Hot idea, market disruptor, and then ancient fossil: the product lifecycle

The product lifecycle has many forms and descriptions, but I thought I’d provide some thoughts about answering these key questions:

• How do you know when your hot product idea is “for real”?
• What tells you that you can make money from your new business idea?
• Will that disruptive new tech move you ahead?
• When is it time to cease investment in a well-loved but declining product?
• Is your product sell-able?

Those questions reflect a product lifecycle that can be summarized into strategic planning and portfolio management:

1. Market opportunity and approach: prioritize markets to explore and invest in, based on the business’s POV and competitive stance.
2. Definition of product and research: go from concept car to validated scenarios, personas, technical foundation, and business plan.
3. Creation and delivery of product: build the product and go-to-market (GTM) assets. Deliver it into market.
4. Observation, reflection, and response: take stock of the product’s performance, by using continuous analytics. Make course corrections.

Product lifecycle

Who’s involved in product lifecycle?

Backing up a bit, I want to share how my work enables Collaborative Decision Making via a team who’s responsible for the strategy and product lifecycle. This team owns cross-functional alignment, commitment, and oversight for each’s product lifecycle. They ensure engagement across the disciplines, driving completion of lifecycle activities by all required functions.

This team of stakeholders crosses organizational boundaries and expertise:

• Customer Success / Support
• CTO
• Design
• Development
• Finance
• Marketing
• Product Management
• Sales
• Strategy
• and often others

How this group drives product lifecycle is via formal checkpoints and playbacks. In the next section, you can take note of how to ensure each of your disciplines agrees to the product direction AND commits resources to making the product successful for the long haul.

Checkpoints where you decide to move forward, or not

As you develop a new idea into a product (productization, to some), you work through milestones (aka checkpoints). The cross-functional team uses checkpoint activities to ensure that a product is thoughtfully developed. Here’s that lifecycle by playback:

• Exploration Playback engages cross-organizational stakeholders and decides early milestones.
• Market Playback decides whether your unique point-of-view (POV) on the market justifies committing time and resources to design a product and develop a business plan.
• Playback 0 decides whether a product will differentially address market opportunity based on user feedback.
• Commitment Pitch Playback decides whether to commit resources to build and deliver a differentiated product.
• Launch Readiness Playback confirms release readiness of a product, go-to-market (GTM), and delivery capabilities.
• Business Review Playback decides whether market feedback requires adjustment to a product’s definition, GTM, or delivery approaches (including sunsetting a product).

So to summarize, the checkpoints across the product lifecycle have these outcomes:

• Lowers center of gravity for decisions
• Ratifies the discipline of Product Management
• Formalizes governance to support cross-organizational collaboration

I’m interested to hear from you… how do you manage your product lifecycle? How does that lifecycle feed into well-developed products and overall portfolio? Let me know in the comments or other social. Thanks!