From the course: Creating a Business Plan

Develop your product

From the course: Creating a Business Plan

Develop your product

- Your business plan has to lay out your product development roadmap. That roadmap should spell out what the major phases are in product development as well as the timelines that go along with it. Describe what's in your minimum viable product, the first product that you put in the market. What are the features you're going to release? Then discuss what the next level of prototypes are going to be, as well as when that final product is going to be available and released into the market. The business plan should also describe your approach to testing, research and development, and what that future product roadmap will be. Explain the key risks in your product development lifecycle, and how are you going to mitigate or account for those risks. For example, at one point, I ran an online ticketing business. Our initial minimum viable product had three features. Customers could sign up for the service. We could list the events we were giving discounts to, and people could hit the buy button and go purchase their tickets. That's it. It was a very bare bones product. Our roadmap then laid out future releases and what features those releases would have. They had things like affiliate tracking and data tracking. We had it where customers could create profiles and we could do some marketing segmentation. Our potential investors wanted to know what our timelines were for each of those features, as well as what the trigger would be, what the gate would be that we would have to pass to invest in building that feature. The reason this was so important was the technology was expensive to build and we faced some key risks in the market and some of those risks came to pass. One of our major partners changed their technology platform and a lot of the features that we were planning in the future, all of a sudden were irrelevant. By having a clear product development roadmap, we knew what those risks were and the actions we would take if they came to pass. When you lay out your product development roadmap, lay out those features and functions at each stage of development and articulate what the gates are for you to build that next level of functionality.

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