The Incredible Life of a Product
Like everything, products are born and then eventually die. This sounds tragic but it shouldn’t be. If all goes well, their life will be full of exciting challenges, happy conquers and will touch the lives of all those around them. Worth it!
Throughout their life, products will go through different phases. Each phase has its specific demands and will need different muscles and skills from you, as you are a Product Manager.
We’ve checked before how much a PM’s work varies according to the type of product and through the product development cycle. Let’s check now how much does your focus and efforts change through the product life phases:
• Introduction
All products start somewhere. This phase is when a product first gets introduced to the market.
The good news is that, most likely, you won’t have to deal with the competition yet. The bad news is that this is the least profitable of all phases, and the business typically is losing money. The pressure is on anyway.
The main challenge will be generating demand — creating awareness and communicating its benefits, so people want to use it. When people actually buy it or use it, that’s the ultimate validation of product-market fit.
As a PM, you may not be performing direct go-to-market tasks. But you’ll be key to keep the product viable and to determine whether it has legs or if the business should cut its losses and move on.
Once the newborn product starts gaining a bit of traction, early usage data will be ready to be analysed. You’ll be able to understand who are the actual users and which aspects of the product are resonating most. Personas will evolve and the roadmap priorities will shift. It’s important to be reactive.
↑ Growth
The product has been accepted by the marketplace. Exciting times!
The good news this time is that the economy of the business starts to scale. But the bad news is that, with the validation of a market, there comes competition.
It goes without saying, the main goal of this phase is to fuel growth and get more and more users. With so much “growth hack” happening, as a PM, you’ll be key to identify who, beyond the early adopters, might want to use the product. But not just that.
With your data mining skills, you’ll uncover other patterns and trends and find out how to iterate on the product. There’s no space for sleeping here; reinvesting in product development is a must for staying competitive.
→ Maturity
This is when the product reaches its demand pinnacle.
There couldn’t be better news right? Well, there’s also bad news. Such an attractive product will get the market full of alternative solutions. Competition is higher than ever.
As a PM, you’ll need to be very selective in which features to invest to stand out from the crowd. You’ll probably be thinking about add-ons to retain existing users or thinking about opening up to a new target market. Whatever you decide on, you need to be sure it will have a high return, as any investment will be significant at this scale. Again, focus on metrics is critical to avoid falling off a cliff.
This phase is also an opportunity to create more efficiency and reduce costs on the operations side — e.g., automating processes that are now stable and keeping teams lean.
↓ Decline
As the demand declines, usage will drop off. Perhaps, the motivation for the product is not relevant anymore; or a replacement product is stealing market share.
Is it all bad news? No, some products manage to survive for quite some time in this phase and the good news is that some new opportunities may arise in the meantime.
The goal of this phase is to squeeze more life out of the product. As a PM, you’ll do all the attempts to delay significant shrinkage as long as possible. You’ll also try to leverage the existing solution for a new problem scenario — to find a new application for the existing technology and expertise. If so, you’d go back to the Introduction phase.
You won’t be able to avoid the unavoidable forever, though. The product life will come to an end at some point. When so, your job is to make its sunset as soft as possible for the remaining users and to help sell out the business assets.
You’ll do your best to honor the incredible life of this product.
