Embracing the Power of Iterative Development: A Game-Changer for Product Managers
As a product manager, you’re constantly torn between delivering a complete product and providing incremental value to your customers on a regular basis. While opinions may vary, building features iteratively offers more benefits than waiting for a full product release. By doing so, you can consistently add value to the user experience, gather continuous feedback, and make informed decisions about the next steps.
What is Iterative Development?
Iterative development involves building new features or functions one step at a time, allowing organizations to maximize resources and provide value to users on a semi-regular basis. This approach has two interconnected benefits: providing immediate benefits to users without making them wait for the entire feature, and obtaining early feedback to guide development.
The Benefits of Iterative Development
Iterative product development offers several advantages, including:
- Providing Incremental Value: By releasing small, beneficial parts of a new feature, users receive immediate benefits while you test the foundations of the feature.
- Obtaining Early Feedback: Breaking a feature into iterations allows you to gather feedback from users at each stage, ensuring you understand their needs and remain agile.
- Maximizing Resources: Iterative development helps organizations maximize the quality of each iteration, minimizing delays and technical risks.
Implementing the Iterative Process
To incorporate iterative development into your product development process, follow these steps:
- Design the Ideal State: Collaborate with your product designer to develop the end goal, using customer feedback, surveys, and data analytics to shape the final feature.
- Brainstorm Must-Haves: Review the final solution and prioritize features into must-haves, should-haves, could-haves, and will-not-haves.
- Break into Iterative Sprints: Divide the end goal into iterations, ensuring each has enough value to be shipped to users and solves a specific problem.
- Set Dates and Expectations: Time-scope iterations and set expectations for releases, considering alpha, early access product (EAP), and general availability (GA) releases.
By embracing the iterative process, you can continuously provide users with new benefits, receive increased feedback, and maximize your resources. This approach helps prevent product issues from arising at the end of development, saving time and resources in the long run.