The Complete Product Life Cycle
The best tools, proven methods, and templates for every stage of the product life cycle.
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There are countless posts about the product life cycle stages, but I’ve noticed a few critical gaps in most sources:
Most assume the product lifecycle starts with development.
Others address messaging and market engagement too late.
Virtually none cover the complete product life cycle in one picture, from the first idea to decline.
So, in today’s newsletter, we’ll discuss the complete product life cycle, along with tools and templates for each stage.
Stage 1: Rapid Ideation
This is where you come up with the initial product idea. You need to understand:
Who are your target customers?
What are their essential needs/jobs to be done?
What can you offer them (a high-level value proposition)?
Some approach this by performing a Job-to-be-Done analysis, but this might be resource-intensive. You might want to perform this research in the next stage.
For a startup, a faster approach to start might be to:
Leverage essential insights (from customer interviews, initial market research, or problems you experienced) without in-depth research that would take weeks.
Formulate an initial hypothesis about your market, your value proposition (including a high-level idea), pricing, and how the market will respond. Those are often the riskiest assumptions.
Create a simple pretotype (a representation of a product) to test your idea with minimal effort.
Insight: In some cases, the riskiest assumptions might relate to feasibility (such as in AI startups), but those assumptions are unlikely to be the easiest to test. And we always want to get maximum validated learning with minimal effort. So, keep those assumptions for the next stage.
Selected recommended tools:
Value Proposition (part of your Product Strategy):
Template: Value Proposition Template (XLSX).
Template: Value Curve Template (XLSX).
Pretotypes, e.g., Paid Ads Campaign, Landing Page, Preorder, Explainer Video.
XYZ Hypothesis (market engagement hypothesis) along with Your Own Data (YODA) and Skin-in-the-Game.
Jobs-to-be-Done (if you have sufficient resources).
The desired outcome: Validated market engagement through collecting YODA and Skin-in-the-Game. You have tested your Value Proposition, messaging, at least one channel, and pricing.
Stage 2: Refinement
A single high-level experiment is not enough. Once you've validated market engagement, it’s time to refine your idea further and cover other risks in product management.
Continue refining your initial strategy and business model:
Leverage additional insights. Perform market research, talk to additional customers, or dive into a Jobs-to-be-Done analysis to gain more confidence.
Ask yourself which assumptions must be true for your strategy and business model to work. In particular, other risks related to Go-to-Market should be considered.
Test high-risk assumptions by experimenting.
Example: Imagine your prototype was a landing page for a SaaS platform offering advanced analytics for e-commerce stores. You validated strong demand with pre-orders, but your business model relies on partnerships with e-commerce platforms. Will they view your product as complementary or as a potential competitor?
You also need to refine the features to include in the first version of the product:
For each feature, consider risks related to value, usability, viability, and feasibility.
This usually means creating high-fidelity user prototypes and flows, which might not have been required earlier.
Identify and test high-risk assumptions by running experiments, such as those involving user prototypes or feasibility experiments.
Example: Imagine your pretotype was a basic landing page with a pre-order form. You validated your value proposition, messaging, and pricing, but customers couldn’t experience the full user journey. Will they find it intuitive? Is it what they truly expected?
Selected recommended tools:
Product Strategy (including Value Proposition and Value Curve):
Template: Product Strategy Canvas.
Examples: Product Strategy Examples: Google Maps, Netflix, OpenAI
Business Model (Startup Canvas, Business Model Canvas, Lean Canvas):
Template: Startup Canvas: Product Strategy and a Business Model. This one covers your strategy, too.
Alternative templates: Business Model Canvas: Google Maps, Airbnb, Uber (examples and PPTX) or Lean Canvas (PPTX).
Jobs-to-be-Done (with jobs, job steps, executors, and desired outcomes):
Template: Jobs-to-be-Done Opportunity Score calculation (XLSX)
Experiments with User Prototypes, such as a task to accomplish, card sorting, or first-click testing.
Feasibility experiments—typically Spikes.
The desired outcome: Validated key assumptions related to the strategy, business model, and initial feature set. You focused only on just one market segment and a small set of high-impact features that are critical for launch.
Stage 3: Development
At this stage of the product lifecycle, the focus shifts to building the first version of the product.
You need to keep experimenting, as it’s impossible to predict everything in advance. Perform small, targeted experiments to address additional risks (e.g., user interaction, technical feasibility).
Engage with a small group of target users as you go to gather feedback on prototypes, partial builds, and early features.
I recommend building minimal products, particularly Piecemeal, Concierge, and Wizard of Oz. They are cheaper to build than full-featured products.
Yes, some things will not be fully automated. But automation becomes a “problem” only once you succeed. Assume failure is the likely option, despite all your previous successful experiments.
Selected recommended tools:
Continue experimenting with User Prototypes.
Continue feasibility experiments—typically Spikes.
The desired outcome: A release-ready product built through iterative development and validated by ongoing experiments.
Stage 4: Introduction
At this stage, you release your product to a small, focused audience. Learn as much as possible from early customers using your product in the real world with their real data. Iterate quickly based on their feedback.
This is where you transition from early adopters to the broader market and prepare for scaling.
Selected recommended tools:
Continuous Product Discovery and Delivery: Exploring the problem and solution spaces and moving quickly with experiments while performing frequent releases to minimize Time-to-Learn (TTL):
Course and templates: Continuous Product Discovery Masterclass (free for premium subscribers).
Experiments in Production: You can leverage Feature stubs, A/B testing, or Multivariate testing.
Crossing the Chasm Framework: Focus on a specific market niche (“beachhead segment”) and move from early adopters to the early majority.
Product-Market Fit Test: Aim for at least 40% of users to say they’d be “very disappointed” without it. See a free survey by
: https://pmfsurvey.com/See examples, templates, and principles discussed in Go-to-Market principles with actionable frameworks and free templates by
.
The desired outcome: Evidence of the Product-Market Fit, referrals and testimonials that will allow you to appeal to the broader market.
Importantly, you need to understand the Product-Market Fit and how customers perceive the value of your product, not just achieve it, as it forms the basis for your future scaling efforts.
Stage 5: Growth
The Growth stage is about expanding your product's reach, maximizing its impact, and driving sustainable business growth.
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