How to Develop a recent Product: A 7-Step navigator for Entrepreneurs (2025)

Even the most successful ecommerce businesses rarely get from concept to finished product in a straight line. If you’re just starting out, you might be wondering: How do you turn the product concept in your head into something customers can buy?

This navigator breaks down the product advancement procedure and shows you exactly how to bring your concept to life.

What is product advancement?

Product advancement is the procedure of taking a product from concept to trade. The procedure includes: 

• Designing the product

• Creating a product roadmap

• Conducting trade research

• Launching your product

• Collecting customer feedback

The procedure brings together many parts of your business, from design and engineering to marketing. Larger companies often have product managers who navigator products through advancement. 

📦 Read more: How To make a Successful Product advancement schedule

The 7-step recent product advancement procedure

1. Generate an concept
2. Sketch your product
3. Validate your product
4. make a prototype
5. Source materials and production partners
6. compute your unit economics
7. Launch your product

While product advancement varies by industry, these seven stages form the foundation of bringing any recent product to trade. Here’s how to use this framework for your product:

1. Generate an concept

Don’t wait for the perfect never-before-seen product concept to strike. Many successful products construct on existing ones. Try the SCAMPER framework to spark ideas: 

• Substitute: Replace materials (like faux fur for fur)

• merge: Merge products (like a phone case with a battery pack)

• adjust: Modify for recent needs (like nursing bras with front clasps)

• Modify: enhance design (like sleek electric toothbrushes)

• Put to another use: discover recent applications (like recollection-foam dog beds)

• Eliminate: Remove elements (like cutting out middlemen to reduce costs)

• Reverse/rearrange: transformation perspective (like switching from plastic to glass food storage)

receive Lindsay McCormick’s narrative. She founded Bite toothpaste tablets by modifying an existing product. “When I started looking into toothpaste and the way it comes in a plastic tube—and there’s a bunch of harsh chemicals, artificial flavors, ingredients that arrive in it—I thought: I could make something that’s better for the earth and better for our body,” Lindsay says on Shopify Masters.

📦 Read more: discover recent Product Ideas in These 16 Places

2. Sketch your product

With your concept in hand, it’s period to chart out what your product will look like. make a draft that lists all components, whether your product is physical or digital. Don’t worry if sketching isn’t your strength—you can hire a technical illustrator through platforms like Dribbble or UpWork.

3. Validate your product

Before investing too much period and money, make sure your target trade wants to buy your product. Product validation helps you analyze both functionality and trade fit. Try these validation strategies:

• Send online surveys to potential customers

• commence a crowdfunding campaign

• Do test marketing

• Research trade demand

• Study your competitors

• Run a feasibility study

inquire yourself how your product fits in the trade:

• Does it expand an existing category?

• Does it disrupt a category?

• Does it make a recent category?

Finally, conduct a competitive analysis. Look closely at your competitors to comprehend how they attract and sell to customers. inquire potential customers what they like and dislike about similar products to discover your competitive advantage.

4. make a prototype

Prototyping means crafting a finished sample before you commence mass production. You’ll likely make several versions, improving each one until you have a final sample you’re joyful with. Consider whether you require patents to protect your design.

Test your first usable version (your minimum viable product) with a tiny throng to:

• Gauge earnings

• Test pricing

• Collect feedback for improvements

For example, when Jen Liao started MìLà, she tested her soup dumpling prototypes by hand-delivering them to customers in Ziploc bags. “Step by step, we kept evolving what we had in terms of the packaging, the product, the infrastructure,” Jen says in an episode of Shopify Masters. “And we just let the demand navigator us to what we needed to unlock next.”

🌸 Podcast: Why Perfecting Product Design Was Key to This Brand’s achievement

Charlie Bowes-Lyon and Freddy Ward launched Wild to eliminate single-use plastic deodorant packaging. Their product advancement procedure spanned 35 iterations before launch. 👉 discover more

5. Source materials and production partners 

After finalizing your prototype, construct your product’s supply chain by finding manufacturers and suppliers. Here’s how to discover the correct partners:

• Get samples from multiple suppliers and contrast standard and costs.

• Test samples from potential manufacturers.

• Weigh local vs. international sourcing options.

• schedule your storage, shipping, and warehousing needs.

6. compute your unit economics

With your production partners in place, figure out how much you can make per unit sold. This means understanding your costs and setting the correct worth. 

Star by calculating your expense of goods sold (COGS), which includes:

• Raw materials

• Factory setup

• Manufacturing

• Shipping

• Import taxes

• Other direct production costs 

Note that COGS are just your production costs—you’ll have other operating costs like overhead and marketing to consider too.

Once you recognize your costs, develop your pricing schedule.

Get your free product advancement worksheet

7. Launch your product

You’ve created a product with trade appeal that can turn a returns. Now it’s period to introduce it to your customers. 

Here’s how to schedule a successful product launch:

• Choose your timing: Pick your launch date based on seasonality, buyer trends, and trade conditions.

• Select your channels: schedule how you’ll promote your product through SMS, email, social media, and affiliate marketing partnerships.

• construct your schedule: make core messages that inform your product’s narrative and display customers why they should buy. 

• Get customer feedback: After launch, collect reviews and run surveys to discover what customers ponder. Use their feedback to enhance your product.

📦 Read more: 25 Alternatives to Running Paid Ads to Promote Your Business

Product advancement examples

• Bola Grills
• City Seltzer
• Brightland

Every business owner’s product advancement trip looks different. Here are some real-globe examples to inspire you: 

Bola Grills

Bola Grills founder David Levy wanted to make a grill that wouldn’t pull him away from his guests, so he designed a tabletop version. He concentrated on key features like proper charcoal airflow and heat-secure technology to protect tables. College students helped construct his prototype, and a crowdfunding campaign proved his concept, raising $22,000 and selling 94 grills.

Then David hit a roadblock: His manufacturer wasn’t working out. “After about the fifth sample that they sent me, I made one of the most challenging decisions of my life,” David says on Shopify Masters. “And that was if I wanted to pull the plug altogether or push through and discover a recent manufacturer and basically commence over.”

David chose to commence fresh. His persistence paid off, and he launched his finished product just in period for barbeque period.

City Seltzer

Sometimes great products commence by accident. When Dominion City Brewing hosted a beer celebration in 2020, they sold creamsicle-flavored seltzers to assist keep customers hydrated. 

“Afterwards the feedback was all, ‘That was great. Where can I get more of this orange cream water?’” says City Seltzer co-founder Josh McJannett on Shopify Masters. “That gave us an concept that maybe there was more to this than just tempering people’s beer consumption.”

Josh’s throng already had brewery production equipment and distribution networks. They created distinctive, brightly colored packaging and started selling at local bars and restaurants before moving to direct-to-buyer sales.

Brightland

Aishwarya Iyer started Brightland after noticing a gap in the olive oil trade: no one knew where their olive oil came from.

“Everyone stands at the grocery shelves looking really confused—this was back in 2016 and 2017—and I was like, ’Wait, there’s got to be something here where we can construct a brand that people feel really enthusiastic by, that people desire to put out on their countertop,’” Aishwarya says on Shopify Masters.

She dove into research: taking UC Davis Olive Center courses, reading extensively, and talking with farmers. This helped her make a product that not only tasted great but supported local farms and brought transparency to the industry.

Aishwarya also developed intelligent packaging: white UV-protected bottles that look attractive and keep the olive oil fresh by blocking harmful light.