Product Development Effectiveness

Publishers are encountering the need to evolve their product strategies to increasingly consider digital offerings, changing customer needs and expectations, and increasing competitive pressures from both existing players and new market entrants. These trends are increasing the pressure on existing product development processes:

• Increasing number of products in increasing formats, often with decreasing units per format
• Need for reduced time-to-market and ability to rapidly incorporate market feedback in offerings
• Need to increase discoverability and relevance to potential readers/customers
• Need to synchronize product delivery with marketing, sales, distribution and post-sale support processes
• Need to customize and individualize title offerings
• Need to integrate technology into products whether useful tools, interactivity or rich media
• Integration with platforms: publisher proprietary and those of channel partners

As each new product is introduced, it is generally accompanied by its own development process, creating a situation where activities are fragmented, unpredictable and in general yield insufficient scale for maximum effectiveness, regardless of whether effectiveness is defined by cost, speed, capacity or flexibility.

At Treadwell Media Group we've lived through these challenges and have implemented processes, organization and technology to relieve the pain. While there is no panacea, all solutions will have one or more key elements:

• Differentiation in customer-facing offerings.
• Scalable platforms behind the scenes for editorial, production, content management and rights management functions.
• Alignment with the product strategy whether the introduction of a few, highly-differentiated products, or a large number of low cost titles.
• Alignment and coordination of centralized functions with product needs via workflow and planning tools.
• Standards where they're invisible, differentiation where they're not.
• Ability to quickly and easily re-use content where appropriate.
• Synchronized delivery of all output and intermediate formats via continuous integration, "XML-first" and other process automation.
• Synchronized and consistent design across all output formats and devices via responsive design techniques.
• Direct feedback loops on product usage, competitor offerings and social trends straight into the product development teams.

Let TMG come in and discuss your product development processes and we'll help you determine if any of these solutions are appropriate for you.