Lifecycle of a software product

I’ve talked a little about what is software product management and manager, the main characteristics, and even about leadership tips and organizational culture for helping product managers to lead without being “the boss”.

Now, let’s talk about the lifecycle of a software product and its different stages: innovation, growth, matureness and end of life.

Innovation

From all the lifecycle stages of a software product, Innovation is the one that holds the biggest amount of doubts. It is also the stage that holds the biggest amount of books (innovation and startups). On the following articles we will explore the following questions:

• what is innovation?
• how to find a problem to be solved?
• how to find out if this problem is, in fact, an opportunity to be pursued?
• how to cash out with your software product?

Growth

In the growth stage, when the product has been developed and launched, we should worry about how to manage the product during its growth, that is, how to manage feedback? What is a roadmap? How to prioritize demands? What to do with special requests? How to say no? What metrics we should follow? This will be the topic of my next articles.

Maturity

After growth, comes maturity. In this phase, we will understand when it happens and what to do if the product has survived this far.

End of life

After maturity, or when the product is developed but it does not grow, comes the stage known as the end of life, or sunset, of a software product. In the following articles we will see how to detect it and how to handle it.

Shall we begin? Stay tuned for my next articles!

Product Management: how to increase the success chances of your software

In 2015 I wrote a book on Software Product Management in Portuguese. In 2016, Paulo Caroli talked to me about how he enjoyed the book and how this book could be useful to people in the software industry not only in Brazil but anywhere in the world. For this reason, we decided to create an English version of my book.

The book is organized in 5 sections:

• Definitions and requirements
• Life cycle of a software product
• Relationship with other areas
• Product portfolio management
• Where to use software product management

This book is suitable for anyone working with software. Even companies that do not have software as its core business use software in their day to day and often have developed some software that interfaces with its customers such as a website or a mobile application. It is important for these companies to understand the software product management role and responsibilities, so they can better manage this software and increase its chances of success.

We are working on the translation but as we progress we are already releasing the content. If you want to see the work in progress, please visit the book page at LeanPub. Still in beta but already with valuable content. Feedbacks are not only welcome, but needed!