Category: Product Lifecycle
AI Made Building Your Product Free. Crossing the Chasm Is Still Exactly Where It Always Was.
AI has collapsed the cost of building your product to near zero. The chasm between early adopters and the early majority is exactly where it always was — and it's wider than ever. Here's what that means for your roadmap, your team allocation, and the grown-up conversation your board needs to have.
Diffusion of Innovations: Rogers' 5 Adopter Categories and the Technology Adoption Lifecycle
Everett Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations — the technology adoption lifecycle — describes the five adopter categories (innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, laggards) through which every new product passes. Here's what Rogers' framework actually means for your roadmap, your GTM motion, and why AI has made some adopter categories much harder to reach — and others much easier.
Gartner Hype Cycle: The 5 Phases and How to Use It for Roadmap Timing
The Gartner Hype Cycle plots emerging technologies through five phases — Innovation Trigger, Peak of Inflated Expectations, Trough of Disillusionment, Slope of Enlightenment, Plateau of Productivity. Here's how to use it as a roadmap tool rather than as conference wallpaper — when to bet on an emerging technology, when to wait, and why PE portfolio companies consistently get the timing wrong.
Platform Business Models: Why Network Effects Are the Only Moat AI Cannot Erode
Platform business models — marketplaces, multi-sided platforms, ecosystems — don't sell products. They orchestrate exchanges between participants and capture a share of the value. In the AI era, where build cost has collapsed, network effects are the one remaining moat that AI cannot erode. Here's what that means for your roadmap, your PE valuation, and why platform plays dominate the next decade.
Product Life Cycle Stages: What Your Roadmap Should Look Like at Each Stage
The product life cycle has four stages — introduction, growth, maturity, decline — and every marketing textbook will tell you what they are. Almost none tell you what you actually need to know: how your roadmap, team shape, and resource allocation must change at each stage. Here's the operating-model view of the product life cycle.
Product Lifecycle Models: Nine Thinking Tools for Smarter Product Roadmap Decisions
Product lifecycle models are thinking tools. Each one helps you reason about where a specific product currently lives and what it genuinely needs next — which may not be more engineering investment at all, but a different go-to-market motion. This directory covers nine lifecycle frameworks, each designed to prompt a different diagnostic question.
S-Curves in Product Strategy: When to Jump to the Next Curve
The S-curve describes how most product and technology performance improves — slow at first, then rapid acceleration, then flattening as limits are approached. Here's how to recognise when your current S-curve is flattening, how to time the jump to the next curve, and why most companies miss the moment entirely.
The Innovator's Dilemma in the AI Era: Why Your Best Customers Will Kill Your Next Product
Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma explains why successful companies lose to disruptors they should have beaten. AI has made the problem worse, not better — disruptors now have near-zero build cost and only need to solve distribution. Here's what that means for your roadmap and how to protect your own disruptive bets from your own best customers.
Ansoff Matrix: Strategic Tagging for Growth Risk, Not Prioritisation
Visualise Your Risk Profile, Then Use Real Frameworks to Prioritise
The Ansoff Matrix categorises growth strategies by risk profile—Market Penetration, Market Development, Product Development, Diversification. It's a tagging framework for visualising portfolio balance, not a prioritisation framework.