The Product Development Process: Delivery
The Product Development Process: Delivery
How product teams build awesome products, part 2 of 2
Welcome back! Last week, we introduced the product development process and covered the first two phases, which many Product people call “discovery.”
You’re here to learn about “delivery” (phases 3, 4, & 5) and what happens after delivery (phase 6). We’ll break down why each step is valuable, your role as the PM, and what outcome you should aim for.
This post is part 2 of my 5-part Product Management Crash Course, based on my recent guest lecture at MIT. Don’t miss it; subscribe.
Refresher: The Product Development Process
In case you missed part one, here’s a quick overview of the product development process.
The six phases of the product development process are:
1. Define the opportunity
2. Design the solution
Product people like to call these two phases “discovery.” It’s when you’re figuring out the most important problem to focus on and how to solve it.
3. Build the solution
4. Prepare for launch
5. Launch 🚀
Phases 3, 4, and 5, usually called “delivery,” is all the work to ship, aka “deliver,” that solution to your customers.
6. Learn, Maintain, Improve
Just when you thought your work was done, there’s more work to do! OMG. 🤦 Phase 6 is what happens after you launch. Don’t fret! This last phase will lead you to more breakthroughs.
Stick around to the end; we’ll talk about what this process looks like IRL. Hint, it’s not so linear and straightforward.
Let’s dive in right where we left off, with phase 3.
Phase 3: Build the solution
Write the code to bring the solution to life.
Why building the solution is important
In discovery, we figured out the most important user problem to solve and picked a great solution by destroying bad solution ideas. It’s time to build that great solution! Building takes time; that’s why this is a whole phase on its own.
P.S. Kudos to you for not jumping straight to this building step! We learned last week that discovery is critical to make sure we build the right things.
What your team is doing
The engineers will spend the time they need to build the solution, which you all agreed on and de-risked in phase 2.
What you should do
This is usually the phase where you will be the most hands-off, but don’t mix yourself a martini and zone out now. This is not the time to go on a very long vacation. Even though the hard work will be in engineering’s hands, you have a few responsibilities during this phase, too:
Keep development moving forward
No matter how well you plan, unexpected stuff always comes up during this phase. Be available to answer questions and unblock the engineers when they get stuck.
Attend engineering team stand-ups, sprint planning, retrospectives, and other development ceremonies to get clues about how development is going. With the Engineering Manager or Tech Lead, look for things that could slow down development, like
Unclear requirements from the PRD,
Dependencies on other teams, and
Unplanned edge cases.
When these bottlenecks arise (and trust me, that’s a when, not if), work with the engineers to find solutions and get them back on track.
Testing
Dogfooding, drinking your own champagne, whatever you want to call it, you need to test the product internally while it’s getting built. Obviously, you need to test it before you launch it to customers, but the most productive teams do testing in parallel with building so that they can fix issues faster.
Find out if your engineers can regularly push their changes to an internal testing site where you can see their progress and start testing. If you have them, your Quality Assurance (QA) or Quality Engineering team should also be testing the product. Get your designers and additional volunteers from the company to help too. The more testing you do before you launch, the more polished your final product will be.
Progress reports
Most product teams have weekly or monthly status update meetings. Usually, you’ll have to report how your projects are going and state if each project is “on track,” “at risk,” or “off track.”
Many PMs dread this part of the job and drag their feet into status update meetings. But not you; you’re wise. You know that this is your opportunity to shine. This is when you will earn your leadership team's and stakeholders' trust – by showing up and doing what you said you’d do. And when things are off track, you show up with solutions, not excuses. Mic drop. 🎤
Take these updates seriously. These signals let leadership and stakeholders plan for delays, and this is also an opportunity for you to ask for help if your team needs it.
Outcome
At the end of this phase, you should have:
☑️ A solution built by Engineering that meets all the requirements described in the design phase.
☑️ Completed manual and automated testing, with all critical tests passing.
Yass! You’re ready for customers! Well, no, not quite; we still need to get through phase 4.
Phase 4: Prepare for launch
Ensure everyone in the business is ready for the solution to go live.
Why preparing for launch is important
The code is done! Let’s push the launch button! Hold your horses; it’s not that easy. The phrase “If you build it, they will come” is a lie. You have to do work to make sure a new product or feature is successful out in the wild. In this phase, you’ll get all your ducks in a row to prepare your company for the launch.
What you should do
You need to start preparing for launch (phase 4) while the engineers are building the solution (phase 3). Wait, phase 4 starts before phase 3 ends? Yes, product management is a multi-tasking mess, but more on that later.
Preparing for launch is one of the busiest times for a product manager. You have to make sure the product or feature is ready to go live. This means coming up with a plan for how you will tell customers about the new thing and making sure everyone in your company knows that the new thing is about to drop.
Here in phase 4, you have a lot of work to do. Depending on your company’s launch processes, you may be doing some or all of these activities in this phase:
Go-to-market prep
Your “go-to-market” (GTM) plan is how you will engage with customers to let them know about your new offering and convince them to try it or buy it. Here are some examples of things you’ll probably need to do:
Work with a release or customer communications team to plan how you’ll announce the launch to existing customers. You might prepare emails to customers or in-app messaging.
Work with marketing to create materials you’ll distribute at launch to announce the new feature or product. You might prepare a blog post, a press release, and line up media coverage. You know, whatever your marketing team does to get your product out there.
Work with your sales team to prepare them to sell this new feature. You could train them to use it, help them refine their positioning and sales pitch, and help create sales collateral.
