Product Management Lifecycle

What is the Product Management lifecycle?

The Product Management lifecycle is a framework that details the different phases of work involved in managing a product through each stage of its development – from inception right through to post-launch and onwards. It splits the Product Management process into different distinct phases, where each phase dictates what you should be focusing on. It’s a logical step-by-step process that makes sure you’re doing things the right way.

The Product Management lifecycle is the foundation of everything you do as a Product Manager. Actually, it’s not even the foundations – it’s the earth you lay your foundations into. It’s a framework that should be so ingrained in the development of a product that you’re probably not even thinking about it as you go about things. 

This framework is second nature for experienced Product Managers, wired into your thinking. It’s like breathing – you’re not stopping to think about it each time you exhale. But, say you’re doing something really hard, like sprinting. Suddenly you’re more conscious of your breathing to help you get more air in. The Product Management lifecycle is the same. When things get tricky, such as if a new feature isn’t working out, you can think about the lifecycle to get you on track and make sure you’re following best practices.

What does the Product Management lifecycle look like? 

Like many things in Product Management, it depends on who you ask. There’s no one single uniform Product Management lifecycle that every product-led business follows. Instead, many companies and Product Leaders will have their versions with slight variations of each stage. Still, if you were to distill these unique frameworks to their essence, you’d find a common thread and order of things that they all follow.  

At the heart of every Product Management lifecycle (aside from perhaps Build-Measure-Learn) you’ll have the following stages:

• Discovery/Ideation: Whatever you call it, this is early-stage identification of market needs or opportunities.
• Validation/Planning: Both concepts ensure that the product idea is viable before heavy investment.
• Build/Development: The creation of the product or MVP.
• Launch: Bringing the product to market.
• Evaluation/Iteration: Post-launch feedback collection, data analysis, and improvement. This can be a single stage or broken up into two, depending on who you ask. 

From here on, the Product Management lifecycle we’re going to be focusing on will follow the structure above.

What is the difference between Product Management lifecycle vs. Product lifecycle Management? 

Product Management lifecycle. Product lifecycle management. Same words. Different order. And different definitions too. It’s funny how unalike these concepts are with such a simple switch. But let’s dive into the differences. To keep things clear, let’s bold Product Management lifecycle, the framework we’re talking about in this article. 

Your product lifecycle is the different stages your product goes through as it ages, with these stages being:

• Introduction phase 
• Growth phase 
• Maturity phase 
• Decline phase

It’s kind of like watching your product grow up. When it’s introduced into the world, it’s new and fresh. Everyone wants a look at the newborn baby and speculate on its future. It then reaches growth and learns how to walk and talk a little bit, and the way you look after it will change. 

Soon it reaches maturity and has hit its stride, with its place in the world all settled. After a while, it gets old and hits the decline stage, where it’s a slow journey towards death. 

Sorry, that got bleak. 

Product lifecycle management is all about how you manage your product in these different phases of its life. It details how you change your tactics to suit the maturity level of your product. A brand-new product will need a different approach from one that’s been in the market for a few years and is firmly in its maturity stage. Product lifecycle management is the practice of doing all that – managing the product through ITS lifecycle stages. 

As already discussed, the Product Management lifecycle focuses on the different stages you go through when creating a product. It’s a tool to figure out what you need to be focusing on and doing as a Product Manager. 

So, the Product Management lifecycle is a framework for PMs to know what to do. 

Product lifecycle management (PLM) is about all the stages the product goes through. 

Got it? Cool. Glad to have that all cleared up. Check out this blog to learn more about the different stages of PLM and what you should be doing for each as your product grows old 🔽:

Why is the Product Management lifecycle important? 

Product Managers tend to move at a million miles per hour. We move at light speed to get things done. This fast pace can lead to some PMs skipping over some vital steps in the Product Management process, like moving onto the build phase before discovery work has been properly done, or moving onto the next product after launch and ignoring evaluation and iteration. 

Essentially, without the step-by-step nature of this framework, you could fall into feature factory mode. The Product Management lifecycle gives you a map to follow, keeping what you do rooted in best practices and always aligned with business goals.

