Product management lifecycle: A PM's role at every phase
Every product has a lifecycle that must be tracked by its various stakeholders. A Product Manager (PM) is responsible for supporting a project throughout each stage. Different skills and leadership demands are needed at these different stages to drive a product forward.
One popular model for a product’s lifecycle breaks it up intro Introduction, Growth, Maturity, and Decline. In this article, we will discuss what PMs should be focused on during each period.
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Overview of a product’s lifecycle#
A Product Manager (PM) or Technical Product Manager (TPM) is an essential part of a product team who creates and leads the vision for a product. They work to define customer needs, manage any relevant stakeholders, and ensure overall product success.
To be a great PM, you need to understand where a product is at in its lifecycle and what decisions to make at each stage. So, what is a product’s lifecycle?
There are many models for thinking about how a product moves through its lifecycle. A common and helpful model by Raymond Vernon follows four basic steps:
- Introduction: get to market-product fit, become a subject expert
- Growth: scale and stay competitive, support more users to encourage growth
- Maturity: retention, maintain market share, evolve vision
- Decline: meet best outcome as product declines, thinking about pivoting or phasing out
Note: There are many other product lifecycle models that categorize and encapsulate different kinds of products and markets. Generally, most models distinguish between a problem-solution fit phase, product-market fit phase, and scaling phase.
Phase 1: Introduction#
Products have to start somewhere. This could be a new startup product, a spinoff, or even a brand extension. Different types of products will require different strategies when they are in the introduction stage. The overarching goal of this stage is to get a product to market fit by adapting to customer insights.
Product Managers are in charge of leading the vision for a given product, so their primary focus during this stage is connecting ideas together. A PM will spend a lot of time validating ideas, managing different visions, and coordinating information from various sources. PMs should focus on a product strategy based on factors like:
- Customer pain points
- Market competition
- Financial model
- Delivery milestones
In terms of product vision, the main challenge of a PM at this stage is generating demand. This is why it’s crucial to develop a product that actually meets customer needs. Lean development principles can be helpful for this aspect of phase one, including strategies like initiative market research and early trials.
In terms of management, PMs serve an important role in this stage as the in-house subject matter expert for a given product. They should focus on providing necessary resources and keeping everyone on track during the early stages of conception and development.
Phase 2: Growth#
Once a product is developed fully and launched, a PM is responsible for guiding its growth onward. During the second phase, PMs need to think more broadly about the market and financial models, most notably competitors.
Product managers need to manage competition carefully, striking a balance between scaling a product but not compromising on the product’s initial design purposes. PMs need to keep a product competitively priced without giving away margin.
PMs also must focus on identifying new potential buyers or audiences to bring in additional business. This can be done through research and data-driven initiates to prioritize new directions. This means a good PM will be aware of the market and demand. They should be deeply invested in uncovering new patterns or trends.
Keep the learning going.#
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Phase 3: Maturity#
When a product reaches maturity, new customer growth will begin to fall off and profits may decrease as more competitors emerge. The main goal of a PM during this stage is to reduce costs and find new ways to differentiate their product in the market.
PMs should also focus on lowering the cost of goods sold by making workspaces more efficient and specialized. PMs will need to make decisions about the following:
- Which initiatives to focus on
- Which competitors to focus on
- Ways to reduce costs or scale a platform
Metrics are crucial during the maturity phase. These numbers can help a good PM understand user behavior to make pivots that may help a product grow again or reach new markets.
Phase 4: Decline#
All products decline for a lot of reasons. Sometimes, the demand for a product dwindles in the market or competitors may have surpassed your product.
PMs need to understanding what is driving the decline of a product and act accordingly. Depending on what factors are leading to a decline, good PMs will readjust, pivot, or find efficient ways to bring a product to the end.
In other words, during phase four, a PM needs to address the following question: do we keep going, kill the product, or reboot it?
- Keep: PMs may choose to keep the product in the market if the product is stable. New features can be added, or the team could focus on a new form of distribution, such as spin off products.
- Kill: A PM may choose to kill a product if it is not successful or there is no vision in sight to resolve the issues. This will require a transition to new alternatives or a full termination.
- Reboot: Many PMs choose to reboot the product by solving the same customer pain point with new technologies or user experiences.
Continuous discovery: Beyond the linear lifecycle#
The classic lifecycle model (introduction, growth, maturity, decline) still matters — but modern product management is no longer strictly linear. Great PMs now think in terms of continuous discovery and delivery.
Continuous discovery is a mindset shift. Instead of operating in long cycles and making big bets once or twice a year, PMs today embed discovery into their weekly routines. That means:
Talking to customers weekly through interviews, usability tests, or feedback sessions.
Running small, rapid experiments to validate hypotheses before building full features.
Using prototypes, wireframes, or lightweight MVPs to test demand with minimal effort.
Continuously gathering and synthesizing feedback from analytics, support tickets, and surveys.
This approach ensures the product evolves with customer needs instead of reacting after the fact. It also enables faster pivots, more data-driven decision-making, and a tighter feedback loop between user problems and product solutions.
