Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

by Melissa Perri

Experiment This phase is to understand the problem and to determine whether it’s worth solving. Teams in this phase are conducting problem exploration and solution exploration activities. No production code is being created. Alpha This phase is to determine whether the solution is desirable to the customers. This is a minimum feature set or a robust solution experiment, but built in production code and live for a small set of users. These users understand that they are getting early access to a feature that might change or be killed, if it is not solving their problems. Beta This phase is to determine whether the solution is scalable, from a technical standpoint. Although not always needed, this is a good phase to reduce risk. This release is available to more customers than the Alpha phase, but is still only a smaller subset of the entire population, since we are still testing. At this point, we’ve proven that the solution is desirable to customers, so it is unlikely that this feature will be killed unless it is not technically stable. Generally Available (GA) This phase means that the solution is widely available to all of our clients. Sales teams can talk openly about GA products and can sell as much as possible to the target market.