What Is the Product Development Cycle?
The product development cycle is the process of taking a product from an idea through its market release and beyond. This cycle involves many departments in a company: product managers, developers, designers, QA testers, and others.
What Are the Product Development Cycle Stages?
There is no universal definition of the product development cycle. Businesses disagree about how many stages the cycle includes. Even those who agree on the number of steps disagree about where one ends and the next starts.
Another point of disagreement: Some teams believe the cycle goes only as far as the product launch. Other companies—including ProductPlan—believe the cycle continues beyond the product’s market release and includes improvements to the product over time.
Here is how we define what we view as the seven stages of the product development cycle. You can use these steps as a guide to creating your own product development strategy.
Stage 1: Develop the idea.
This is the brainstorming stage. The product team looks for ways to solve problems for their user personas. During this phase, the team will generate several product ideas.
Stage 2: Validate the idea.
By the end of the first stage, the team will have a long list of product concepts. The goal now is to narrow the list to one product or feature worth pursuing. There are several ways of screening ideas to learn which are the most viable.
For example, the team can weigh each product idea according to a consistent set of criteria. One way to do this is with the weighted scoring feature in ProductPlan’s roadmap app.
The team should also screen its product concepts by speaking with its ideal customer user personas. These are the people likely to buy a product from the company, so their view on the list of ideas should carry weight.
