Appreciate the Circle of a Product’s Life: Part I
Discover the product life cycle from a programmer's viewpoint, including concept creation, prototyping, and development. Learn how to evaluate ideas, drive technical research spikes, and contribute meaningfully to product success. This lesson equips beginners to understand their role within the bigger product process and build essential skills to support product life from inception to release.
Product life cycle
Every product and service begins as a spark of inspiration in somebody’s head. It’s a long road between there and version 1.0 and longer still to version 10.0. This tip will take us on a tour of the life cycle for a product from a programmer’s perspective.
The big-picture of a successful product is circular. Someone starts with a concept, builds prototypes, develops one into a product, and releases it. It’s a success, of course, and the company both maintains that product and starts to develop new concepts. Eventually, a product’s time has passed, and it goes end-of-life. In the meantime, the company has built other stable, successful products.
Not every product’s lifecycle is quite so complete. Silicon Valley is filled with the smoking craters of start-up companies that failed to get a product shipped or customers to buy. But we’ll take the optimistic route and discuss a product with a long and healthy life.
Concept
In traditional product management, people research a market and search for opportunities. The “market” is short for the “marketplace.” Practically, it’s a definition of our customer. Who do we sell to? That’s our market.
Opportunities, then, are products or services our customer is willing to pay for. At a market-driven company, they may do interviews, data mining, trend analysis, and other research that programmers generally find boring. Once they find a new opportunity for profits, a product concept is born.
For programmers, on the other hand, the concept phase goes the other way: a great product concept is born in someone’s head. Then, they search for a market. This way is also known as “a solution looking for a problem.” If there’s a market for the product, there’s nothing wrong with this technique, and it’s the way many disruptive technologies get created.
Waterfall vs. agile terminology
Our discussion here ...