Product Life-cycle and Process of Development.
Tags: productmanagement, products, productmanager
Published: 2021-01-01 18:58:12

Hi friend, welcome back! 🧘

Understanding how products come alive and how they live is a very interesting experience. This article will do justice in giving you an exposition to that concept.  
As a Product Manager, you need to know this because you'll always be into products, and the success of your product is very much dependent on your decision (As I stated in my last article, [click here to read it](https://dev.to/ayfolut/product-manager-vs-project-manager-46bk) ). I'd be sharing with you, the process that products undergo and the life-cycle of products. 


### What is a Product? 🤔
A Product is anything that is offered to a market to satisfy the desire or need of a customer. A product can be physical or virtual. You should know that understanding the concepts of products is not just for a Product Manager, it is for everyone.

Products range from simple to complex and can be managed by one person or a hundred. This is one of the many reasons why understanding the process and life-cycle of products is essential. Let's move 🚀


>Bad product managers fall in love with solutions, Good product managers fall in love with problems, Great product managers fall in love with the process.


### Products Process 🧘
The product process is a series of actions or steps taken in order to get a product into the market. Below are the steps involved in the product's process;

1. **Discovery**: In the discovery, brainstorming sessions for a product idea are the talks of the day. Problems are being discovered and discussed, requirements for the product are being gathered and the idea is curated.

2. **Building**: In this stage, the development team gets to work, and of course, a bit of discovery is still going on. As a product manager, you ensure that what the development team is doing at this time, matches what you have planned out.

3. **Launching**: This is an exciting stage💃, everyone gets happy and as a PM, you should consider treating your product team to dinner (PM Jokes). As soon as it has been launched, your product team, including you, should watch the product closely for about 48 hours, to see to any anomalies or breakdown.

4. **Maintenance**: Since we know that products never ship bug-free, the team will be engaged in fixing up any bugs, and also new features could be added.


### Product Life-Cycle :
The product life cycle is the cycle through which every product goes through from introduction to maturity or death. We will look at it in five(5) phases;


![5f7c8198574ffd91984269f7_rQJ5wtLUvftE4uFKPr1T3a-r31LFDx72R0tW8_SkdeAJEYeVLDejSvU4G40BaZkIW270x-F3AZcVSjrxUCGWDmuNYCyHsJlIcAHAnNJldG6HFq2uVi2QCkt97toVACc60Sq2kt5G.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1609526307289/8WpIeA1c5.png)

1. **Development**: This phase spans from when an idea is conceived to when it has been built and is ready for deployment. 
2. **Introduction**: This phase is when the product is introduced to the market and the customers. At this stage—it is expected, and in most cases—the sales of the product shoot up. Much work is usually done at this stage to get customers to know more and use the product.
3. **Growth**: If the product has a successful introduction, it then moves to the growth stage. This is characterized by growing demand from the users and expansion in its availability.
4. **Maturity**: When a product gets to this stage, its sales decline, usually because of market saturation. Even advertising is no longer very fruitful.
5. **Death**: No product team wants their product to get to this stage. The sales would drop very massively and customer behavior would change as there is less demand for the product. If a product team cannot re-plan such a product to be relevant again, it would eventually die out.


### Conclusion :
As a product manager, the product process and life-cycle should be well understood as it will help a lot in planning your product and all other steps involved.
If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact me on Twitter:  [@ayfolut](https://twitter.com/ayfolut). 

#### Reference
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/product-life-cycle.asp