Stage: Optimize

Once you reach this stage, all your major assumptions should be validated. Product UVP must be clear and willingness of the customers to pay for that value proposition needs be confirmed. This means most of the core features are available and tested by your early customers during the ‘Build’ stage.

During optimize, you tune the product further to achieve maximum performance. You also carry out testing required for it to be adapted by a bigger scale of customers. This means the product quality, stability, visual appearance, onboarding procedures, etc. should be made world-class during this stage.

• Analytics Review Process: Gather correct and current data and process them to identify patterns and make predictions. Use this to enable data driven decision making. #DataModel
• Cost optimization: Focus on reducing cost. Consider shredding unnecessary waste in platform services, tech debt backlog or team structure. Look into process improvements.
• Promotions Process: Creating a detailed plan including frequency, customer segments, market conditions, offerings, ad-word design and message.
• Customer Support: Plan and organize human resources, tools, documentation, training required, communication and troubleshooting capabilities to provide great customer service.
• Compliance & Approvals: Adapt to industry standards and certifications to design stronger, safer, more reliable products and get compliance approvals from relevant authorities and industry bodies (e.g: PCIDS, HIPAA, GDPR etc).
• Customer Contract Management: Define how to correctly manage contracts (versioning, tools etc) and SLAs for customers
• Tech Team Branding: Define a brand for the product team to have a powerful impact on team’s alignment, effectiveness and engagement with each other and the rest of the organization.
• Performance Tuning Plan: Optimize system performance for best user experience, based on performance requirements and analysis on existing performance. #TechArchitecture
• Web Optimization Plan: Offsite (SEO) or onsite improvements provided for user experience so that customers will be more likely to convert to your website
• Log Indexing & Analysis: Process of reviewing, interpreting, and understanding logs to identify application health and to diagnose and rectify issues. Use this also to enable data-driven decision making.