Product Development Process and The Seven Stages
Every product, that is being developed, has a series of steps that they go through, we call this the product development process. There are seven main phases to this process: conceive, plan, develop, iterate, launch, steady state, and then finally we either maintain or kill the product.
I) Conceive
This is the R&D stage for the idea generation for a particular problem or a set of problems. The ideas may come from different sources: user feedback, co-workers, competitors etc.
- Collect users’ problems, understand them and brainstorm solutions.
- Identify the focus areas to work on.
II) Plan
Market research is done on the ideas which are already accepted in the previous stage. These selected ideas are also called initiatives
- Evaluate the different selected ideas or initiatives.
- Look at the business case and see what goal is getting fulfilled.
- Customers may be interviewed to understand whether the feature conceptualised solves the actual problem.
- Build a roadmap of the different initiatives, how long it might take, and at what point a particular initiative should be built.
III) Develop/Execute
This is the stage where we get our hands dirty. We lay out the requirements and by the time dev team starts implementing these requirements should be set and shouldn’t really change until we get some sort of validation from the previous iteration or sprint.
- Make timelines and detail out the features that need to be built.
- Write user stories and specs.
- Give estimations after consulting with the Dev team.
IV) Validate
Once an early prototype or MVP, Minimum Viable Product, of the product or service is developed, it’s time to test it with the real customers.
- Test the assumption made with the MVP.
- Get early feedback from the users by using alpha and beta testing.
V) Launch
Deciding when, how and where to launch the product will determine its early impact on the market. This may determine the early success of the product.
- Work with the marketing & sales, legal and PR team to position the product for public launch.
- Develop & implement a Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy to help potential customers discover the product and eventually purchase it.
VI) Post Launch
We either hold the product in a steady state or continue iterating on it based on the customer feedback & our analysis.
- Collect metrics on how people using the product.
- Keep optimizing the product based on the analysis done.
- Assess continued efforts to see how likely is the growth to keep moving forward.
- Marketing & sales continue.
VII) Maintain or Kill
During this stage, we gather all the data we have collected and answer a few questions: how competitive the product is and what is the ROI. Based on this, we decide whether to continue maintaining the product or kill it.
- Follow sun-setting to kill the product. This is a slow transition to the end of life of the product.
- Allow users to back up their data before the final shut down.
Killing off brands is not a popular or pleasant thought. It can be tough to admit that it’s time to pull the plug, but we should do the needful to move up the ladder in the game.
