Product Development

Ironically, the way to achieve a truly effective customer value management approach is to revisit and revamp the organization's product creation, development, and management disciplines as well. For the traditional telco, product management is a decidedly slow moving, engineering-based process that involves much technology and very little consumer input.

In the modern telecommunications industry, two issues of product development must change quickly and radically if the telco is going to survive.

1. The rate of telco product development must escalate

Each year, telcos integrate more and more new "products" into their product portfolio. As this rate of development increases, so too must the discipline associated with the management and control of the process.

2. The alignment of market needs and products developed must be integrated early in the new product development stage, and be re-synchronized on a continuous basis

Telcos can no longer afford to design products for markets whose specific size, shape, and breadth are not known. Many telco product offerings have been developed for markets that never materialized.

TTA Assistance for Telco Product Developers and Managers

The telco revolution is expanding and now includes, not only maintenance and management of the traditional product portfolios (the POTS (plain old telephone service) products), but the responsibility for conceptualization, marketing, development, and sales of dozens of creative, non-conventional, and highly profitable alternative product offerings. Most telcos find themselves ill-prepared to manage such a momentous task.

TTA has worked with some of the most innovative and creative telco product developers in the world and has helped create some of the newest thinking and most profitable design, development, and management techniques to come along in some time.

Value Propositions for Product Development

The stakes are high for most telcos to be able to better forecast, design, and defend the new products that they develop. Most have come to realize that the largest profit potentials lie not in existing product lines or customer groups, but in the new service offerings that they can create. For many telcos their very survival depends on this capability.

Product development disciplines can help telcos to:

• Better manage the product development process

• Reduce the cost of new product development

• Raise the chance of success of new products

• Better identify the markets, demands, and revenue potentials of new products

• Reduce the overall risk of the new product development process

• Greatly increase the odds of being first to market with the best, newest, and highest impact product offerings

• Greatly increase the number of new products that are considered and expanded

• Greatly increase the rate at which new products can be launched

• Improve the quality assurance of the entire product development process

The TTA DreamCatcher© Methodology

Because the field of telco product development is so new with so many new paradigms and approaches, TTA has developed a methodology to help set up the best practices paradigms and teach the core principles that drive successful telco new product development.

The methodology is known as the TTA-DreamCatcher©. It provides the telco with a complete product development lifecycle upon which to base their understanding and execution of new product development strategies.

TTA Offerings for New Product Development

TTA has developed a complete range of offerings to support your ongoing product development efforts. They include:

• Product portfolio analysis
  Systematic review of your current products and offerings as well as categorization of those products into catalogs and portfolios (units of management)

• New business development
  Approaches, analytics, and support for the new business development function

• Product segmentation
  Development of market segmentation that aligns with the different products in your catalogs

• Product benefit/feature/function analysis
  In-depth mapping of the benefits your products offer in the market place vs the features and functions that different groups of customers are looking for

• Product demand forecasting
  Development of product/market segment based demand forecasts to better anticipate product requirements and capabilities

• TTA-DreamCatcher© methodology
  Comprehensive best practices based approach to help set up and fine tune your product development processes and departments