Accelerating Product Time-To-Market
Enhance your competitive edge through integrated product delivery
In today’s business landscape, the ability to bring products to market swiftly is paramount to success. To accomplish this, organizations must adopt an integrated product delivery lifecycle approach that optimizes the journey from concept to launch as part of an overall modern product company transformation.
This article dives into the four pivotal stages of the product delivery lifecycle, providing comprehensive insights into each focus area. Leveraging this approach, we have helped a number of Fortune 500 cross-industry companies shift from being laggards in their industry to driving out some of the most innovative solutions and leaping ahead of the competition. The implemented processes have resulted in significantly reduced time to market and accelerated product innovation. By harnessing this knowledge, businesses can drive the delivery of successful outcomes.
According to the Product Excellence Report by Productboard, 48% of product leaders said identifying bottlenecks, clearing blockers, and helping team ship faster were their top challenges. Challenges emerge when leaders silo teams that drive product management, agile development, and infrastructure, support, and operations without establishing an effective engagement model across the organization to drive execution.
The fundamental issue is that often nobody is charged with the authority to watch over and drive the integrated experience of product innovation to market delivery. The process is traditionally broken up into discrete organizations with executives that have competing priorities and are focused on meeting the performance metrics of their siloed functions. The shift must be the focus on an integrated set of outcomes and a roadmap that drives collaboration among teams on core deliverables that expedite product delivery.
We’re seeing companies shift to increased clarity around roles and responsibilities and defining the right capabilities across the product lifecycle, but we have found that this does not go far enough. Companies require clear decision-making authority, collaboration on critical deliverables, and a defined team engagement model. Challenges that often turn into roadblocks occur in the handoffs and ineffective use of deliverables between product management and development teams and from development teams to support organizations. It is important to ensure that the roles have the appropriate accountability and responsibility and are trained to collaborate on critical deliverables. Without the alignment on who does what within the engagement model, product management, delivery, and operations often fall short of their business objectives.
Many organizations have not fully considered developing a specific division with the authority, decision rights, and management support to facilitate and deliver cross-functional services to enable the integrated experience required for successful product deployment and management. This oversight can result in missed opportunities to bring innovative products and solutions to the market, consequently losing ground to competitors and forfeiting potential revenue.
To be effective, executive teams must understand the integrated product delivery lifecycle, align cross-functional teams, and streamline the decision-making processes. Teams must also leverage technological advancements in cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI) to realize efficiencies and drive product intelligence.
Implementing an integrated product lifecycle can lead to several beneficial outcomes, including enhanced efficiency in product development, data-driven decision making, reduced costs, improved product quality, increased flexibility and responsiveness to market changes, better risk management, sustainability and compliance with regulatory standards, and enhanced cross-functional collaboration. These outcomes contribute to the overall efficiency, market responsiveness, and success of the product development process. By understanding the key stages of the integrated product lifecycle, C-level executives get better transparency and insights into navigating the complexities of driving the process of product innovation to product launch and securing their competitive advantages in rapidly evolving markets.
1. Product management and design
The initial stage of the product delivery lifecycle focuses on product management and design. We typically find that multiple resources will be required to produce the right deliverables across the product management and design process. It is critical to understand how each of the deliverables builds on and interrelates with each other. It involves five key areas:
Innovation, ideation, and experimentation
Creativity and generating new ideas are essential for product development. Encourage teams to explore innovative concepts, conduct brainstorming sessions, and experiment to validate ideas. Leaders can determine the level of success by the number of innovative ideas generated and implemented.
Product strategy
Developing a clear product strategy aligns the product with the overall business objectives and includes defining target markets, identifying customer needs, and outlining the product’s value proposition. We recommend setting a goal for the number of product features deployed in line with the defined product strategy and roadmap.
Product definition and scope
Teams should conduct market research and translate customer needs into clear customer journeys with defined touchpoints and impacted personas. Once complete, detailing product requirements, epics, features, and user stories is crucial for a successful product definition and scope. Teams should ensure that they are defining and tracking a high percentage of product requirements that are aligned with epics, features, and user stories as part of the plan.
Product design
Create the user experience and user interface design of the product. This typically includes wireframing and visual designs, prototyping, A/B testing, and a solution architecture that aligns with the overall enterprise architecture decision of the company. These activities ensure a user-friendly and visually appealing product that can be built on a scalable architecture. To drive accelerated product delivery, the product teams must collaborate with agile solution leads to drive a prioritized backlog of user stories for quarterly planning, development, and management. Success in this area will drive increased user satisfaction with the product, task completion times or error rates, and number of user stories completed.
Product planning and governance
Effective planning and governance ensures the product development process remains on track. Establish and track project scope, schedule, budget, and resource allocation and implement mechanisms for decision making and stakeholder engagement. The development of an integrated product roadmap is critical for driving insights into how targeted releases achieve product milestones.
2. Agile product development
In the next stage, organizations need to collaborate with agile product development teams to streamline prioritized development and implementation tasks. This is completed using a prioritized and groomed backlog managed through an established sprint cadence. Collaboration, communication, and handoffs between product teams and agile development teams are often challenging and a source of critical roadblocks and breakdowns in the ability to drive accelerated product delivery. This stage encompasses the following areas:
Solution design
Establish the detailed design and architecture of the product with considerations for scalability, performance, and technical feasibility. Solution design teams collaborate with product management teams to ensure alignment between the business requirements and the overall solution design. A well-formed and managed backlog should be established and used to protect teams from scope creep during the sprints. Not doing so often results in reducing velocity and confusing the development teams. Teams should strive for complete user stories with full acceptance criteria and a prioritized backlog that aligns with capacity.
