The product development lifecycle

The XC uses the "Build-Measure-Learn" lean startup feedback cycle to quickly and continuously de-risk and improve the things we work on. This cycle reduces the likelihood of wasting time, money, and effort designing and building something that is not valuable, desirable, or feasible.

Build

Generating the Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

The Build phase involves developing the bare minimum product, service, or feature that will allow the team to test key uncertainties or hypotheses in order to learn. There are a couple of steps that occur during Build:

Define the test. Determine the details and design of your test, and have a good idea of how you will collect actionable, reliable data.
Make whatever you're going to test. Keep it simple and small so that you're not overwhelmed.
Run the test. Deploy your test and collect your data.

Test examples: Interview script, value proposition, prototypes, MVP, usability tests, unit tests.

Measure

Collecting and synthesizing the data

The Measure phase is centered around collecting and interpreting your initial metrics to determine if meaningful progress is being made (or not). It involves:

Analysis: Analyze your data, seeking to answer the questions: What happened? What are the implications? Evaluate your results against your hypotheses.
Organization: Arrange your data so that it is easily understood.
Presentation: Generate a compelling presentation of your data in order to communicate your findings with others.

Measurement examples: Customer observation/interviews, split tests, real-time monitoring, funnel analysis, cohort analysis, search engine marketing.

Learn

Making the decision to pivot or persevere

The Learn phase is all about next steps. Based on the knowledge gained, should the team pivot (change some or all aspects of its strategy), or persevere (continue forward with the same goals)? Some considerations for this phase are: