Every great product was once just an idea, an itch, a frustration the founder had with the existing status quo. Whether you are building a product for your new startup or looking to add a new product to an existing lineup, this is the stage where you will have to tread carefully. Because an idea, when it first hits you is at its most vulnerable form. Even the smallest form of critique or negative comment can fizzle it out of existence. Share your new product idea prematurely to the wrong person and you risk killing a billion-dollar idea. Share it too late and you risk spending too much time on something that wasn’t worth investing in at all.

In the Strategic planning phase, most companies spend more time thinking about what to build than why they should be building specific capabilities. With Cosmos, we focus on why we’re building our product. As a result, our thought process naturally shifts its focus on the end-users and their pain points.

Pass the design for your team to build it. Even after your development team has built it, you know there will be iterations that will take the feature back to the design team. Likewise, even after a feature is passed to the QA team, it still comes back to the development team for bugs that need to get fixed. Yet, most teams mistake this step in the process by assuming product development to be linear. This non-linear aspect to the product development process makes it harder to collaborate, predict, and become efficient. As a result, issue trackers and generic project management tools often fail.

A well-planned launch can be powerful. It lets you get in front of an audience, helps get your product adopted, and ultimately brings customers.