The 3 Stages of Product Development
There are few things more exciting and rewarding than progressing a product development project from initial concept to launch. Thanks to the Internet, you can now easily get access to countless numbers of resources online in an instant to guide you through the product development process. Instead of writing another detailed “how-to” article about the product development process, this article serves as a short reflection of what I’ve personally experienced as a product manager and designer worked through different stages of product and organisation maturity.
Make it work
The first stage of product development is to get to the initial launch. This stage often involves a lot of upfront and integrated research and concept ideation activities. At this stage, the team’s goal is mostly focused on getting the product up and running in the shortest time span possible without compromising the product’s core user experience — what most people refer to as the “Minimal Lovable Product”. Therefore, for early stage startups, this is the phase where a lot of tradeoffs need to take place to cut off non-essential features from the scope in order to focus on the core product experience.
When leading a team through this stage of product development, the most important thing to maintain team morale is to help the team align on the goals and roadmap of the company and product, and make sure all product progress and milestones are visible and are celebrated.
Make it work well
The second stage of product development starts the moment your product is released to the world. Having passed the initial phase of pushing to product launch, it is time to clear some of the technical and design debt due to the earlier time and resources constraints and focus on optimising your product for conversion and adoption. It is also important to open up communications channels with your early customers to gain insights into customer perception of your product and resolve any usability issue they may be facing. Iterative product improvements at this stage are usually incremental and controlled to minimise drastic changes of the product experience.
It is also important at this stage to say no to features that are not essential or does not add significant value to the product experience. As you add more features to the product, you also add additional complexity to the design which may be undesired by your customers. Any additional feature requests should be weighed as a tradeoff between simplicity and functionality.
“You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1,000 things.” — Steve Jobs
Make the team work well, together
When the team is still in the stage of getting the product ready for launch, there is always an “all hands on deck” urgency. Usually little to no formal processes are required for the team with a shared goal to work well together in the early stage. However, once the product has “survived” the initial launch and early improvements stages, and the team has grown to a certain size, it is necessary to take a step back and evaluate and establish necessary processes and team norms to help support long-term, sustainable team productivity and happiness in the workplace. Regular team retrospective sessions are a good opportunity to learn from experience and continuously improve team collaboration to create a great environment for meaningful work.
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