Product Life Cycle & Product Development Cycle

This is the stage in which the product is initially promoted. Public awareness is very important to the success of a product. If people don’t know about the product they won’t go out and buy it.

There are two different strategies you can use to introduce your product to consumers. You can use either a penetration strategy or a skimming strategy. If a skimming strategy is used then prices are set very high initially and then gradually lowered over time. This is a good strategy to use if there are few competitors for your product. Profits are high with this strategy but with risk.

The Growth stage is where the market share of product starts to grow. Often at this stage a large amount of money is spent on advertising. You want to focus your advertising campaigns at your target audience and existing customers, and sell the benefits of your products to them. There are several channels to advertise your product. The advertising channels you choose to take will depend on your product, industry and advertising budget you have.

The third stage in the Product Life Cycle is the maturity stage. If your product completes the Introduction and Growth stages then it is likely to spend a great deal of time in the Maturity stage. During this stage sales grow at a very fast rate, then gradually your market share will begin to stabilize. The key to surviving this stage is differentiating your product from the similar products offered by your competitors.

• This is the stage in which sales of your product begin to fall. Either everyone that wants to has bought your product or new, more innovative products have been created that replace yours. 
• To stay competitive, and keep your market share, you will need to reassess your existing product and iterate on it’s features.
•  Ideally, between the maturity and decline stage, you would restart the product development cycle, to continue the success of your business. 
• Some companies decide to withdraw their products completely from the market due to the downturn.

The product development cycle is a part of the product life cycle.

The product development cycle focuses on the planning, development and evaluation of a product. The product life cycle looks at the performance of the product in the market and its market share.

The product development cycle consists of the following stages: Plan, Develop, Evaluate, Launch, Assess, Iterate or Kill.

To begin Market Research and Competitive Analysis should be carried out, to get an understanding of the market, and the key players in them. This research will need to answer questions such as:

• Who are your target audience?
• Is there a need for the product? Can it be validated by thing like surveys, customer interview or consumer spending figures?
• Who are the competitors in the market and how will the product be able to compete with them? What is the potential market share for the product?

Simply put this is when the product be it software or hardware is built.

You will need to management resources and development to deliver a working product, that contains the core features for success in a timely manner. This will ensure a great product release, and will enable you to evaluate the product and it’s features quickly, once it is live.

Once the features have been defined with user stories and specification, they should be ranked by difficulty and priority.

Use Key performance indicators as metrics to measure the success of the product.

Key Metrics Measure For Product Success:

• Cost of Acquisition
• Revenue
• Rate of Revenue Growth
• AARRR Metrics:
• Acquisition
• Activation
• Retention
• Referral
• Revenue

This stage is very much the same as the Introduction stage of the Product Life Cycle.

Launching the product involves letting your target audience the product is live. This can be done with Press Announcement & Interviews, advertising, creating public launch events etc.

Soon after launch, you should assess your performance.

Assessing the product entails collecting metrics and analysing them, to gather insight in to the performance of the product. A/B testing, challenging how to improve a return on investment, testing what makes a returning customer are a few possibilities for assess and analysis.

Similarly to the Evaluation stage, each feature of the product will need to be tested and evaluated to see if a feature worth keeping and iterated on or being doped from the product completely.

Once assessment and evaluation of the product features is complete, a decision needs to be made on which features to keep and upgrade and which to remove.

For the features that prove not useful for the customer, and don’t generate engagement or revenue, those should be removed. This should be done in a well planned manor, with customers should be informed of the removal of features.