Development
The actual coding and development of the product takes place through a managed sprint cadence, following agile development methodologies and practices. Break down development tasks into smaller iterations or sprints to ensure continuous progress. A prioritized backlog drives the sprint work for the development teams with tracking through integrated reporting for management by the product managers. Track the success of your sprint by comparing the number of completed and approved stories over time.
Testing
Develop a strategy that enables rigorous testing to verify the product’s functionality, performance, and quality through test automation, unit testing, integration testing, and user acceptance testing. Acceptance tests should have a high code coverage to ensure code quality and tracking defect resolution time to catch any defects released and resolved in development, test, and production environments.
Release management
Plan and coordinate the release of the product, including version control, deployment strategies, and change management processes. Align the product releases with the integrated product roadmap investments and track for successful deployment.
Deployment
The product is deployed to the intended environment or platform, ensuring smooth integration with existing systems and infrastructure. Teams should aim for high user adoption and satisfaction rates post-deployment with minimal defects in production.
3. Product support, service, and operations
Once the product is released, ongoing support and operations are crucial for its success. This stage includes:
Product support operations
Monitor the product’s performance, address user issues, and provide timely support and maintenance. End-to-end cycle time for support tickets should be managed and tracked, as customers value quick response and resolution times for user-supported issues, order fulfillment, and provisioning.
Platform and infrastructure operations
Manage the underlying platform and infrastructure on which the product operates by ensuring environment and system availability, facilitating server maintenance, and conducting scalability planning. The availability and uptime of the product platform and infrastructure can measure the success in this area.
Risk and compliance
Ensure compliance with relevant regulations and industry standards, address physical, application, and information security and privacy risks, and implement necessary controls to protect the product and its users. Success can be measured by compliance with relevant regulations and industry standards (i.e., GDPR, SOX, PII, HIPAA, etc.). As user stories are developed and completed, there is an opportunity to integrate risk and compliance mitigation into the acceptance testing process. There is also an opportunity to integrate data quality standards into the user story acceptance test criteria as part of the software development lifecycle.
Continuous improvement and product reporting
Continuously improve the product based on user feedback and market trends by leveraging the product intelligence designed into the solution and gathering product usage data, analyzing metrics, and generating reports to inform future enhancements. Continuous improvement will beget faster cycle times and high end user satisfaction scores.
4. Cross-functional service delivery
The cross-functional service delivery stage focuses on developing integrated services that transcend organizational boundaries and deliver an integrated customer experience. It includes the following key areas at an enterprise level:
Design and manage an integrated experience
Services are delivered through a seamless and consistent experience across all touchpoints within the customer journey, and impacted personas are supported by an efficient operating model.
Establish product and service delivery organization
Form a dedicated team responsible for delivering the product to customers, ensuring efficient operations, and managing customer expectations. This team must have the appropriate decision rights of the required functional areas to deliver a seamless customer experience and resolve customer service or product issues.
Manage customer-facing service delivery processes
Implement streamlined, integrated processes and workflows to support service management and delivery, including service line strategy and management, business processes, solution management, data development lifecycle, data migration and transformation, product development, end user support, and platform services.
Define integrated services
Establish integrated services that encompass both business services and technical applications to provide a consumable service to the end user, whether it be the customer, employee, or partner.
Overall success in the cross-functional service delivery stage can be measured by increased revenue or efficiency, end user satisfaction, and service quality.
Other key considerations
External partners and suppliers
With the emergence of cloud computing and AI services, a significant shift has occurred in how customer-facing products and services are delivered. Today, there is an increasing necessity to utilize partner solutions for creating a cohesive and integrated user experience that incorporates services outside of what a single company can provide.
This leverage is primarily achieved through collaborations with major cloud and AI services providers, such as Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, OpenAI, and Salesforce. There are other players in the AI space, such as business process automation and cloud services, that should also be considered for enhancing productivity and integrated solutions. Moreover, the integration with advanced large language models utilizing generative AI has opened new avenues for services and productivity improvements.
The potential of such technology is more tangible and accessible today than ever before. By aligning and integrating with external partner solutions, it is increasingly important to ensure that security and privacy are at the forefront of any selection process.
Integrated solution delivery
Managing the integrated product lifecycle “demands clear decision rights and the capability for cross-functional, global, and local delivery teams to collaborate efficiently.” This scalable governance approach brings together cross-functional global, regional, local, and platform delivery teams to achieve successful outcomes. The governance structure of this transformation framework consists of five pivotal areas to drive integrated solution delivery:
- Integrated solution management
- Portfolio/program leadership
- Architecture, technology, and business oversight
- Cross workstream enablement
- Management of delivery workstreams
The full details of this approach are discussed in one of my previous blog posts, “Moving Beyond 44% Effectiveness”.
Start small and scale
We realize that moving toward a modern product company operating model can be a large shift in how your organization operates. However, companies can start small and scale operations across the integrated lifecycle. By prioritizing the area of the lifecycle to focus on, understanding your team’s capacity and your organization’s ability to adopt a change is a critical first step. Our belief is that if you do not start to address operating in this way, you are likely to lose your competitive advantage quickly.
By implementing an efficient integrated product lifecycle, organizations have proved to be able to react swiftly to market demands and innovate in ways they could never have imagined before. The collaborative nature of the integrated product delivery lifecycle drives integrated services to end customers by aligning business functions, product management, agile development, support, and operations, and is governed through an integrated solution delivery approach. By optimizing each area and focusing on integrating across the lifecycle, organizations can maximize efficiency, deliver high-quality products, drive new revenue streams, and gain a competitive edge in today’s dynamic market.
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