PPC Academy Topics
As per winningroduct.com the product’s lifecycle can be divided into 8 stages. Unlike the Waterfall phases they are iterative at product level, module level and even at feature level. These stages differ in subtle but important ways. By understanding the focus of each stage, you can understand the strategic activities within it.
You can click on each stage to see the detailed topics to learn.
| Stage | Description |
|---|---|
| Explore | This is the initial stage where the founder conceives the idea to solve a problem identified. It’s important at this stage to take a holistic view of the problem domain and think broadly. This is where you explore different possibilities before locking down on a focused product concept. You should study and analyze different paths and possibilities the new solution may take. Activities include brainstorming for idea generation as well as studying competitive offerings, and research publications from the marketplace. This phase is somewhat similar to Divergence and Discover phases of the Design Thinking process. |
| Focus | During the explore stage, your team can usually come up with a vast amount of ideas and value propositions the product may offer. Success of a product has no direct relevance to the numerous features it offers. A smaller set of cohesive, targeted features are usually more effective than a large set of features. Focus is the cycle to narrow down the attention to the most important aspects such as market segment, value proposition, brand story and the overall solution architecture. |
| Immerse | Once the focus (niche) is defined, it’s time to delve into to the details required for solving the problem. During the immerse stage, you can consider solution’s features, associated costs, timelines, etc. A lot of ‘what if’ analysis takes place and the base artifacts that are required for detailed planning are generated here. |
| Plan | Once you analyze the impact of different variations during the immerse stage, you can create the initial plans for the rest of the project. Most of these plans are live documents that are kept updated right throughout the cycle. Next you plan ahead the product development, implementation, operations without losing the ability to respond to market dynamics. It’s important to understand, this is NOT about making a ‘Big Plan Upfront’, but about making the base planning documents that can help with continuous planning throughout the lifecycle. |
| Build | This is where you have the highest flexibility to change the solution implementation at a lower cost. Once the product passes this stage, changes become costly due to the involvement of other stakeholders such as customers. Make use of this stage to validate all the assumptions (technical, requirements, business) made during the previous stages. Every requirement should be treated as an assumption with a plan to validate. Such validation can come in the form of MVPs, demos, user testing, architecture PoCs, etc. During the build stage, consider onboarding pilot customers as testers to validate the primary value propositions. |
| 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. |
| Harvest | This is where your product returns back the investment. The focus of this stage is to retain happy and loyal customers, up sell more and get referrals to grow the business. You need very stable operational processes to respond to the customer issues and inquiries. Build and tune your sales and marketing processes to capture a greater market share. |
| NextGen | Regardless of how well the product is built and maintained, there is always a retirement time for products. Retirement can be called upon by a major technology or user behavior change in the marketplace. At this point you re-invent the technology platform / business model / user experience to keep an edge in the market. You should be watchful to identify this need so that they are able to disrupt their own business model before a competitor does. When a next gen product is planned, it’s important to do it with minimal disturbance to the existing customers. You need to have clear and pain-free migration paths available and provide incentives/motivation for them to move-on. Long-term side-by-side operation of 2 major versions can be an extremely costly operation. For this reason, you must plan to complete migrating all your customers within a planned time span. |