For a product manager, it’s important to understand the various stages that products go through during their lifecycle. The following four broadly-defined stages constitute the product life-cycle:

1. Introduction
2. Growth
3. Maturity
4. Decline

This article will introduce you to each of these stages as well as examples of products in each to help you better identify them moving forward.

Introduction

The introduction phase of a product’s life-cycle is defined by the following:

• There have only been a few iterations of t...

In this tutorial, we will cover a tool called “Feature Table” that will help you compare your product to that of you competitors’.

What is a feature table?

A feature table is a comparison chart that is used to objectively analyze the competitiveness of our products vis-a-vis those offered by our competitors. Most feature tables employ the following format:

In this tutorial, we will learn about the most common types of MVPs: emails, shadow buttons, 404/Coming Soon pages, and explainer videos. These techniques allow you to test your idea without creating an actual product, saving you time and money.

Email MVPs

If you already have an email service and a mailing list of customers or interested people, you can create an Email MVP.

Simply email them a pitch for the product, and see who bites. There’s no actual product, but you can see who is interested.

Pros of Email MVPs:

• Quick and cheap
• You can segment customers into categories
• You’re starting out with a pool of interested users

Cons of Email MVPs:

This tutorial will briefly cover some tools that you can use to keep a tab on the performance metrics of your website.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is perhaps the most popular tracking-tool out there. Getting this set up entails adding a line of code to your webpage and gives you all sorts of usage data such as visits, bounce rate, pages per visit, and new visitors across both web and mobile.

The previous lesson focused on MVP strategies that advertised non-existent products.

The MVP types in this lesson feature a somewhat-functional product. These techniques require more investment, but are more professional and create better test conditions for your users.

Concierge MVPs

At a luxury hotel, the concierge is there to answer your every request, personally guiding you through your travel experience.

A Concierge MVP is very similar. Concierge MVPs experiments focus on providing a manual experience of the product without actually building it.

For example, RentTheRunway started at college campuses with an in-person concierge and a manual dress-renting service before building their online product.

The key is to start with a small group of users who ...