Saturday, March 30, 2013

Observations on Product Development: Part 3

  1. Your product forms a unified hardware-firmware-software-marketing ecosystem.
  2. This is true even if you are only really interested in one part of it.
  3. Your product has a lifecycle that extends from conception through decommission.
  4. When your product first ships it will be, at best, one-third of the way through its lifecycle.
  5. Your product's ecosystem and its lifecycle are orthogonal concerns.
  6. You need to control costs in both; otherwise they will eat you alive.
  7. Architect, design, implement, and deploy with the entire ecosystem in mind.
  8. Architect, design, implement, and deploy with the entire lifecycle in mind.
  9. Successful product development organizations don't do this because they are large.
  10. They got large because they did this and it allowed them to scale.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Items 9 and 10 have interesting implications on the lifecycle of an organization.
There is a lot to be said about the interaction of the organization and the products it can develop.
[See Rechtin discussing Why Eagles Can't Swim]
But what an organization can build does change, and I have seen little published discussion on this evolution.

Ken Howard