The Lifecycle of Product Development

Learn the process behind building modern, highly performant and usable web and mobile apps.

So, you have the next big idea — or, at least, an idea for a software product or service that could be valuable to many people. Now you’re wondering how to take your idea from concept to launch. In this article, we’ll go through the steps in the product development lifecycle. Although the details may vary, these steps have become standard across the tech industry. They create a clear roadmap for engineering and design to work together efficiently to create a high-quality product. 

Step 1: Gather requirements through research

When you’re building a new product, setting your business up for success begins with research. You’ll start by getting curious and asking questions like: Who are my users? What are their needs? And what are my competitors doing?

For instance, imagine that you want to create a way for chefs to offer video classes to people who want to learn how to cook. It would be helpful to conduct a broad set of interviews with your different user roles — in this case, chefs and would-be students — and learn what each of these groups are looking for. You’d also want to investigate competitor sites that offer online experiences. 

Through your research, you’ll develop a list of requirements for your product. Keep in mind that at this point, you aren’t looking to assign priorities or decide what you’re going to build — you’re simply gathering information. It makes sense to group your features by user role. For our example, our list for chefs might include: receiving payments, scheduling classes, and webcam setup. 

Step 2: Create a Product Requirements Document (PRD)

Now that you’ve researched a list of requirements, you can begin the difficult work of paring down your list to just the essentials. In product management, this is called the minimum viable product, or MVP. The idea here is that rather than building all the bells and whistles, you spend time on just your highest-priority features, so you can launch and start collecting user feedback as quickly as possible. 

Prioritization is one of the hardest tasks in product management. It can be helpful to identify the KPIs (key performance indicators) for your business. Returning to the previous example, do we care about the number of chefs that join the platform, or are we more interested in the number of students that sign up for classes? Once you know what’s important, assigning a priority score to each feature becomes easier.

With a list of your MVP features, you’re ready to create your PRD, or product requirements document. While there’s no one “right” way to write a PRD, it’s often useful to make your PRD brief (1–2 pages) and focus on describing the key user journeys. User journeys are the key tasks that people should be able to accomplish in your mobile or web app. For example, the user journeys for a student in our cooking class app might be:

• Creating an account

• Browsing classes

• Searching for a specific class

• Signing up for a class

• Taking a class

• Submitting class feedback

It’s important to ensure you’ve captured the journeys for all user roles (e.g. both chefs and students). Don’t forget that if you have employees who’ll be working with your product, such as customer support, these are also users who’ll need to have their requirements accounted for in your PRD. 

Step 3: Wireframe your MVP

With a list of prioritized requirements in hand, you’re ready to move onto wireframing. Wireframing is the process of visually depicting your user journeys. Along with your PRD, wireframes are the blueprint of your product. They’re a great way to quickly conceptualize your features and help engineers and visual designers understand what to build. 

We recommend starting out with lo-fi (low fidelity) wireframes, for which a variety of tools are available. As your visual design begins to take a more defined shape, it can be helpful to build medium or hi-fidelity wireframes that more closely resemble the finished product. You can even build interactive wireframes that let you click through a series of steps, which can be useful for demoing the desired flow.  

If you have a mobile and desktop product, be sure to create wireframes for both surfaces!

Step 4: Visual design

The next step of the product development process is to create high-fidelity or “pixel perfect” mockups using software like Adobe Illustrator or Figma. Developers will then use these mockups to build your product’s frontend as specified. 

The visual design process will result in two important documents:

1. The visual style guide: The color palette, exact typography, iconography, grid system (spacing and layout), and standard UI components for your app. 

2. Visual designs for the key pages of your app. To ensure that you don’t complicate the engineering effort for your MVP, it’s a good idea to design pages that are mobile-responsive — in other words, the components can easily adjust to support a wide variety of screen sizes, from desktop to mobile devices. 

In future posts, we’ll dive into the details of the visual design process. 

Step 5: Software development 

In modern product development, engineering and design happen somewhat in parallel. Developers don’t need to wait for final visual designs to start working on the different components of your app — software development can typically begin once there is a PRD, wireframes, and a visual style guide. The engineering process can take 3–6 months for an MVP, depending on the scope of your project and the size of your team. 

There’s a lot more to say about the software development process, and we’ll go in-depth in upcoming posts. 

Step 6: Testing 

Before launch, it’s important to ensure your product is stable and doesn’t have any major bugs. As with software development, quality assurance (QA) can start before all the other steps are complete, and should be run continuously throughout the engineering process. QA usually involves a mix of manual and automated testing to ensure that the end-to-end user journeys in the product can be completed without any issues.

Along with testing your product , you’ll also want to expose it to a small number of real, external users for feedback before going public. This user acceptance testing (UAT) tells you whether your product is working from a trusted group of alpha/beta users, before you open it up to a broader audience. 

Step 7: Launch — and iterate!

Once you feel confident that your MVP is stable, you’re ready to go live! But the story doesn’t end here. Based on user feedback, you’ll add features to the next version of your PRD, then update your wireframes and visual designs, then develop the next iteration of your app. That’s how your app continues to evolve and improve — following the same lifecycle of product development.  

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