But that’s not all. By embedding this lifecycle into the way you operate, you can:

• Get your product to market faster
• Create a higher-quality product 
• Increase sales opportunities
• Reduce errors and wasted time
• Build strategic alignment
• Foster continuous improvement
• Focus on customer-centric product production

There’s a reason why the Product Management lifecycle is so important. It’s invaluable for new PMs to get to grips with the responsibilities of the role, and useful for experienced PMs to keep them grounded and not fly off too close to the sun and get burnt like Icarus. 

What are the different stages of the Product Management lifecycle? 

There are six stages of the Product Management lifecycle, all feeding into each other to create a loop that you’ll typically follow in order. Once again, these stages are:

• Discover 
• Validate 
• Build 
• Launch 
• Evaluate 
• Iterate

Let’s look deeper at these stages in turn.

Stage 0: Outline business outcomes

Oh yes, a secret bonus stage, just like when collecting enough rings in Sonic the Hedgehog. However, unlike in Sonic where you can finish the game without playing the bonus stage, outlining your business outcomes is essential to a good Product Management lifecycle. 

This is because it gives you the groundwork. Identifying the business outcomes gives you the ‘why’ of what you’re doing, and something to measure up against. When you build a new product or feature, or indeed improve one, you want it to do something. You’re looking for it to leave a mark on your business. This stage helps you identify what it is you want it to do and aligns your product goals with business objectives. This is your product vision.

For example, you may already assume what you need to do to improve your product, but do you have any evidence? Is it aligned with business goals?  Is it just a hunch? By putting this secret stage at the start of the process, you’re flipping your way of thinking. You’re identifying the impact you want your product to have, and from there are working out the best metrics and goals to target that dictate what you do.

Through this stage, you may learn that increasing retention is a strong business objective. From here you can then work out your product priorities, which may no longer be that shiny new feature but instead creating a better product tour experience to boost adoption rates. 

Knowing your desired business outcome is like collecting the Chaos Emerald from the Sonic bonus stage – you can now go back and enter the Product Management lifecycle properly. 

Stage 1: Discover

The discovery phase is all about figuring out the best thing you should be doing with your product. It’s your time to learn about the customers and the market you occupy. You’re finding out the pain points of your users that your product should address. If you equate this stage to detective work, you’re not yet trying to figure out who the murderer is, but instead deducing that there was murder in the first place. 

When in the discovery stage, there are two pillars to follow to help you find out what issues your product needs to solve. That’s: 

• Qualitative data 
• User research

Qualitative data helps give you the facts. It’s things like performance metrics and analysis that shine a light on an issue, such as product usage data and the key metrics you’re following on your dashboard. Alongside this, you can supplement your understanding with user research, digging into your customer feedback loop to look under the surface.

Some of the tactics you can employ for your user research include user interviews where you ask open-ended questions in a one-on-one environment. Establishing a Customer Advisory Board is another option – and, although in the earliest days of discovery for a brand new product, you won’t actually have customers per say, you can invite potential customers to get in at the very start of a cool new product idea. 

You can also make use of user surveys; more controlled questions that you can ask a wider group of users at once. There’s also card sorting that helps you see how customers categorize information, giving you better insight into how to build features, menus, and any other form of content hierarchy.

Essentially, by the end of the discovery stage, you want to know what customers are trying to accomplish and what solutions you can offer to enable them to do this. You’ll have a hypothesis of what this product discovery suggests is important. At this stage in the process, it’s just a theory that needs to be validated and confirmed. You think your customers want this thing – the next stage is testing to make sure. 

Stage 2: Validate 

If the first stage was about figuring out the problem you need to solve, this is where you work out what answer is best. Validation is all about testing the solutions you put forward to a problem and working out if it’s actually the right idea to combat it. 

See, the solutions aren’t always obvious. Say there’s a house fire; your first instinct is to get a water hose on it. Oh no, that just made the flames bigger! Why? Because it was an electrical fire. If you took the time to validate the solution, you’d learn BEFORE you used the hose that it wasn’t right and instead have used the appropriate foam extinguisher. 

This is why the validation stage is so important. It helps ensure that you’re investing the right resources down the line and better prioritizing the right solutions. It saves time and money and provides evidence to your stakeholders so that you can prove that your idea to solve the problem is the right call. 

