Appreciate the Circle of a Product’s Life: Part I
Understand the steps involved in the life cycle of a product.
Product life cycle
Every product and service begins as a spark of inspiration in somebody’s head. It’s a long road between there and version 1.0 and longer still to version 10.0. This tip will take us on a tour of the life cycle for a product from a programmer’s perspective.
The big-picture of a successful product is circular. Someone starts with a concept, builds prototypes, develops one into a product, and releases it. It’s a success, of course, and the company both maintains that product and starts to develop new concepts. Eventually, a product’s time has passed, and it goes end-of-life. In the meantime, the company has built other stable, successful products.
Not every product’s lifecycle is quite so complete. Silicon Valley is filled with the smoking craters of start-up companies that failed to get a product shipped or customers to buy. But we’ll take the optimistic route and discuss a product with a long and healthy life.
Concept
In traditional product management, people research a market and search for opportunities. The “market” is short for the “marketplace.” Practically, it’s a definition of our customer. Who do we sell to? That’s our market.
Opportunities, then, are products or services our customer is willing to pay for. At a market-driven company, they may do interviews, data mining, trend analysis, and other research that programmers generally find boring. Once they find a new opportunity for profits, a product concept is born.
For programmers, on the other hand, the concept phase goes the other way: a great product concept is born in someone’s head. Then, they search for a market. This way is also known as “a solution looking for a problem.” If there’s a market for the product, there’s nothing wrong with this technique, and it’s the way many disruptive technologies ...