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Product Development Life Cycle
The article explains howproduct development moves from validating an idea through Sense, Focus, and discovery work to continuously evolving a live product through ongoing sensing, focusing, and dual‑track development.
Product Development Life Cycle
It makes a difference if you explore if an idea is worth pursuing or if you are already developing your product. Therefore, the product development life cycle is split in two main phases:
- Idea and
- Continuous Development.
Product Development Life Cycle
Idea / Opportunity
Sense
Sense is about understanding users and their needs. You might have already build up evidence and observed users. If there is no evidence yet, this is not a problem as you will start with your assumptions.
Focus
Focus is all about understanding what opportunities drive what business results such as revenue, customer retention, etc. It is important to not only think about the impact this idea will have on your business but also to define concrete metrics to measure if the idea will be a success or failure.
This analysis can for instance be done with a business model canvas or an opportunity canvas. Additionally, you will verbalize the idea as hypothesis.
Opportunity Canvas
Discover and Deliver
Once you have defined what evidence needs to be collected to build up confidence, you will run further desk and user research to validate your assumptions.
Based on the delivered results you will decide if you continue iterating or if you pivot.
Pivot
Pivot means a radical change to the ongoing process. It can be a reworking of a concept or a completely modified version of the entire MVP based on the collected evidence.
Continuous Development
Umbrella
I tend to call Sense and Focus for ongoing products an umbrella. Why? Because sensing and focusing are ongoing activities that happen all the time and overshadow dual track development.
Umbrella
Sense
Once implementation has started you will continuously collect user feedback. A good way to keep your evidence organized is an evidence board where you track findings along the whole user journey. What worked best for me so far is to keep the evidence board high level and track findings in a dedicated Jira board.
Focus
You will continuously adopt the business model to the
- changing product maturity
- market adoption
- new target segments
- growth potential at the current stage, etc.
Dual track development
Dual-track development means that the whole product team works in parallel on discovery and delivery. Discovery is an essential part of product development and the whole team is responsible for output and outcomes.
As the workflow is organized in sprints, the team works in parallel on discovery and delivery tasks. Sense and Focus are the umbrella, the foundation or the center around which everything is organized. The evidence board is where findings are documented but the insights and learnings are generated in discovery and delivery.
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