The Product Development Process for Lean Startups

Howdy, Upstarts!

To launch your product quickly and efficiently, you will need to master the Product Development Process. A strong Product Development Process allows you to gather data, identify valuable features, and launch your products quickly and cheaply.

I love developing and launching products! I have always loved building things since my father bought me my first set of lego bricks. After that moment, the innocent enjoyment in putting things together and taking things apart has never left me. So, I moved into Engineering and Software Development and product development, where I could be paid to play with a more expensive lego set.

Over the years, I have built several different Products, both successes and failures, in several different industries, Finance, Transit, Education, Defense, etc. Some of the products have been simple and some of the products have been complex. Some of the products were fun and some of the products were profitable. But each of the products shared at least one aspect.

Every time I worked on a product, I receive the same lecture about how the Product Development Process should be.

There are so many books already written on Product Development that every line manager and lead engineer has a slightly different opinion on how a Customer Journey should be written, or an Ideation Session should be managed, or a User Test should be run. Every person has an opinion on every thing. But at the end of those lectures, I never saw our Managers or Engineering Leads behave any differently from each other.

As a Software Developer, I never really behaved differently during any of these myriad variations of Product Development Processes. Every Product Development Process devolved into the same basic structure. I received Requirements in the same basic format, and I wrote Code in the same way that I always had.

And I realized that none of these different Product Development Processes address how they impact Software Developers and Engineers.

So I have set out to fix this problem! In this series of articles, I will be discussing the Product Development Process from the point of view of the Software Developers and Engineers who end up working late nights and long weekends to actually bring these Products to Market. In this article, I will start with the most basic Product Development Process; and in later articles, I will expand and detail this Product Development Process.

Start with A Two-Step!

I always advocate that we should not take things for granted and that the best way to evaluate our assumptions and behaviors is to work from Base Principles. So we are going to do this with our Product Development Process.

The Product Development Process is the process that we apply in order to transform an Idea for a Product into a tangible Product in the Market.

The Product Development Process is how your turn Ideas into Products!

That’s pretty simple, right? Well yes and no. If you could wave a magic wand into to take your ideas of the page and materialize them, fully formed, in front of you, then building a startup would be much easier. So if we want to create a Product Development Process that is actually useful, then we are going to need to break our Product Development Process into smaller steps.

First, the Product Development Process is done in two phases: Articulation and Implementation: like the process shows below.

Your Two Phase Product Development Process

Articulation

The first step, the Articulation Phase, is the part where we research, we define requirements, and we develop a strategy!

During this phase, we should take an Idea for a Product and validate that there is a demand for it in the market, build financial forecasts to determine the potential revenue, and develop a strategy for implementation and operations. The Articulation Phase requires people who can communicate well, think strategically, gather data, conduct research or surveys, and organize schedules and budgets.

By the end of the Articulation phase, we should have a collection of requirements that are ready for the next phase, the Implementation Phase!

Implementation

The second step, the Implementation Phase, is the part where we build the Product!

During this phase, we should take the requirements that were created during the Articulation Phase and write code until all of the requirements are met. The Implementation Phase requires people who can learn quickly, listen attentively, and code well.

By the end of the Implementation phase, we should be able to Launch our Product!

Who does what?

Both the Articulation Phase and the Implementation Phase are, generally speaking, full-time jobs and require different skill sets. So that means that you will need different people to do the work of each phase. So Technology Companies build two different departments around each of these two Phases. the Product Organization is built around the Articulation Phase and the Engineering Organization is built around the Implementation Phase.

This why companies have a Chief Product Officer and a Chief Technology Officer!

So Software Developers always work with a Product Manager. Startups have someone who is in charge of “The Product”, i.e. a person who is in charge of the Articulation Phase; and, Startups have someone who is in charge of “Engineering”, i.e. a person who is in charge of the Implementation Phase.

If you look at the organizational structure of technology companies and review the literature about product development and you will find this break down is universal.

That’s the Basics!

There is a lot of White Noise in the realm of Product Development, and every team has slight variations that never have much of an impact on the day-to-day work of Software Developers or Engineers. So, I want to return to the very first point from which we can derive a Product Development Process. I hope this can shine a light on many different aspects of building a Startup and running an Engineering Organization.

In this article, I defined the Product Development Process and I broke it into two steps: first, the Articulation Phase; and second, the Implementation Phase. Each of these phases is a full-time job and requires different talents. By dividing our Product Development Process into these two phases, I hope that I have explained why most companies have two organizations: a Product Organization and an Engineering Organization. This organizational division mirrors the division in our Product Development Process.

In the following articles, I will continue to flesh out our Product Development Process.