Validation is the ‘why’ behind the decisions you make. Going back to the detective analogy, it’s the evidence that points to who the killer is. Now validation and discovery have a fair bit of overlap, and an experienced Product Manager is likely validating while they discover the problem, but saying that, there are some unique things you can do. 

The most obvious is to simply talk to your users. Tell them about your potential solution and gauge what they think. Do they think it’s the right one? This can be great when talking to customers you trust but can be limiting as it’s slow progress to get a wide data set. You can use wider surveys to try and get a larger reaction, or make use of product usage data, more market research, and feedback management platforms. 

The latter can be really helpful when it comes to the validating Product Management lifecycle stage, especially if you teach your Customer Success Teams to give valuable feedback. If many customers are asking for the same thing, it suggests that that’s the solution you should focus on.

Stage 3: Build 

You know the problem you need to solve, you know the answer to that problem. Now it’s time to build it. In the build phase of the Product Management lifecycle, the Product Manager takes a teeny weeny step back, allowing the rest of the Product Trio (the Designers and Engineers) from your Product Team Structure to work their magic and get a version of the product live. 

Of course, a PM still needs to be involved to guide this build phase and ensure that these team members are on track to build the right solution aligned to the business outcomes identified in bonus stage 0. As the PM, you’re not the person building (unless you’re in a small team and need to muck in), you’re the person leading effective execution. You’re like a coach on a football team. You’ve written up the plays and are maybe giving instructions from the sideline, but ultimately it’s down to the superstars on the field to score the touchdown. 

One thing you’re going to be doing in the build phase is creating a Product Requirements Document (PRD) that details all your team needs to know to successfully get the product from a concept to a living and breathing solution. To help you write the best PRD possible, download our free, editable template:

Another crucial, imperative, critical, vital, pivotal, significant, – and all the other synonyms for important – thing you need to do in the build stage is to create your roadmap and manage the build progress on it. 

Now, we’d hope that you’d know what a roadmap is. Read our ultimate guide to product roadmaps if not. We’re not going to waste time telling you what it is. But we are going to highlight that you need to protect it in this phase and properly manage it. 

Far too often an internal stakeholder could come in and demand something be moved to a higher priority on the roadmap, throwing everyone off plan. Or, someone in a role with less visibility on the product might have no idea what’s going on and do something that doesn’t align with the product vision. To combat both of these situations, you need to create visibility to your product roadmap, letting the wider organization see the process and the source of truth for what you’re doing. 

Consider putting your roadmap on a roadshow to justify your approach to your wider team. A well-protected and managed roadmap will help you better manage your sprint backlog and the build process, helping you to get it out of this stage faster with fewer issues.

Need to know the difference between the sprint and product backlog? Learn it in the article below: 

Stage 4: Launch 

You’ve done it. Your product or feature is ready, now it’s time to get it out there baby. Now many think that launching a product is more marketing or sales-driven, but the Product Manager plays a critical role in this phase. To start, you’ll be working out the timing of when to launch and the product positioning of it: where it’ll sit in the market. 

You’re also going to be deciding the product pricing strategy and working to determine what pricing model and approach is right for your market and your objectives. 

There’s a lot that goes into a successful launch and how you get your product to market. You can find out more about it in the article below:

Now, you don’t want to launch a product and not have anyone know about it. That’s like hosting a party without inviting anyone, or not telling them the address. As a Product Manager, there are things you can do in this stage to influence early product adoption. One of your main goals is to help users know how to use the next feature and reach an activation point. You can do this by offering in-app product tours and onboarding or using tooltips to announce new features.

You also don’t want to release everything at once. If you open the floodgates, you might drown your audience. If you’ve made sizable changes to your product, you’re going to want to release it incrementally to a smaller audience to test it and make sure that it works. There are four ways to do this:

1. Feature flags: Here you can turn certain features on and off during a release to control what users have access to. 
2. Opt-in: This is where you give users the ability to choose if they want to try a new feature. This is good to test if the value proposition is clear early on for them to want to try it. 
3. Pilot period: Here a set group of users have a limited time to test a version of the newly built product to then give feedback.
4. 1/10% tests: This is where you test new functionality with a percentage of your active user base. For smaller products, this would be 10%, for larger adoption it’ll be 1%. 

