3 Keys to Cost Effective Product Development
Below are the three biggest keys to minimizing your product development cost. They include having your engineering team use test-driven development, minimizing the time it takes to get feedback from your target audience, and using a proven product development process.
Use test-driven development to minimize the cost of regressions (the largest cost of development)
This will reduce the cost of product development by reducing the engineering costs associated with developing the product.
Minimize the time to feedback from your target audience.
This will reduce the cost of product development by reducing the amount of time spent designing, building, and testing a product that is unwanted by users. Users do not have to be unknown to you, and you can be the user. But a product should solve someone's problem, and if it doesn't solve any problems it's unlikely anyone will ever pay for it.
Use a proven process to differentiate between bug fixes, improvements, and feature changes.
A product team will slow down if there is not a clear delineation between the different work that is required to build a product. Often times the product team can avoid certain bug fixes if they know those features will be rewritten by upcoming feature changes -- however if they don't know what's a bug fix and what's a feature change they won't have the necessary information to make this change.