Product Life Cycle Management – The 4 Stages and How to Manage Them

Product life cycle management is a lot like growing up – when you’re young, everything is new, exciting, and bursting with opportunity.

In your teens, you could be whoever you want to be. Sure, your goth phase may have turned out just to be a phase after all, but then pretty quickly you were on to the next thing, and the next. Then maybe you went to college, expanded your mind, and became a well-rounded member of society – comfortable with who you are and what you have to offer. Congrats.

At 40 years old, though, making the kind of drastic changes you did in your teens will probably cause people to accuse you of going through a mid-life crisis. At 80, your routine is probably so stable as to be set in stone, but your health? Maybe the outlook’s not so great.

The point is: things change. People evolve. And so do products.

Every product has a natural life cycle baked in, and people will expect different things from them at each stage.

So how do you manage those shifting expectations as a product manager? And how can you adapt your product strategy to ensure that your product isn’t the SaaS equivalent of an octogenarian taking up skateboarding?

Here’s a full guide to tackling product life cycle management.

What is product life cycle management (PLM)?

Product life cycle management (often referred to as PLM), is the process of changing your product management strategy to suit your product’s level of maturity in the market.

Product managers who use a PLM framework know that it’s important to adjust everything from product development and marketing to product launches, feature rollouts, and team structure, in order to suit the stage their product is currently in.

Products that are brand new to the market naturally need a different approach to years-old products that have reached a decent level of market saturation. That’s due to a huge range of varying product characteristics and attributes like brand recognition, feature parity, user base numbers, and how entrenched the product is in people’s day-to-day lives.

That might seem obvious, but it really pays to think in terms of life cycle stages. If you’re Coca-Cola, for example, then your innovation and marketing efforts should logically be a lot different from that of any small, upstart brand selling cola out of their local deli. It’s exactly the same for digital products.

Ultimately, product life cycle management is about reducing workload, costs, and resources by structuring every team’s efforts in a way that makes sense for the product’s developmental stage.

The aim is to streamline processes to cut down on any wasted effort, work duplication, and tactics that don’t quite fit the product in its current form.

The story of product life cycle management (and why you should care)

The origins of this stuff go back to 1931 when Otto Kleppner outlined the core stages of a product as being Pioneering, Competitive, or Retentive. Fast forward to the late 1950s and Booz, Allen & Hamilton had refined these stages to:

• Introduction
• Growth
• Maturity
• Saturation
• Decline

We’ve since merged maturity and saturation into one, but – in any case – the most famous example of product life cycle management originated in the 1980s. Carmaker AMC used emerging CAD technology to adapt the processes involved in designing and manufacturing the (mature) Jeep Cherokee in order to streamline the introduction of its successor, the Grand Cherokee.

AMC recognized that different cars (at different stages) needed differing care and attention in their development and management – and that you can use products in the maturity and decline stage to bootstrap the development of new ones. It was such a successful idea that the company was soon snapped up wholesale by Chrysler – which made PLM a standard practice across the business.

That story is based in manufacturing, but the point is this: thinking about products in terms of where they are in their life cycle will enable you to design new processes, adapt your prices, and even pivot to pastures new when it’s time to sunset a declining offering.

What are the stages of product life cycle management?

1. Introduction phase

This all starts after you’ve already designed, built, and readied your product for market. The introduction stage Is about how you launch your product and get people interested – but it’s also about learning how those early adopters are using your product and adapting things to match. You’ll need to have all your ducks in a row for a successful product launch, including a rock-solid marketing plan, and a means to track user behavior and insight.

2. Growth phase

With a successful launch under your belt, you need to figure out how to scale effectively so as to capture more and more market share. The growth stage is one in which you tighten the screws, introduce new features, curate lasting, impactful marketing campaigns, and tweak pricing until things really start to snowball. Here you’ll be scaling your servers, your features, and your teams all at once.

3. Maturity phase

In the maturity stage, it’s harder to turn on a dime, but it’s also where you’ll make the most money – and feel the most confidence. You’ll be reaching market saturation, and people will know your product’s name. But it’s a difficult stage to manage because you’ll be in a spot with tons of disruptive upstarts snapping at your heels.

• We have a whole guide to navigating this stage here.

4. Decline phase

When the market has moved on, technology has changed, and the core things that made your product so special have been wrapped into other products as a standard-issue feature, you’ll enter the decline stage.

Nothing lasts forever, so this shouldn’t come as a shock. Instead, you’ll need to act with some serious strategic thinking to pivot your product vision towards the new hotness – whatever shape that takes.

How can PMs manage the product at each phase? Product life cycle management at a glance.

How to manage the introduction stage

In the introduction stage, you’re trying to prove whether the product you’ve made actually deserves to exist or not, because you won’t truly know that it’s a viable product yet. Oftentimes, you might be fooled into thinking you have a great problem/solution fit; you’ve found a particular problem, and you’ve now got a solution that might work for it. But the trouble is that you won’t actually have a large enough market to support that hypothesis just yet.

