Product Life Cycle

introduction, growth, maturity, and decline. Product life cycles are used by management and marketing professionals to help determine advertising schedules, price points, expansion to new product markets, packaging redesigns, and more

When a product has been successfully created, the product has a cycle consisting of various phases.

1. Introduction
   Every new product or product being developed must be introduced to the market. Introduction is the initial phase that aims to build customer awareness and communicate various benefits so that people are interested in buying it. At this stage, the company needs a large amount of money to advertise and carry out marketing campaigns.
   Promotions carried out in the introduction stage are often aggressive and ensure the target really leads to the product being promoted.
   Product Manager’s focus during the introduction stage: New products pose a challenge to generate demand. Even though product management does not directly manage many of the important go-to-market tasks in this phase, it is still your responsibility to explain to all the relevant people about the features or what can actually be obtained from the product.
   You must be an available resource for the marketing and sales team during this phase.
2. Growth
   When sales begin to increase and the product has proven to have a market, a product will enter the growth stage. This phase is the stage when the company invests a lot in marketing or marketing.
   In the growth stage, profit margins will usually increase as economies of scale begin to operate. Even so, the more sales, the more competition there is. This is because other companies have realized that there is a valid market for the product that can be used to offer their own products.
   The growth phase is all about collecting data to uncover patterns and trends. This is the phase where Product Manager technical skills are highly required. Product Manager’s focus during the growth stage:
   The entry of competitors has the potential to reduce prices with the aim of equaling, weakening, or expanding market potential. Product Management must manage this balance properly so that prices remain competitive.
   Another challenge for the product team is reinvesting some of the profits and revenues in product development. This aims to improve the product and ensure that the increase is balanced with the use which also continues to increase.
3. Maturity
   In this phase, the growth of new customers begins to decrease, there are more competitors, and profits decrease because more companies make the same product.
   The biggest challenge at this stage is retaining as many customers as possible while making sure not to lose too many.
   Product Manager’s focus during the maturity stage:
   For Product Managers, the maturity phase is an opportunity to lower cost of goods sold and create more efficient product operations, such as streamlining the development team and eliminating activities that are no longer important.
   This stage requires you to be selective in investing and focus on increasing with high ROI.
4. Declines
   In the end, the product will decline. The decline was triggered by a shrinking market for that product, either because there are new, more advanced substitutes, there is an overall reduction in demand, or even because too many competitors have surpassed your product in popularity.
   When this happens, a Product Manager must understand which scenario resulted in the downgrade.
   If the degraded product cannot be saved, it is important to pay attention to the decommissioning and end-of-life processes. Even if this isn’t much fun, it’s still your responsibility to make the transition as easy as possible for the remaining customers to actually stop using the product.
   Some of the things that are done are usually in the form of refunds, exports or data transfers, finding new solutions for old customers, and providing good service to maintain relationships with customers.

Although it cannot be used as a clear success parameter, the stages of the product life cycle above are a reflection of product achievements in its life cycle. However, at each stage, there are several unexpected factors that can arise and affect the company’s product life cycle.

These factors are usually beyond the control of the manufacturer. So, they can be said to be quite dangerous things.