The Misconception
Many entrepreneurs, especially those coming from brick-and-mortar businesses, believe that building a digital product is as simple as hiring developers, sharing requirements, and expecting a finished product.
If you’re an entrepreneur aiming for success with a digital product, it’s critical to understand the Product Development Lifecycle. Let’s break it down in the simplest way possible.
What is Product Development?
Product Development is not just about coding, technology, or cloud infrastructure.
It’s a coordinated effort involving multiple roles and stages. It’s about seamless collaboration across:
- Product Management
- Product Design
- Engineering
- Quality Assurance (QA)
- Data Analytics
- Marketing & Sales
- Customer Support
These teams work together across the following stages:
- Discovering: Identifying the problem and opportunity.
- Designing: Crafting user-centered solutions.
- Developing: Building the product.
- Launching: Bringing it to market.
- Growing: Scaling and optimizing.
If you ignore even one role or stage, your “machine” won’t run smoothly, and your chances of failure increase.
There’s no fine line between the stages, but understanding them it’s easier to spot and deal with emergencies.
The Restaurant Analogy
As an entrepreneur, you need to ensure every role in the Product Development Lifecycle is covered, either by assembling a team or partnering with the right Product Development Experts to handle the process end-to-end.
Imagine visiting a restaurant and asking for a burger. Traditional outsourcing agencies would bring you raw ingredients—ground beef, bread, lettuce, and tomato—and leave you to assemble and cook your burger.
At MVP Masters, we go a step further. When you ask for a burger, we offer tailored options: "Would you like a classic cheeseburger, a plant-based burger, or a gourmet truffle burger?"
Understanding Product Development is crucial for finding or building the right team. This could mean a mix of outsourcing and in-house talent, working with a company that handles end-to-end development, or having a Product Manager in-house while outsourcing design and engineering.
Whatever your approach, make sure every role is accounted for!
Your Role & Product Management
Understanding Product Development also means knowing your personality. As a founder, you need to clarify where you fit in the roadmap and what responsibilities you’ll take on.
The Product Management role is crucial in the journey. If it’s not executed properly, the chances of failure significantly increase.
Most founders in the beginning naturally step into the Product Management role—conducting market research, analyzing competitors, defining priorities, and planning the launch.
While this often comes naturally, it’s vital to familiarize yourself with what Product Management entails. A great resource is Product Compass by Pawel Huryn.
Key responsibilities of a Product Manager include:
- Collaborating on the business model.
- Defining and tracking metrics (KPIs).
- Conducting customer interviews and product discovery.
- Prioritizing features and roadmap execution.
By aligning your personality and strengths with the roles and stages of Product Development, you set your product up for success.
The Stages
1. Discovery
Why do we need Product Discovery?
“The first truth is that at least half of your ideas are just not going to work.” – Marty Cagan, Inspired
The problem is twofold:
- Many ideas won’t work.
- The best ideas might not even be on your radar.
Even if you have promising ideas, can they be improved? Are there better, untapped ideas? These questions often go unanswered.
Discovery helps us:
- Generate better ideas.
- Validate those ideas before implementation.
- Address risks—value, usability, feasibility, viability, and ethics—early.
The goal is a validated product backlog ready for development.
There are countless frameworks for conducting Discovery. Your Product Manager should identify the right one for your team. At MVP Masters, we use BRIDGeS and the Opportunity Solution Tree to guide this process.
2. Prototyping
Prototyping allows you to create small, testable solutions to validate hypotheses with real users. This phase provides insights and user feedback that shape the product roadmap, ensuring you build something that meets customer needs.
3. Development
This stage involves planning the technical foundation: tech stack, architecture, databases, tools, and product design. The goal is to establish a scalable and reliable base for the future product.
4. Beta Launch
The Alpha and Beta phases focus on interacting with early users, onboarding them, and collecting their feedback. During this stage:
- Use marketing strategies like customer development (CustDev), surveys, and research to gauge customer excitement.
- Refine your solution based on user input.
- Define actionable startup metrics and set up a product dashboard for tracking progress.
5. MVP
Using insights from earlier stages, you now polish and refine the product, adding crucial features before releasing it to the public. With your product dashboard in place, you can monitor performance and make data-driven improvements post-launch.
6. Growth
With customer feedback, analytical data, and research, you create new product hypotheses and repeat the cycle using a Discovery framework. At MVP Masters, we leverage Shape Up to prioritize and deliver the work that truly matters.
Final Remarks
The product development lifecycle, with its distinct stages, provides a structured way to approach an otherwise uncertain process. It turns the unknown into something tangible and manageable.
While no one can predict exactly what will happen with your product, understanding the lifecycle equips you with the tools to navigate challenges effectively.
Having worked closely with over 20 founders, I’ve observed a common pattern: entrepreneurs are good at building businesses but often lack experience in building products. Those who take the time to understand the Product Development Lifecycle significantly improve their chances of success.