You might work with finance and sales to establish pricing for the new feature, but everything’s part of a subscription model these days, so maybe not.
Prepare the company
Give everyone at your company a heads up that a new thing is coming so they aren’t surprised when customers ask them about it. And there are a few teams in particular who you’ll want to spend extra time preparing for battle.
Train your customer support teams on how to use the new feature and how to troubleshoot customer issues that might come up.
Inform your SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) and operations teams so they are aware of any potential spikes in usage after the launch and ready to handle them.
If your company publishes documentation or FAQs about your product, update them to include information about your new feature.
Your company may have other specific steps to prepare for launches. Make sure you know what’s expected of you for each launch. How much of this you do yourself versus working with specialists depends on staffing at your company and what help you have available.
In smaller companies, you may have fewer marketing and sales folks, so you may handle a lot of the go-to-market prep yourself as the product manager. At larger companies, teams of specialists will handle all of this, and your role will be to coordinate and support those teams as they prep for your launch.
If you’re relying on other people to do all this work, start preparing for launch as early as possible to ensure you can hit your desired launch date and avoid delays.
📚 Build that skill 📚
Coordinating launch prep activities across your company can be overwhelming. Influence without authority is the critical skill you need to align all your stakeholders and gain support from other teams when you need their help preparing for a launch. My course, Product Influence, can help you build this skill. It might be on sale right now.
📚 📚 📚 📚 📚
Outcome
When you’re done with phase 4:
☑️ You have a GTM plan for announcing the launch to customers
☑️ Everyone in the company who needs to know knows your launch is coming
☑️ Impacted teams are ready for the feature to go live
Phase 5: Launch
Ship it! 🚢
Why launching is important
3… 2… 1… lift off! You will make the awesome new thing you built available to users and customers. I’m excited for you.
What you should do
Launches are another moment of significant coordination for the product manager. While I’m excited for you, it’s ok to be terrified to push the “Launch” button. In this phase, you’ll work closely with your engineers to coordinate how your new feature gets pushed to your users and customers. After getting any required approvals (check your company’s specific steps), the activities you could be doing in this phase include:
Making the call on whether or not the feature is ready for prime time and giving Engineering the green light to deploy. Depending on how your company deploys code changes, the actual launch event might be handled by the engineers on your team or a centralized DevOps or Release team.
Coordinate anything needed from stakeholders during the launch, like sending customer emails or publishing technical documentation.
Monitor the performance of the feature at launch and after. In the Discovery phases, you should have defined success metrics for your feature, and now you’ll monitor those metrics to see if your feature has the impact you expected.
If your launch involves an A/B test or feature flags, manage the rollout by adjusting the percentage of users exposed to your feature. For example, start with a small percentage, say 5% of users, on day one, and increase that percentage over a few days if the metrics look positive. If the metrics look bad, you might work with Engineering to roll back the feature (disable and remove it from users) so your team can fix things. Disasters are best kept tiny.
Review and manage feedback from customers. Hopefully, it’s mostly positive feedback, but you’ll also have to deal with support tickets and bugs.
Provide reports to leadership to let them know how the launch is going.
The launch phase can be a lot of work, but don’t forget to celebrate! 🎉 Show gratitude to your team and all the stakeholders who helped with the launch, and take a moment to celebrate together.
Product development is a slog. Be proud of your triumph! 🧗
Outcome
☑️ Your feature is out in the wild, and customers can access and use it.
Phase 6: Learn, Maintain, Improve
Monitoring performance to restart the cycle.
Why learning, maintaining, & improving is important
Observe how users and customers interact with your new feature to inform your next steps.
What you should do
Just when you thought your work was done… Nope, it’s Groundhog Day, and it all starts over. Well, hopefully not. There are exciting things to learn to make your product the best it can be.
After the launch, you will continue monitoring your fantastic feature:
Monitor your success metrics. You’ll work with a data analytics team to set up tracking and dashboards to monitor customer adoption, sales, engagement, and retention metrics.
Triage bugs that customers report about the feature and work with your engineers to fix issues.
Report to leadership how the product is doing, what you’ve learned post-launch, and what next steps you’ll take to improve it further.
And all this brings you back to phase 1! You’ll find new opportunities for improvement and start the product development process all over again. This isn’t Groundhog Day. You and your product are becoming the best they can be.
Outcome
☑️ Take what you’ve learned post-launch to define new opportunities and loop back to the start of the product development process.
The product development process IRL
As a product manager, how you spend your time during a typical workday depends on what phase of the product development process you are currently in. Or how many projects at different phases you’re juggling.
In real life, the phases are not linear. Most of the time, the phases will overlap with each other. IRL, the process might look more like this for a single project:
Ok, this might even be ambitious. The phases may be more of a blur. You may go through several mini-loops somewhere in the process if you find out something isn’t working, and you need to go back to a previous step. That’s ok. It’s more important that you do the work for each phase than what order you do it in.
You’re gonna be a great juggler
In reality, you’ll probably be in the discovery phases for 1-2 projects while 1-2 other projects are in the delivery phases. And you’ll always have the features you’ve launched in the past that you must continue monitoring. Your day might start to look like this:
It’s a serious juggling act. And the more senior you get, the bigger your scope will be, and the more projects you’ll have in flight at different phases that you’ll need to juggle at once. Fun! 🤹😣
Bookmark this guide to help you navigate the product development process and keep track of everything you need to do at each phase.
Yes, it’s a lot of work to ship a feature, but it’s incredibly rewarding when you launch something unique and awesome into the world. So do the work, and celebrate the accomplishment when you launch. 🚀
And remember, you got this!