In other words, you can’t yet prove that there’s a large enough group of people who have that particular problem – or certainly not with enough confidence that you can justify scaling up a whole business around it.

Sometimes people build products to scratch their own itch with very niche products, but then realize that there’s no one else who has that problem.

So what’s the answer? The key to product life cycle management – is customer discovery. Get your product in front of people, ask them probing questions, listen to their responses, and don’t be afraid to kill your darlings.

It can be tough, but you need to be able to embrace the pivot if the market tells you to.

How to manage the growth stage

The growth stage is a huge opportunity that needs careful balancing if you’re going to cross the chasm toward maturity.

Here, your customer base of core users will likely be early adopters who generally have a higher tolerance for the BS that early product versions tend to carry. They’ll put up with bugs and the scratchy edges of the product because they want to be the first ones to use something cool.

These early adopters will proactively go looking for solutions to problems, whereas the people who live later in the adoption curve will want to make sure that your product actually does solve their problems – and they won’t want to have to put effort into getting something buggy to work.

That means you’ve got to focus on evolving your product enough so that it solves a problem for this different set of users. It’s got to take a step up in terms of being polished, easy to use, approachable, and understandable when it comes to the user experience.

At the same time, if you’ve been grabbing people’s attention, there will probably also be competitors who’ve jumped in and created their own versions of your product. You’re still proving that this thing you’ve made works, but suddenly somebody else has built a shinier, more polished version of it – and maybe even leapfrogged you.

The answer here is to talk to your early adopters. Find out why they came to your solution in the first place, find out what kind of problems they had, and find out what they were using before. Ask them what they’d use if they couldn’t use your product anymore. And, crucially, ask them how your product could be improved. What bugs have they encountered? What needs to be polished and streamlined?

These folks are your secret weapon when it comes to making a product that can transition from early adoption to mainstream appeal – so use them and learn from them!

Don’t forget – Customer insights will inform your user personas, and your product vision and help you align your business goals and unique selling points to a product that achieves product-market fit.

How to manage the maturity stage

The maturity stage is a really interesting place to be; you’ve become successful, but that doesn’t make you bulletproof.

You’ll need to be able to disrupt yourself without upsetting the apple cart. The thing that got you where you are today needs to stay, but you’ll want to be exploring innovations that might help you when you get to the decline stage.

We’ve actually written a full, super in-depth guide to the strategies that’ll help you handle the maturity stage and avoid its pitfalls – since doing so is so vital.

How to manage the decline stage

Every product will eventually enter some sort of decline – everything tends toward it – so the product management challenge is to try and stop it from doing so.

When you’re in the maturity stage, more and more products will launch and eventually something will come along to replace yours or make it otherwise redundant. The usual culprits are increased competition, price sensitivity, or new technology.

Your inclination will be to continuously innovate – to take your current product, add more to it, and make it something that people want to continue using. And, to a point, that’s smart.

But be warned: you don’t want to just keep adding more and more functionality for the sake of it. At a certain point, adding more will stop making your product a better one, and actively make it worse through bloat and legacy UX needs. In fact, sometimes you might want to simplify things by carefully taking away from your feature list – creating a more focused product altogether.

Simply put: sometimes it’s better to move house than to keep adding extensions.

So what then? What if the game has changed entirely, and it’s time to move on? In that case, you’ve got to think about sunsetting your product while also creating an onramp for the next.

Start thinking about how you can take advantage of the users that you have, and what sort of problems they need solving next. What new product can grow out of the ashes of your delining one? How can you disrupt your own product, then pick up your users and take them on this next journey with you?

The answer is to drive buzz for your new product using the existing one – and to do so long before you kill the latter off. Create something new and start generating interest and incentives that organically bring people over. That way, you can begin the whole cycle again, but in a better place than you started originally.

Roadmapping across the product life cycle

Knowing your product life cycle stages is one thing, but adjusting your product roadmap for them is entirely another. The good news, though, is that success at every stage hinges on the same challenge: being able to solve problems for your users.

Regardless of which stage you’re managing, you’re going to need to understand what your customers are asking for, and you’re going to need to understand how those asks are relevant to your product and the Now, Next, and Later of its roadmap.

Using a roadmapping tool like ProdPad can allow you to capture that feedback in a way that generates insight. We use AI to decipher feedback, which helps our users understand who’s been asking for what, and how it all ladders up to the bigger picture.
With that, you’ll be in a much stronger position to understand how to drive the most revenue, which new feature is going to solve your users’ most-encountered issues, and the things that are frustrating them the most.

ProdPad understands which problems you need to be tackling first based on what you’re hearing from real customers – and it’ll help you make fast, smart decisions as a result.