The Product Development Lifecycle
My first post on an actual Product Management Topic. Exploring the nuance of the PDL and how to best apply it to your organization.
What is the product development lifecycle? If you ask the internet, most folks seem to be more or less on the same page.
Four Phases: Introduction, Growth, Maturity, and Decline
Seven(ish) Stages: Idea, Validation, Prototyping, Marketing, Development, Launch, and Iteration.
None of this was revolutionary or shocking to me as it stirred up some flashbacks to an early morning college marketing class ten years ago where we slogged through fifty PowerPoint slides reviewing more or less the same waterfall-looking infographics. And that’s ok.
The concepts here are accurate. The delineation of goals and strategies to be used for different phases of a product's existence are apt. It's important to call out that you should validate your ideas before you sink thousands or millions of dollars into a prototype and I’m glad they call out the idea of product iteration. But it all seems a bit too... textbook.
Before stepping into a product management role, I spent years working my way up the Agile project management ladder. My first corporate gig was Project Coordinator for a healthcare software company, and I had zero experience with the tech industry and the word “Agile” was something my high school football coach would yell at us when we didn’t move as fast as he thought we should. Four years and a few industry certifications later I was tasked with rebuilding a PMO for an ag-tech startup suffering from a bad case of waterfall development.
The company had no product roles at the time and all product decisions were made by a single VP who oversaw the entire engineering department of 20-some cross-discipline engineers. Each in-flight product had a pre-set deadline and followed the same extensively detailed product development plan that looked exactly like the seven stages above, specifically with iteration as the final step. Oh, and there were sixteen of these new products in development at the same time. What could go wrong?
I’ll spare you the details, but the moral of the story is that, unless you are working on fail-proof military-grade hardware that has an unlimited timeline and budget, waterfall development is the wrong approach to modern product development. It assumes too much and leaves no room for error, prioritizing the timeline at the expense of the product. And that is exactly the message I get when I read the seven sequential stages of the product development lifecycle.
Ok so waterfall is bad, and the model is too simple. How do we fix it?
Each of the four phases above should work through its own track of a subset of the seven stages above. If the market and participation strategy thereof is dynamic, the product development stages should be too. Ideas become features and resources are used only if there is substantial value to be gained from them. Let's rethink the linear, waterfall-type flow of the phases for each stage.
Phase One: Introduction
Start with the most core MVP to efficiently go to market and validate if the market finds it valuable. This enables you to shorten your prototyping given the reduced complexity of the product, build a lightweight marketing campaign around the core value prop, batch produce a small first run, and launch. Minimizing scope and parallelization of workstreams mitigates cost, (i.e. risk) and speeds up time to market.
Summary: Low cost and quick to market.
Stages: Idea, Validation, Prototyping, Marketing, Development, Launch
Phase Two: Growth
So, the MVP had product-market fit and it’s gaining momentum. Great. What’s missing? Leverage your consumer base and the usage metrics to find the missing value, generate feature ideas to move the product from viable to loveable, validate your ideas, and iteratively develop against version one. By leveraging the experiences from your first foray into the market, you greatly reduce the cycles necessary for prototyping, marketing, and launch, and free up time and budget for net new feature development and scalability necessary to facilitate the growth demanded by the market.
Summary: Viable to loveable. Leverage the success of phase one to focus on iterative development and scale.
Stages: Validation, Iteration, Development, Launch (Deploy)
Phase Three: Maturity
At this stage, the product has experienced successful growth and enjoys a considerable market share. It’s profitable, generally stable, and lovable. The risk-reward math tells you that any major shift in features or feel probably won’t increase profitability but could unnecessarily torpedo the product. Take the profits, invest them in a new idea or growth stage product, minimize development to simply keep the lights on, and focus on other things.
Summary: If it aint broke, don’t fix it.
Stages: Validation, Iteration (Support), Launch (Deploy)
Phase Four: Decline
Your product has had its time in the sun. A newer, better solution has come around to solve the problem this product has solved for years. You’ve solved all of the major bugs and issues that aren’t a problem of an aging architecture or codebase and you're losing more users than you gain. The product would take far more resources to revamp than there is upside so you choose to sunset it. Take whatever revenue you can get and sink no more resources into it. Document as much as you can from the success of the product for a next-gen solution or generalize your learnings for posterity.
Summary: Salvage as much as possible and reflect. Divert all resources elsewhere.
Stages: Idea, and Validation.
In my last post, we arrived at the conclusion that a product manager is essentially a freelance entrepreneur. Successful entrepreneurs are efficient with their resources and optimize for profitability. Successful product managers do the same. A one-size-fits-all product lifecycle is neither resource efficient nor optimal for profitability, but a dynamic one can be.