The reason you’re doing this incremental launch is to give you an opportunity to make changes and tweaks to the product based on feedback from this smaller group without impacting your entire audience. 

Stage 5: Evaluate 

Next, up in the Product Management lifecycle, it’s time to see how well your new product or feature has done. If it was all worth it, and if not, what you can learn and do to improve it. 

Now a lot of PMs can fall into the trap of ignoring this phase and the one after it, especially if your definition of success is simply shipping a release. It’s easy to be tempted to just move on to the next product and start to feature creep, not making this one the best it can be. If this has been you, pause to stop and reflect on what you’ve produced to see if it’s really met the mark. This is the difference between being output-focused or outcome-focused. 

The methods behind your evaluation are pretty similar to your discovery. You’re collecting both quantitative and qualitative data to build a story of how the new release was received. Let’s quickly go over some of the ways you can evaluate your efforts. 

Quantitative evaluation

This is all about diving into the numbers and using performance metrics to paint a picture. There’s lots and lots of metrics you can use, perhaps too many, but three of the best include:

• Tracking your adoption rate. This tells you how many users have tried out the new feature.
• Looking at feature usage and engagement. This lets you know if users are interested in what you’ve created and if they’ve dropped off once they’ve tried it.
• Conversion rate. This looks at how many people have seen some promotional material for the feature and from there converted into a user. 

Beyond metrics, you can also measure how users engage with your product through things like following paths, funnels, and action replays.

Qualitative evaluation

As well as looking at the cold hard numbers, you can also evaluate with qualitative data. This can give you clear insight into what’s going down. Some forms of qualitative data include:

• Leveraging user surveys and interviews to get opinions and insight
• Using in-app feedback from a chat widget or poll 
• Getting insight from Customer Support Teams to learn about recurring problems
• Tracking social media or review sites to understand how the new product has been received

By the end of the evaluation stage, you’ll know if you need to tweak your product and your goals and if you’ve actually created the right product. If not, you’ll move on to the iteration stage.

Stage 6: Iterate

So you’ve found through evaluation that your release has a weakness. It’s not doing what you wanted. That’s okay, no product is ever perfect the first time around, but you’ll find that by following this framework it would have been closer to being perfect than if you didn’t use the Product Management lifecycle at all. Plus, by identifying that it needs to improve, you’re already proving that you’re a diligent Product Manager. So good job. 

This stage is all about working out why it’s not performing. What’s causing the issue? In this stage, you need to ask yourself “Did we build something that produced the business outcome we thought it would?”

You’re not finding the solution just yet, you’re just making it clear that a solution needs to be found. You’re a doctor diagnosing an illness. You haven’t prescribed medicine yet – that comes later.

By looking at your evaluation and iteration, it should become clear that you need to tweak something to align with your business goals. So what do you do now? Well, this is a cycle after all so you’re going back to the discovery phase to figure out what needs to be done to improve things. What’s the right medicine for this problem?

Around and around we go

There you have it. The Product Management lifecycle. A merry-go-round that with each rotation you create a product that’s closer and closer to perfection. This framework is all about building a mindset of continuous improvement. Your product is never done, just one step closer to getting done. 

The Product Management lifecycle is a fundamental blueprint for success, and as you grow as a Product Manager, you’re probably going to iterate off it and develop your own process tailored to your team, product, and users. 

But no matter how you tweak it, the core principles remain the same – discovery, validation, building, launch, and iteration are your compass points. Each phase brings its own challenges and rewards, but ultimately, it’s about delivering the right product to the right people at the right time. And remember, the ride never really stops: it just gets more exciting with every spin, So, buckle up, keep learning, and enjoy the journey! Each time around helps you stay glued to Product Management best practices. 

Alongside this, what if there was a tool that had best practices built in? That helped you get the best out of your ideas, your roadmap, and your backlog management. Well, with ProdPad, you can be sure best practice principles are being followed by the whole team. With effective prompts and functionality, our tool helps you become an even better Product Manager. Give it a try today to see how it can support you and your teams.