Product Management Approach to New Product development vs. Existing Product

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I wanted to compare and contrast the product management approach to developing a new product vs. adding features to an existing product.  I have been thinking about it for a long time and after skimming through numerous product management books and discussing with fellow product managers, I believe the below approach makes a lot of sense.

New Product:

Opportunity Discovery --> Opportunity Assessment –> Opportunity Validation –> Product Discovery –> Solution Validation –> Metrics (KPI) definition –> Execution –> Go-to-market strategy –> launch –> post-launch assessment.

Opportunity discovery = ideation, but often the opportunity is presented to you either by either the founder in a startup environment or by a senior executives in a large company. It is difficult to cover each of these definitions in this article, but they are self explanatory. I will try to add more details in future.

Each of these phases are important and based on where you are in the product life-cycle (introduction, growth, maturity, decline), you might encounter one or more of them.

Existing Product

Compare this to the approach which generally works for adding features to an existing product where you analyze the usage metrics, come up with feature definition which could move the needle in the right direction, develop, deploy and measure. This cycle of build, measure, learn is very well documented by Eric Ries in The Lean Startup book.

 

I will try not to get into too much details, but it is suffice to say that the approach to product management for a new product is very different. While working on an existing product, the customers are known, their needs have been established, the solution has been validated and we now have a known product/known customer scenario. In the new product scenario, both the market and the product is unknown. You are not sure, if there is an opportunity. Even if there is one, is the need  strong enough that they are willing to pay for a solution. You have no idea about the solution and if it  has significant value proposition. You probably do not know who your customers are in the first place. Eric covers it very well:

 

 

Market	Product	Methodology
Known	Known	Waterfall
Known	Unknown	Agile
Unknown	Unknown	Lean

 

In the lean start up approach you have to focus on the customer development in parallel to product development. Read Steven Blank’s The Four Steps to the Epiphany for more details