In general, it seems that most of the products and services I’ve worked on followed this model

Each of these steps is important, though none of them are sufficient unto themselves to guarantee a successful product. Great research is useless unless it can be applied. Excellent development doesn’t matter if the team is working on the wrong product. A great definition does not guarantee a good product launch.To me, good product management is the coordination and integration of these blocks.

Not every product / service evolution requires the same amount of effort in each of these boxes. Some small products can start in the development bucket and literally get to the launch phase in a couple of weeks. Some products require intense Research and months of refinement in Ideation and Evaluation / Selection. A lot of this depends on the culture of the company investing in the product, and the type of product whether it be hardware of software.

There are consultants, books, entire fields of study about each of these topics, and I don’t claim to be a topical expert on any of them. However, having gone through a couple few product launches, there are some quick and dirty tips that can help a product manager get through each stage successfully. Over the next couple of weeks I’m planning to post an article or two on each bucket. The goals of the articles are not to provide an in-depth how to on each topic, there are many other experts that are better positioned to provide that information. Instead, they will attempt to give a product manager the tools to handle internal or external sources of expertise and accelerate the product cycle without getting stuck along the way.