Product Lifecycle Diagram

Design & UX Don’t Just Happen

At an organization whose UX maturity is low, it can be a struggle to convey the value of the discipline, and especially the time required, to really do it right and deliver the best possible product for the customer. Sometimes it can be as simple as educating your teammates—and there is no better way to educate than with a well designed visual.

In this scenario specifically, the end-to-end product development lifecycle ignored UX entirely, and largely glossed over the development process. The UX team took it upon themselves to revise the existing lifecycle document and propose a new version that achieved two goals:

Detail the intricacies of the ux, design and development processes
Create a comprehensive diagram that provided insight into the value of ALL participants in the product development lifecycle

The end result was an interactive diagram shared across disciplines that helped educate everyone as to the contributions and responsibilities of all parties involved in the product process.

Research and Ideation

Evaluating the Existing Process

The first step was to examine existing documentation from Product team leaders to identify gaps.

The examination revealed that all roles were defined with great detail, except for development (which was only briefly mentioned) and UX (which was not mentioned at all).

Increasing visibility

Starting with a Pro/Con assessment of the existing documentation, a revised matrix of roles and responsibilities was created. The revised version expanded the design and development stages and incorporated roles and responsibilities for those contributors.

As an additional finding, more emphasis was given to measuring results of acquiring feedback after the launch of a product or feature.

Explorations

Section by Section

A clear and concise visual flow diagram was the key anchor point to the new document.

It needed to represent three primary concepts:

The end-to-end flow of the product development lifecycle
The cyclical nature of each individual step
The iterative process of design and development

In addition to the flow diagram, a grid to display all roles and responsibilities at each point in the process was required. To make this grid more useful, tags utilizing the RACI matrix were added to each role indicating specific details about their specific responsibilities in that stage.

The Kitchen Sink

With the main components (flow diagram and roles grid) defined, the next stage was to find the best design to deliver the details in a clean and concise manner.

As roles were added to the grid it was clear that the "kitchen sink" was too much to take in. Ultimately an interactive version that allowed viewers to select individual stages to view details was decided on.

Final Designs

In the final iteration, the default view of the interactive diagram displayed the top level steps in the flow, allowing users to click on any individual step to view the sub steps and individual roles and responsibilities of each individual contributor.