Launching a new product in an existing market: What you need to know

No matter the timeline, no matter the market, launching a new product is never easy. Even the most innovative companies look for ways around the challenges that they face when developing and introducing new products. If you’re launching a new product in an existing market, it’s tempting to rely on your existing code and infrastructure. Building on existing projects, though, might have unforeseen drawbacks.

There are two significant factors that can hamstring innovation and creation. First, building toward an audience of existing customers can mire new thinking and possibilities. Second, using a code base from an existing product can close doors that designers didn’t know existed in the first place. If you rely on existing products, development of your new project could be slowed to a crawl, as the old or existing code can stifle the flexibility needed for the new product and limit creativity.

Our team at BitTitan learned a lot about creating a new product for an existing market when we rolled out Voleer, automation software for IT professionals, in 2019. Although our team could’ve used existing code from MigrationWiz, BitTitan’s established migration tool, we ultimately decided to build Voleer from square one. While it’s easy in the beginning to use existing code and ways of thinking, breaking away from what’s come before is key to unlocking innovation and creating something truly successful.

Market Fit and Customer Profile

Product development is too often based on the "Field of Dreams" assumption: Build it, and they will come. But this is rarely the case. With any new product, it’s always important to know your target customer and truly understand the problem you are solving for that customer. This consideration gets complicated when launching into an existing market.

You have to answer this question: Is this a different product for the same customers, or is our new product for a different customer base? This question helps everything from marketing to targeting to product quality. Think about Microsoft Word. If you’re Microsoft and develop Excel, that’s clearly a new product for the same customer profile, which means your marketing and development will be similar to the first product. But if you’re creating a game console like Microsoft Xbox, that’s a whole new customer base, and that translates to a fresh approach to development and marketing.

Production Schedule

It can be easy for an existing product to influence the development of the new product in ways you might not anticipate. That’s why it’s important to intentionally decouple the development of the new product from the previous one.

When we developed Voleer, our team moved to a new, separate office space. Rather than following the path we used to build MigrationWiz, we changed our development methodology from a traditional scrum-based process to Kanban, a method to help manage change and continuous improvements in the organization. The new product demanded a new way of doing things. Rather than using the old process simply because it worked once, we chose a methodology and schedule based on the new product, new timelines, and new factors. Being tied to an existing product release schedule can either slow down new development or negatively impact its process.

The Speed of Clean Code

Building from scratch doesn’t just apply to timelines or methodology. Freedom from previous products also means freedom from old code.

There’s always a temptation to build from an existing code base, and that temptation makes sense. It saves time in the short term and propels the new product through its first few iterations. But using existing code can also predetermine paths for development in negative ways, limiting capabilities and product growth.

Building from scratch can unlock key elements in new product development. The team is free to pick any technology from the beginning, and we can also take advantage of open-source technologies so that product code can be enhanced using existing tools off the shelf.

It’s true -- building from scratch can be difficult. But you can do it in just a few months, and in doing it this way, you can achieve greater speed and quality, thanks to a clean code base.

Time and Space
All of this assumes, of course, that you have two things every product needs: a dedicated engineering team and rapid iteration.

The importance of a dedicated team can’t be underestimated. It is significantly more effective to have people who work exclusively on the new product. They aren’t distracted by past or parallel projects; their attention isn’t split. The necessary focus and speed only comes from a dedicated team.

Higher quality decisions can be made by enabling team members to make decisions themselves. You don’t have to wait for a product owner’s call. It’s yours; you make decisions when they need to be made, and if something needs to change later, you will typically have better information by then.

Bringing a new product to an existing market isn’t easy. But striking out on your own and decoupling your new product from existing products can save time, boost creativity, and ultimately, unlock what’s truly possible.

And finally, rapid iteration is key. This allows you to evolve ideas quickly in a focused environment. Adopting Kanban reduced our iteration duration to a week without overwhelming developers.

Image credit: nd3000 / Shutterstock

Alex Tkatch is Senior Director of Software Engineering at BitTitan, where he leads the product engineering team for Voleer, an automation solution for IT service professionals. He is an established software development leader with extensive experience in architecture, design, and implementation of software products known for reliability, scalability, and security.