Product lifecycle - four steps to success

 This article is a followup on theory of innovative product design.

Following that, once that you know which characteristics your product should have, you need to get to know what basic steps you need to take it through. As shown in the following figure, there are four crucial steps which dictate the roadmap of our product — feasibility study, user adoption, production, enforcement.

General product lifecycle steps

A feasibility study is a must-have and absolutely the first step of every project since its results tell us whether we should go with or abandon our product idea. It implies a legal framework, target market research, required budget, and other resources like team members, stakeholder analysis, technical feasibility, planned timeframe, etc.

User adoption is intentionally listed before we have a developed product. This is because we want to prepare the user, introduce him to the future product so that he can start using it as soon as possible after it enters the market, that is, we grab a part of the market even before we enter it. At the early stage of research it is a good practice to deliver PoC (Proof of Concept) to consumers as soon as possible, and then do iterations for example through the MAUI [1] approach (Measure, Alert, Understand, Improve).

Development overlaps with user adoption — during the development phase, we must ensure the best user experience and the best way to do this is through corrections during the development, where we use the user adoption phase for additional research to meet user’s expectations. From a small/startup company perspective it is also a good practice to enter the market with an MVP (Minimum Viable Product). “MVPs allow you to learn about what people want, what they’re willing to pay for and what method of delivery is best for your product to achieve growth.” [2] With MVP not only time-to-market is shorter but also future change management is much more cost-effective.

Once we enter the market, we usually think that we came to the end, actually we should go back to the beginning. We need to continue with further research in the form of consumer feedback, and also we need to make sure what the competition is doing. Change is a reality. If we walk by the MVP road, this is when we start improving our product — not only adding new features but also optimizing and customizing it.

[1] Suardi L, „How to manage your software product life cycle with MAUI“, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/27296533_How_to_manage_your_software_product_life_cycle_with_MAUI, Accessed on February 8th 2020.

[2] Shalev K, „Why every company needs a minimum viable product“, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/small-business/startups/why-every-company-needs-a-minimum-viable-product/article22087974/, Accessed on February 8th 2020.