Managing Product Life Cycle as a Product Manager — Part 1- Discover
Product managers’ everyday routine range across the course of the product life cycle . The new age product development usually doesn’t adhere to a defined linear approach but it’s important to have a structure in place to make the life of a PM easy.
Introducing 6Ds of the PLC ( Product Life Cycle). Honestly , the below mentioned stages will overlap many a times & will follow an iterative approach as well, so do take a note of it.
In most cases , either PM will be operating in the vicinity “Discovery” spectrum or close to “Delivery” phase. This ensures that PM plans efficiently over the next set of things while the engineer is about to complete the work.
In this post , I will discuss about the 1st D — Discover .
Discover
More often than not , being a PM you must have came across some feature request from the Business leadership team , let’s say launching a “Shortlist” feature in the product for Q2-FY21. You went ahead and assign this task to the team. Once finished , you are wondering why the adoption is so low & “Shortlist” featured seems to have misfired. Being a PM , you have to own for the failure of the feature not the Business leadership team. The situation seems familiar , right!
In the above scenario , PM just blindly started working on the feature request without digging deep & identifying the root cause for the same. This stage is referred as Product Discovery. In this stage , PM works on identifying the key problem statement to work upon.
The initial idea of the product arises usually from below mentioned scenarios :-
- Feature request
- Mediocre metrics
- Entry to new market
- Competitive benchmarking
In the Discovery stage, the PM take the initial idea & further brainstorm it on the basis of customer’s pain point & requirements.
Most of the launches fail because the team focused on the wrong problem statement & they missed the bigger picture.
Let’s take an example to understand this. Ola has launched Olay Play as an innovative feature in the market. Ola Play greets customers when they board the car, addressing them by their first names; automatically starts playing songs that they like based on their past choices; intuitively lowers the volume of the music if the customer receives a phone call; making the commute a pleasant experience. However , Uber never attempted or tried their hands with such a feature and focused on key problem statement of the customer — cab availability. Better product discovery by Ola could have maneuvered it in the right direction.
There are 8 tasks which are covered in Product Discovery stage , namely :-
- Analyzing funnel metrics
- Interviewing customers
- Performing Competitive Analysis
- Conducting brainstorming sessions
- Conducting user experience study
- Deep diving feature request
- Understand medium to long term product vision
- Conducting market analysis
Discovery is the secret sauce for creating successful products. So being a PM, do ensure to spend ample amount of time in this stage before moving ahead.
Stay tuned ! In the next post , I will talk about the next stage — Define.
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