Product Lifecycle - The 5D process

A successful product relies on a clearly structured process that involves product managers, designers, developers, business and data analysts, quality assurance engineers, content providers and merchandisers. A strong product manager has to make sure they are looking at all aspects of the product life cycle (holistic thinking) and go about it systematically in strong collaboration with various roles mentioned. People wonder what the product manager does, so I wanted to capture how I go about it with references to other aspects of product management that I will go into in separate articles.

Before I go too far into the process of creating successful products, let me state what I am referring to as a ‘product’. The dictionary meaning that best captures the use of product here is “the totality of goods or services that a company makes available”. I would classify this as a suite of products and within these, each good or service is a product.

Successful products go through an iterative 5 D process that includes

1. Discovery,

2. Definition,

3. Design,

4. Development and

5. Delivery

All products go through this either in a formal or informal way and the amount of time spent on each step may vary depending on the situation. A product may seem to have skipped the first 3 D’s if the product was conceived and developed by the same individual. In these cases, the creator was not systematic about the process and the deficiencies are visible in the end product. Even products that go through the process need iterations to reach their ideal state. There are improvements to some basic products that happen through continuous iteration. Take the wheel for example, it needs to be circular in shape and filled with air to reduce the bumpiness during use. The product manager in a tire company will have to look at where it's being used, the friction, the wear and tear, how it is getting attached to the vehicle and various other aspects. In each of these they can look to make iterative improvements to ensure continued success.

The 5-D process should not be confused with the development methodology of agile vs. waterfall (or some happy medium adopted by your company). Irrespective of which development methodology the product development team follows, the spirit of the process remains the same. There may be instances, due to time constraints or how teams are tetris'd to work, when steps may overlap or run in parallel. Look up development methodologies to figure out what works best for your situation.

Discovery

Let’s get a bit more into the weeds with the 5 D’s, starting with the discovery phase. The discovery phase is slightly different depending on the maturity of the product, as a product manager would help drive the discovery of each iteration and we will get more into that later. As the term discovery states this phase is all about identifying the need and understanding the gap the product is going to fill. It involves covering various aspects either through research or working with experts. The need can be identified either by analyzing the demographic (eg. - if a product designed for adults is getting heavily used by kids, are there enhancements that will help this new segment), the financials within an industry (eg. - purchasers who are buying our product are also purchasing ‘x’ along with it so we should put ‘x’ into the product), observation of users (field observations of users to understand where the bottlenecks are, self-checkout stands in stores). Irrespective of how a need is identified, observing users helps validate the need and capturing the need in a set of use cases helps later in the process. This is where ‘design thinking’ plays a key role in the discovery process and that in itself needs a separate deep dive. This phase is a very collaborative step and the product manager plays the role of a strong facilitator and ensures that all aspects are covered while capturing the information to create a clear definition of the product in the next phase.

Definition

The next step is a key step in ensuring success of the product. Defining the product is a process in itself, wherein the product manager not only has to define the functionality of the product, but ensure that an outline is created to allow for flexibility and innovation while adhering to the core principles to follow while designing and developing the product. To arrive at the core product principles it is essential to understand the business goals and the user needs to arrive at a set of principles that captures the outline to use when making decisions and building rationales to justify the features, functionality and design direction. Once the principles are captured the next step is to define the functionality required in the product to address the user needs in a manner that ensures success of business goals. The only way to know the product is succeeding is to associate a key metric to each goal and define how to measure that metric. It is also essential to define ways that help ensure the product is addressing the user needs. Most successful products are able to deliver on business goals when they are addressing the user needs. There may be additional pain points identified once a product is launched that can be iteratively worked on. The key deliverable of this phase of the product life-cycle is a clear MVP (minimum viable product) document, that includes business goals, user needs, product principles and the metrics that need to be measured to ensure success.

Design

A clear definition is extremely helpful to designers who support the next step in the process - Design. Keeping designers involved in the initial phases of discovery and definition helps speed up the design process and reduces the number of iterations required before going into testing with users. It is extremely important to validate designs with users prior to going into full-fledged development. This is independent of A/B testing with a broader set of users that will quantitatively validate the design. This is more qualitative testing either in a lab or using an online tool to arrive at the best design option. In the design phase the product manager works closely with the design team (UX, visual, research, content) to arrive at the best variant of the design for launch. The design process is an iterative process and I am not going into the details of it here. At a high level, designers will use the MVP to understand the desired functionality, conduct heuristic and competitive analysis, understand design patterns relevant to the product and come up with variations for discussion. Once there is agreement on 1 or 2 designs, the team creates prototypes to test before moving into the development phase.

Development

To facilitate a smooth development phase it is important to have the lead developer identified and involved early, so they can have a clear idea in terms of how the product will be developed. To ensure the development covers all aspects captured in the MVP the PM needs to create a clear set of epics and stories that capture what needs to be developed while staying clear of how it will be developed. It is important to create spikes (exploratory stories) up front for the developers to understand the MVP and chart out ‘how’ the development will be done. Keeping a clear line between the what and the how ensures collaboration and clarifying questions/ discussions when there is any ambiguity. The developer or development manager may have provided sizing for this phase earlier, but it is essential to revisit it once the stories (at least epics) are in place and the developers have spent time on spikes to outline their approach to the development of the product. All stories should also have a clear set of acceptance criteria so the QA team can validate prior to launch which is the final step in the process.

Delivery

Once the development is complete and the product has been tested for functionality and performance under load it is ready to be released for the desired audience. In many instances, products are launched in beta mode to test it or as a phased launch to ensure the product is performing as expected without breaking down due to edge cases that may have not been considered. Another method is to ramp access to the new product via an A/B test and increase exposure as confidence in the new product begins to increase.

Summary

To launch a successful product the team has to follow the 5D’s - Discovery, Definition, Design, Development and Delivery. A product manager is key to driving success in strong collaboration with their counterparts in business, design and development. In each of these steps the members of the team have different roles to play, and keeping the core team involved helps in delivering a successful product if built right will be flexible and scalable and address the users needs to deliver profitability for the business.

As with any topic you can go deeper into each aspect and then further into the subtopics. Please leave me a note about any questions you have regarding how you can incorporate this process into the methodology you follow or about details regarding any of the steps/phases in the process and I will prioritize sharing my thoughts on that aspect.

If you need any help with any of your products (design or management) or would like me to consult on any aspect around your product launch, drop me a note at mohan.d@gmail.com

Disclaimer: I have more than 20 years in the product space working on designing and managing products (both physical and digital) from conception to delivery. I am capturing my thoughts here and these may have been fueled by articles I read, talks I attended, or experts I talked to and contemplation I have done based on that.