Greg Crisp

Previously, I discussed The Delivery as one, small part of product management, and the need to plan a product’s life cycle past its birth, all the way to its eventual shutdown. These are things I don’t see included in the typical plan for high tech products.

From my previous post: “In any IT group, software development shop, or product development team that ever had a successful product, the ACTUAL ‘maintenance cycle’ is much longer than the other 4 ‘cycles’ [of the software development life cycle] combined.”

I want to see product plans that incorporate higher-order cycles of development and evolution. This is not a foreign concept, though not as practiced in life as it should be. There is an existing concept that defines it: Long-Term Planning.

The 29th Law of Power states: “Plan All the Way to the End”.

A complete product plan includes not only birth, but life, and the eventual death. The time when the last server is turned off, and any clients still in the wild begin failing with “cannot connect” errors when launched (though with proper long-term planning, customers might see a more informative and friendly version of that message).

Have no misunderstanding: this level of planning takes longer to complete. It’s not the sort of thing you bang out in a Gantt Chart over a long weekend. It takes time, iteration, and the creation of lots of scenarios for failure and success. Getting it even close to right takes a level of prescience few have at their disposal.

Depending on available capital, it may be unreasonable to invest the time needed to do it fully, but some level of long-term planning is important if you want to see any success beyond the accidental. It may not be full, long term planning, but its better than short term thinking. Let’s call it “Longer Term Planning”. It needs to include the following at a minimum:

1. What the product should do to provide enough value that people might actually want it
2. When you’re going to ship it, and the steps you must take to get it ready to ship
3. How you’re going to sell it, collect revenue for it, and get it into your customers’ hands
4. How you’re going to deal with foreseen and unforeseen problems that will arise after you ship it
5. What you’re going to measure (a.k.a. metrics) to determine if the product is successful (i.e. profitable), and how you are going to collect the data for those metrics
6. What you’re going to improve after you ship it so that more people will want to buy it
7. How you’re going to deal with the probability that too few people will want it, which may involve improving it, or shutting it down
8. Which steps you will need to take to shut it down in the end, either due to failure, or due to the need for the product to go away in favor of something better/faster/stronger
9. What you’re going to do about those customers who still want it after you shut it down, which may include politely telling them: “Thanks for the business, and the money, now please seek fulfillment elsewhere.”

“But Greg”, you say, “My widget is the hottest thing since sliced bread. It’s the Coca-Cola of the 21st century! It will never go out of style, so I need not waste my valuable time planning for its demise.”

Good luck with that. Maybe you do have the next killer app, that will be successful for years to come. It’s still a good idea to plan for cycles in your product’s life span. Business ebbs and flows. Fashion progresses, sometimes not in a tasteful direction. And the success of a product is more influenced by the execution of those who make it than by its degree of hotness. So consider that maybe, just maybe, your hot new widget is the “New Coke” of the 21st century. Remember what happened to that?