Traditional product management and platform product management
Product Management 101 tells us that every product goes through four stages: introduction, growth, maturity, and decline. But I believe that no one should plan for the decline stage. It might happen due to circumstances beyond our control, but the plan should be to revamp and restart in that case.
I also believe that there is one more stage before the introduction phase. A lot of time and effort goes into research, building hypotheses, and validating those hypotheses, and all this happens before introducing the product. Some people call it part of the introduction phase, but I like to call it pre-introduction. Hence, when you are planning, you should plan for the following four stages of a product:
- Pre-introduction
- Introduction
- Growth
- Maturity
Let's look at these four stages from a platform product management lens and see what the differences in each of these stages are when building a...
