🚲 Product Life Cycle

Echoing the life cycle of a product and an exclusive bonus insight from a Google employee about Google Ads.

🏋🏽 4 stages of a Product

I love tech products. Period. I love to try them out, experiment with them and figure out what's good, ugly and bad. But in the real world, it takes an immense amount of effort to design a product and to make it sustainable over a long time.

So basically, each and every product, not just tech products but products like coke, detergent, and cars go through a series of cycles.

These 4 stages are - Intro, Growth, Maturity and Decline. I hope these are self-explanatory. But to set some context:

1. Intro: This is the phase where firms start the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and organisations market with informative advertising to increase the awareness of the product.

2. Growth: The sales start to grow exponentially here with respect to time and firms create Persuasive Ads to increase brand loyalty.

3. Maturity: In this phase, sales actually get plateaued for a period of time and firms again use the technique of Persuasive Ads and Remainder Ads.

4. Decline: The product deteriorates here and sales start to decline. Firms use Remainder Ads by discounting the price to increase the life of the product.

🍀 Way to Sustainable

When you see the product lifecycle closely, like edibles, Products do decay over time. Especially TECH products📱

The only way to be sustainable is to introduce a new product/tech once you start to feel that the existing product is deteriorating so that you can achieve cumulative exponential growth. (aka diversify your business models)

Products always follow an S-curve, where it is dull when it is launched then exponentially grows and then reach a saturation where there is no growth. But what Elon does is he comes up with the 2nd tech before the 1st tech is just about to reach its saturation. So if you see the pink dotted line his growth is always exponential and never reaches saturation. He always looks into the future so that his products never reach maturity.

He creates a super sexy car model. Creates a pre-demand by building hype around the product. Then he raises investment with the pre-orders and builds a super big manufacturing industry for the production. And once he starts to feel that the tesla car product is reaching Maturity, he quickly jumps to altogether a different ball game - SpaceX. Then from SpaceX to Twitter.

🏅 Bonus Insight

I had a short convo with Jeff Su, Product Marketing Manager (PMM) of Google Ads at Google, in his AMA session about the deterioration of tech products. He was so nice to explain to me how Google Ads is already a mature product and what challenges they face.

Check out the full conversation here

Also, since he brought up the challenges Google faces wrt to Google Ads, I was curious on knowing one major problem that I witnessed with Google Ads.

The Problem with Ads: Recently, there are preventers that block google ad sense. For example, Apple not allowing Facebook to track users' data. Brave browsers tending not to play ads. This is hurting a lot of content creators. Users mostly skip the ad on YT or don't watch the ad. But they might be checking the product after the video on Google Search. This makes companies difficult to understand from where the customer has landed to the orders page. The companies think it was due to google search but it was actually through google ads from the YT videos. So I think this is another problem because firms will now prefer Google search to Google Ads.

And Jeff gave me an amazing insight into the 'Last Touch Attribution' model that modern tech firms use which I am saving it for an another blog.

Until then, get curious about product psychology and design, and feel free to drop a comment if you find this interesting or want to share your thoughts.