From the course: Becoming a Product Manager: A Complete Guide

Getting deeper into the product development process

From the course: Becoming a Product Manager: A Complete Guide

Start my 1-month free trial

Getting deeper into the product development process

“

- Hi, so in the last lecture we discussed the first four phases of the product development process. The company conceives of the new product. They plan it out. They develop it and then they iterate on it before you even launch it. And you do this using the early test feedback or the alphas and the betas and there's a few other things we can do to get that feedback. But after that's done we want to do three more things. We want to launch, then we want to hold it in a steady state and then after that we decide if we want to maintain it or we kill the product. So let's talk about launch. - [Announcer] Lift off, we have a lift off. - We want to work with the marketing team and the legal team, the PR team, the sales team. And we want to position this product for public launch. Then we actually send it out there to the public. We see what kind of reaction we get. Then the sixth major phase is called steady state or just basically hold it in either a steady state or continue iterating on it. During this time we're collecting metrics on how people are using it. How often are people buying it. We analyze the product and we optimize our metrics. We try to get the maximum return for our investment on it. During this time we also have marketing continuing to market it and sales people continuing to sell it. We assess our continued efforts here to basically see how likely are we to continue moving forward with this. Then we move on to the seventh and final phase of the product development process, Maintain or kill. At this point we decide, using all the data we've already gathered and especially from the last phase. How frequently are people purchasing this? Are we staying on top of the market? Are we competitive with this product anymore? And we look at, more importantly, how much money are we spending to maintain it? To see, is it even paying for itself? How's our return on investment? If it's not doing so well then maybe we decide to kill it and we decide to move on to something new. One thing that's important to mention here is that it may not have anything to do with the revenue of that product. Or maybe even the usage it could just not fit our company vision anymore. Our executives and the people that are leading the company might decide, just based on market circumstance, that the company is now going in a different direction. So we need to go ahead and cut our losses on that product. Or go ahead and put it to bed. If we decide to kill the product then we do what's called sunsetting. You've probably heard this before. This is a slow transition to the end of life of the product. We message our user base. We tell them what's going on and we have an end-of-life plan for the users and the people that may rely on it. So if we have a company or product that is storing data for people for instance, then we may allow them to back up their data before we shut down the product. Everyone's probably seen a product that they love to use be killed and it's always very sad. But unfortunately sometimes there's not much you can do about it. But I have had a lot of good experiences with products that are dying and being killed out but they still allow you to bring out your data and something like that. This is really good practice. So those are the seven main phases: conceive; plan; develop; iterate; launch; steady state and then finally we maintain it or kill it. One thing to mention here is that this might sound a little bit academic to you it is because it is actually pretty academic. This is a process that every product goes through. But you're not going to be actually using these terms in the office everyday. It's just very important as a product manager to understand that every type of product or company goes through these types of phases and there's things to consider about each. So without any further ado let's go into the next section. I will see you there.

Contents