Software Product Development Lifecyle

Well, this topic was written around in 2014.  In that time, I got an opportunity to present about product development. Because sharing is caring. So, I am as representer from of my team decided to tell about what we do in and what it will influence with my company's business goal. I explained about Software Product Development Lifecycle. I think the topic is really familiar in IT field because it relates to software engineering. There are 7 steps in software product development lifecycle:

1. Product Conceptualization

Every company should know about their objectives and goals. Where they want to go and how to achieve it. Every company has own business model. Most of business failed because they don’t have business value in the long term and maybe they only have small market segmentation.

Before we make features, we should have mind set and start thinking with “WHY”. Why, we want to build x features? WHY is about find the best reasons behind it. It would be better if the features impact your company goal.

So, how do we get the best reasons behind it? There are several methods : listen to your customers/user, interpreting from data statistics, doing research, using analytics tools, discussion, reading books, creating mind map to limit scopes, etc.

  2. Product Analysis

After we got data from explanation above (no.1), then we process it into information. We specify about who is our user targeting and also what they are doing on your system/site. 

For Examples :

• Seller be able to sell items
• Buyer find the right item : want to buy HP with brand x type abc, competitive price, in Jakarta, new item.
• User can send private messages each other directly
• User can register/login to Bukalapak easily

  3. Product Design

There are two ways to deliver product design : product architecture, prototype/wireframe. Oh iya, I usually use Balsamiq tools to put all requirement specification into mock up design.

4.  Product Development

System analyst explains to developers about requirements and non-requirements of the system. Programmer/software engineer/developers code the program. 

  5. Product Testing & Quality Assurance (QA)

Testing your product in every requirement detail. If there are still some errors, it means the products not ready yet to be released.

  6. Product Release

After product’s ready, and then we work together with marketing team to promote our features. We can use some channel (social media, home banner, newsletter, blog, etc). Success of product depend on the products itself and marketing activities. The best/great product will fail, if there isn’t marketing activity. We want our product will be used by our customers. Mostly, company spend budget on it. But, we should also notice, sometimes the great marketing activity will fail if the product still has many errors. We don’t want to make our customer/user are disappointed after they use our products. It will make they don’t want to come back again.

  7. Product Lifecycle Management

Everyday, every week, every month, every year…there are many new ideas and innovations in product development. What if there are new features in the future that it will impact to existing features/systems. For example : What you will do to your user & system when you want to move big step a head from non transaction based to be transaction based on online site marketplace. Is it big thing, right?

  Summary :

Actually, I inspired from book by Simon Sinek – Start With Why. This book tell about leadership skills that every leader should have design thinking skill when they ask their employee to take actions. But I think, his perception can implement in other cases. For example when we want to build IT product. Start thinking with WHY we want to build it, HOW we build it, and then WHAT is your product that will be accepted by your user/customer. At the end, all company want to make everyone happy : investor’s happy, employee’s happy, customer/user’s happy. Good luck!

By the way, with reference this topic, I also had published slides on my SlideShare. You can clip or read, or download it at My Slide. I hope it will be helpful for you. Thank you :)