What is a Product Development Life Cycle?
In the previous post, I discussed the concept of the product life cycle and delved into details on its phases. This time let’s consider the product development life cycle that is a part of the product life cycle.
The Product Life Cycle vs Product Development Life Cycle
The product development life cycle focuses on product planning & discovery, development, launch, measurements & learning, and product iterations. In contrast, the product life cycle shows the maturity of the product and its market share. The knowledge about the product life cycle makes possible for a product manager to understand how much product effort he/she needs to spend on every stage of the product development life cycle.
For instance, as a product manager, you are given a goal to build a product for an emerging market. You and your team know nothing about this market apart from the existing demand from the business strategy. Since you know that the product is in the development stage in the product life cycle, you realize that you need to spend considerable effort on the product planning and discovery phase of the product development life cycle to avoid building something wrong (reduce the value risk).
If the business objective of your company is to reduce the customer churn rate of an already existing mature product, you may assume that most likely planning and product discovery phase should take less time then in the scenario above. You may quickly jump to conclusions that only usability should be enhanced by conduction of an initial market, customer and user research. In such a case, the improved user experience may help to solve a business problem and diminish the presence of competitors by making users more satisfied.
The Stages of the Product Development Life Cycle
The effort towards the development of a product can be broken down into six stages: plan & discover, build, launch, measure, learn, and iterate.
Plan & Discover
The planning and discovery stage comprises all work that needs to be done before the building stage. If your goal is to create the right product, it is risky to move ahead with the development of software without making sure that you create something valuable, usable, and business viable. Despite the fact that the product manager is a leader of the effort at this stage, successful product managers involve a whole product team in some planning and discovery activities.
The graph below shows activities within the product planning and discovery effort. I consider them as incremental steps to be taken to make a decision on ‘what’ to build, for ‘whom’, and ‘why’.
The first two steps are about understanding the business and developing the product vision. The next steps are all about continuous product discovery.
1. Understand the Business Vision and Business Strategy
Before any product effort is made, a dedicated product team should understand business needs. In other words, the team should figure out ‘what’ a company wants to achieve and ‘why’. Every product effort should contribute to a business objective in a way to make customers and users happy. Therefore business needs should be overlooked by no means.
2. Develop the Product Vision
Product vision reveals the purpose of a product by giving an answer to ‘why’ a product is supposed to be built. The product vision should be aligned with the business vision and business strategy.
3. Develop the Initial Product Strategy
The product strategy shows how product vision is realized. It is made up of the three key elements: market and needs, key features, and business goals. The first version of the product strategy should be based on
- the initial market, customer, and user research to explore problems to be solved;
- assumptions about the best solutions to the defined problems;
- knowledge about the business benefit which a product should bring.
Market research should help to give an answer to the following questions:
- What are the needs of the market?
- What is the market size?
- Are there any competitors?
- What are the key features of competitors’ products?
Very often the market research is already done during the development of the business strategy so that some answers can be already provided at the company level, e.g. you can have the information on the market size, demand, and competitors. Yet a product team should analyze the available value proposition in the market and try to come up with better solutions.
Customer research should lead to a better understanding of who is your target group of customers and specify its needs. It is done to reduce the risk of creating the wrong product.
User research focuses on a better understanding of user problems to tackle usability risk.
These three types of research should result in a statement of the target customer and user problems. Access to such information helps a product team to come up with the right key features. This can be done by means of various ideation techniques such as brainstorming, story mapping, etc. It is worth noting that all members of a product team and key stakeholders should participate in the ideation process. As an example, you may invite people from marketing and sales, customers support, and legal department. Availability of engineers can reduce the feasibility risk while the key stakeholders can help to validate the business viability of ideas.
Once the initial version of the product strategy is ready, the next step can be taken.
You can read more about the development of the product vision and strategy in my previous post.
4. Create a prototype
The prototype is a scaled-down version of a product aimed at reduction of feasibility, value, and usability risks. You need to put as little effort as possible to be able to say whether the solution is achievable from the technical point of view. Once the feasibility risk is minimized, try to focus on building a user prototype. Keep in mind that that the user prototype has a sole purpose — validate proposed value and usability. Don’t focus on its operational readiness since it is not supposed to be launched.
5. Test it & Learn
Show your prototype to reference customers and users. There are various quantitative and qualitative research techniques that allow validating value and usability. You can either ask users what they like about a potential product by interviewing them or observe their behaviour. You can collect some data on usage of tested features and learn why some of them aren’t used as it was expected.
6. Iterate, Pivot, or Kill.
Companies and product teams should realize that not all ideas will work after a prototype is tested. And those solutions which seem to be promising need to be iterated again. At this step, a product manager needs to make a decision on what to do with the validated features. There are three choices:
If you decide to iterate a product, you need to review the initial product strategy and enhance it. The new knowledge about customer and user problems will help to create a validated version of the product strategy. At this step, you need to improve solutions and test them as long as you don’t decide to build a minimum viable product (MVP) and launch it.
If experiments showed that your assumptions about customer and user problems are wrong, or an offered solution doesn’t work at all, you need to pivot. You have to change a product strategy completely to achieve product vision in another way.
If you pivot repeatedly, most likely you need to kill the idea about building a product.
Build
At this stage, you should have the “final” version of a product strategy which defines validated needs and solutions. And it’s time to build the first version of a product.
Before you do that, share your product strategy with your team again. It will help to create a roadmap, set priorities, define which feature will be in the scope of which release, create epics, and break them down into user stories.
You will benefit if you build and release MVP. First, you can be focused on must features that bring the biggest value. It can help to reduce the risk of failure. Second, you can deliver the product faster that should enable you to speed up learning by doing continues product discovery.
Launch
When a product is launched, it is introduced to the market. This stage should be strongly supported by folks from sales and marketing. They need to put their best effort into raising awareness among customers and attracting them.
Meanwhile, a product team should start the product discovery process from scratch. Since a number of customers and users rise, the product team can start collecting more and more data to plan further improvements. Also, there is a chance to receive feedback. Now ideas may come not only from the team itself. Customers and users start using the product in real life. They may come across some usability problems and share with you their ideas. It is important to continue listening to customers and users to avoid their churn.
Measure & Learn
Measurement can be done through quantitative research. It can be realized by measuring different key performance indicators (KPIs). As long as they are monitored, a company may make quick decisions and improve its chances to set the correct business objectives. For example, the company monitors the acquisition rate. If it drops to a predefined value, a company may set a business goal to improve the situation. Most likely, sales and marketing will start contributing to this goal as well as a product team. As a product manager, you need to initiate qualitative research to understand why the business problem happens at the product level.
The research will help to gain new knowledge. It will lead to the generation of new ideas to improve the product in a way to meet the business objective.
Constant measurements, monitoring of metrics, and learning should help not to lose control over product features.
Iterate
Thanks to the continuous development activities, a company and product team know a lot about a product, customers, users, their problems, and behaviour. It enables the company to react fast to changes in desires and preferences of customers and users and adapt its software quickly to market needs.
At this stage, the product team should know which features need to be maintained and which ones are supposed to be retired soon. The team needs to discover the product and deliver new versions continuously to be present in the market on a continuous basis.
Final Thoughts
Understanding of where a product is in the product life cycle, as well as business, customers and users needs, can help to prioritize product effort.
According to the product development life cycle model, there are six stages of the product effort. A dedicated product team needs to pass through these stages continuously to ensure business, customer, and user satisfaction.
I consider the product planning and discovery stage as the most important one if you want to build the new product. It consists of the six incremental steps, first two of which are prerequisites for starting the product discovery process.
