do. It’s what fuels our passion and keeps us coming back day after day doing this work we love.

I’d love for you to leave a comment about a recent offering you’ve taken to the market. Thanks for participating!