Dual-track agile: Discovery and delivery in parallel#
Modern product teams don’t treat discovery and delivery as separate stages. They run them in parallel — an approach known as dual-track agile. This ensures that while one part of the team is validating ideas, another is building validated solutions.
Discovery track: Focuses on exploring problems, testing assumptions, and shaping solutions based on real user insights. This includes customer interviews, rapid prototyping, opportunity mapping, and hypothesis validation.
Delivery track: Focuses on building, launching, and iterating on validated solutions with production-ready quality.
This model reduces wasted engineering effort on unproven ideas, keeps product work aligned with real customer needs, and allows teams to pivot quickly if assumptions don’t hold true.
Product operating model and Product Ops#
As organizations grow, the complexity of managing product teams increases. This is where Product Operations (Product Ops) comes in — a strategic function focused on improving how product teams operate, communicate, and scale.
Product Ops supports PMs by:
Standardizing workflows: Establishing consistent processes for roadmaps, OKRs, experimentation, and customer feedback.
Improving visibility: Ensuring everyone — from engineering to sales — has clear insight into product priorities and progress.
Optimizing tooling: Managing analytics, feature flagging, customer feedback, and documentation tools.
Institutionalizing learning: Maintaining knowledge bases, experiment libraries, and decision logs so insights are reusable.
With Product Ops, PMs spend less time on coordination and more time on strategy, discovery, and delivering customer value.
Metrics that matter: NSM, OKRs, and outcome alignment#
The original blog mentions metrics, but PMs in 2025 must think in terms of outcomes rather than just outputs. Modern product teams use layered measurement frameworks that guide decisions across the lifecycle.
Key frameworks include:
North Star Metric (NSM): The single metric that best reflects the value your product delivers to customers. Examples: Spotify’s “time spent listening” or Airbnb’s “nights booked.”
Supporting metrics: Break the NSM into smaller KPIs (e.g., activation, engagement, retention, referral, revenue) to track progress at a granular level.
OKRs (Objectives and Key Results): Help align the product team’s work with broader company goals and ensure every initiative moves the needle.
Importantly, these metrics should inform every decision — from prioritizing discovery opportunities to refining mature features.
Experimentation, feature flags, and risk reduction#
The days of shipping massive releases and hoping for success are over. Modern PMs rely on experimentation to reduce risk and validate ideas before scaling.
Best practices include:
A/B testing: Test different variations of features or designs to learn what drives engagement, conversion, or retention.
Feature flags: Roll out new features gradually to small user segments, gather data, and reduce the blast radius of potential issues.
Kill switches: Include built-in mechanisms to turn off problematic features instantly without redeploying.
Cohort analysis: Study how different user segments behave post-launch to guide iteration.
This iterative, data-driven approach ensures that every feature contributes to measurable outcomes and that potential failures are caught early.
Product-led growth (PLG) and growth loops#
The modern product manager must also understand how products grow. In 2025, product-led growth (PLG) is a dominant strategy — where the product itself becomes the primary driver of acquisition, engagement, and revenue.
Key PLG strategies:
Self-serve onboarding: Remove friction from signup and activation to deliver value as quickly as possible.
Freemium and free trial models: Let users experience value before they commit to paying.
Virality and growth loops: Embed viral mechanics like referrals, collaboration invites, and shareable content into the product experience.
Expansion through usage: Drive upsells and feature adoption organically as users find more value.
PLG requires PMs to think beyond features and focus on user journeys, aha moments, and compounding product value over time.
Risk, compliance, and AI-era considerations#
With new technologies like AI and evolving global regulations, PMs now face responsibilities that go far beyond feature delivery. Risk management, compliance, and ethical design must be part of product strategy from day one.
Regulatory compliance: Laws like GDPR, CCPA, and the EU AI Act influence how data is collected, processed, and shared. Non-compliance can lead to heavy fines and reputational damage.
Ethical AI design: If your product uses AI, ensure transparency, fairness, explainability, and bias mitigation. PMs must collaborate closely with data science and legal teams.
Data governance: Establish policies around data consent, retention, anonymization, and usage to maintain trust.
Security and privacy by design: Integrate security practices from the earliest stages of development, not as an afterthought.
Modern PMs must anticipate these challenges early and bake compliance and risk mitigation into every stage of the product lifecycle.
Wrapping up#
As you can see, knowing which stage a product is at will drastically change what decisions you make about a product. A good PM is always tracking a product along its lifecycle and thinking about how it may change in the future.
These lifecycle phases are somewhat unavoidable, so a good PM will encourage a product to evolve rather than fight against change.
This means that the skills of a good PM will also change to meet the task at hand. Learning new styles of product management can help you stay efficient in the way you solve problems.
To learn about lean startup and lean PM methodologies, check out Educative’s course Lean Product Management. You will learn modern product management techniques that will help you bring products to the market as quickly as possible.
By the end of this course, you will have the foundations in place to bring products to the market that solve problems, generate revenue, and are built for the long haul.
Happy learning!
