Why Product Developer Needs SmartTask As Their Productivity Work Management Tool

Thousands of new products are released globally every year. It could be a product launched by a global leader or it can be a product by a small startup, it doesn’t matter as only a few products ever “make it”. The reason could be that your product is not needed in the market or you were not able to sell it properly.

Demand and sales are directly related. Therefore only those products should be invented which have demand in the market so that it is easier to sell the product. You can also create something that you think you can create a demand for or you are sure that you can sell without demand too. Eg: Dimond shaped Ice-cube tray, this product was not needed but the developers thought that they can sell it and are selling it like crazy on Amazon. 

Not everyone is lucky enough! According to Harward Business School professor Clayton Christen, each year more than 30,000 new customer products are launched and 80% of them fail. Some other statistics stat that 80-95% of new products fail!

A Harward Business Review article written by Joan Schneider and Julie Hall states, “ The biggest problem they’ve encountered is lack of preparation. Product developers are so focused on designing and manufacturing new products that they postpone the hard work of getting ready to market them until too late in the game”.

Yesterday, I saw a post on Instagram stating what we learned from Elon Musk after the new Tesla release:

1. Build and leverage your personal brand - we do not know who the CEO of BMW or Mercedes is, but we all know who the CEO of Tesla is.
2. Sell it first, Build it later - Tesla will start production of Cyber Truck in 2021, but it has sold 250k trucks in pre-order. 
   
   You can say that this is because of the vision statement of Tesla and that person is Elon Musk and we are ordinary people, we cannot sell the product unless and until we have the product on hand and then only we are able to sell it. Therefore the main target or milestone of a Product Developer is to first develop the complete product.

But, the production stage is taking all the time available and then the product developer has to postpone creating the marketing strategy and thus they have to face the consequences of the same. 

The following are the phases of Product Development:

• Initialization and Research
• Defining and Planning 
• Designing
• Implementation
• Marketing
• Giving Training and Demonstration of the product
• Launch

Along with handling all these phases, the project developer is responsible for managing the team too.

Now doing all these chores alone is the real problem. So, why not use a helping hand?

More than a product, SmartTask is a partner that works as an online work management tool which can streamline your process and can help you and your team in working together and efficiently. 

The following are the ways in which you can utilize SmartTask:

1. Research:

According to the Pareto Principle, 80% of the sales from the new product will come from the 20% causes. 

This means if your product has 5 features, one of them will be the reason for its 80% sales. 

Market or Product research is the starting point of product development. The Product developer has to talk with potential customers, other developers, team and have to research the market about what features the customers need in the product.

There is a thin difference in wanting and needing the feature. 

For example, the customers want a 50 MP camera and they need a fast processor in the phone, what do you think will be the feature because of which your product will produce the maximum sales?

The fast processor would be the one feature that will result in 80% of the sales. Therefore you should consider needs over wants. 

Here, you can utilize SmartTask as a Task Management Software by creating the task of all the features that you think should be in the market and then the whole team can easily evaluate the feature and can decide if they want to incorporate this feature or not in the task itself. You can also add your superiors here to finalize the feature.

If any task is decided to be taken forward, you can simply assign it to the development team and the development will be started in just a few clicks. 

2. Planning and Defining:

Create a workspace that can be viewed and accessed over your phone or system.

No need for unnecessary meetings, forget to call your team members to know their progress over a particular work or task, assigning work will be easier and easiest to follow-up on tasks. 

SmartTask, as a Project Management software, will help in streamlining your every product development project and will help in creating accountability.

Thus it enables you to see the bigger picture of the whole project on a single screen, across all the products and departments. Therefore you can review all the work by sitting on your system and can save your time, so you can devote the time spent on taking follow-up from the team to more important tasks. IT has provided so many solutions, so why not use them and increase productivity?

3. Analytics:

Get an analytics view of the project to know the progress of the whole project in charts form. You can create your own charts depending on your requirements. 

4. Timeline:

As I mentioned earlier, Product developers are so busy designing and manufacturing new products that they postpone marketing. Therefore the product enters the market when it’s too late. 

The simple solution is to avoid being delayed. Don’t worry, your personal assistant SmartTask is here to help you in this case.

As you start working on your product, SmartTask will create a timeline view, which will serve you as a report in which you can view the original plan. i.e. baseline (the yellow line) and the actual or the current timeline (the one above the yellow one). This way you can simply find out where the delay was in the project and who caused the delay. Then you can simply click on the task and ask the assignee about the delay. 

Thus, you can know where was the project stuck and then you can take the corresponding measures. 

You can choose from different views like the board view, calendar view, list view, or you can also make your custom view, therefore your personal assistant Smarttask enables you to view the project however you want. 

5. Designing:

Once the team has agreed on the specifications of the product, now comes the work of designing the product. The product developer has to create a detailed design work, prepare working drawings and a prototype. 

Many times, it happens that the developer will have to collaborate with technical specialists or engineers to ensure they create the best design.

You can use the guest user feature on SmartTask here. You can invite third-party collaborators to your SmartTask workflow. They can work on a particular task or a project with you and that too without any charges.

For example, in the image above, I have invited Ruchi Joshi as a guest user to work with me and my team on a particular project. 

6. Forum Integration: 

Designing is a continuous step. For example, if your product is an online site, they require continuous designing and updating. 

If you want to keep adding new features to your product, you can also streamline this with SmartTask. 

You must have a “Forum” page on your website. The SmartTask team can integrate your forum page with your SmartTask project, in this way, all the new feature requests will become a task in SmartTask and then you can decide whether you want to add that feature or not and you can simply work over that request by assigning it to a dedicated person. 

7. Implementation:

As you start working on the project, a lot of follow-ups and deviations are to be faced. 

This is the stage where SmartTask is most useful as it makes this stage the easiest stage for you by miniaturizing your whole organization in one single screen. 

Once you have created all the tasks and have added the start and end date, it is now the work of SmartTask to remind you of all your tasks and highlight all the tasks that are overdue. 

As SmartTask follows the rules of the single task-single assignee, all the assignees are solely responsible for their tasks. 

Dependencies can also be set, for example, if task 2 is dependent on task 1, as soon as task 1 is completed, the person doing task 2 will get an immediate notification.

If you want to know each and every detail or changes about a task, you can add yourself as a follower in the task, thus you will be notified about all the notifications of that particular task. Notifications will come as a desktop pop-up and you will get mobile notifications too.

As SmartTask is available on smartphones too, you can utilize it whenever you want to.

8. Marketing:

Now comes the stage of marketing, sales and customer support. 

The product is new, no one in the market knows about the product, being the product developer, it is their duty to market the product and sell it. 

The developer of the product is always the best seller as he knows all the ins and outs of the product and no one knows the product better then they know it. 

9. CRM:  

You can use SmartTask to manage your sales pipeline.

Create an Inquires project.

You can either add all the leads manually or if you get all the leads from a B2B site, the process can be automated and all the leads will automatically become a task and the contact info will also be added. 

Fields like Deal stage (.i.e lead, lead qualified, meeting, deal lost, deal won), Deal value, Keywords, etc. could be added using the custom field feature of SmartTask. You can create your own unique fields too. 

CRM analytics helps you to know the estimated sales and the overview of the whole sales process.  

Various other features of SmartTask that can help you:

1. Reports:

The view of SmartTask is totally customizable. 

For example, if you want to see all the overdue tasks only, you can search for them in the advanced search option and then you can save the template as a report. 

2. Portfolios:

If you have various product development projects going around, you can create a portfolio view of them and can get the analytics of all the projects in a single view.