Step 5: dIPDL Operate and Run
You’ve built a minimal viable product and then turned it into something that delivers happiness. Once your offering is past those two stages and it’s pretty clear that the market will adopt it, you’re ready to move out of prototyping and into production. The offering is viable, so it’s time to commercially scale.
The next stage in our product lifecycle framework is to move into full production. Once again, each function in the organization needs to participate and each has its role, with the head of product leading the orchestra. The responsibilities for this step are listed below.
The principles of this framework apply whether you are building a service, launching a new analytics platform, selling data via an API, or launching a new virtual event. In an agile world, especially with COVID-19 in our midst, this process isn’t about long, laborious steps — it’s a framework for operating quickly to test, iterate, test again, move into production, and scale.
One leader we spoke with last week turned their entire roadmap inside out and went from launching an MVP to an operating product in nine days. They are now running two-week sprints to add to the product and embellish it with new data, functionality, and ways to serve additional user groups relevant to the experience they are offering. Agility is the name of the game, and moving through the process quickly is today’s imperative. It’s always about time to market and time to money and making sure the offering is hitting all its targets. Happy scaling!