Timeline of 20 Common Product Development Activities
How long an activity takes can have a huge impact on success or the perception of success when developing products. More often than not, teams are overly optimistic on the timeline that will be required to complete an activity.
Why it matters
When you get the timeline or duration activities wrong you can create a variety of problems. You can miss targets. You can put unnecessary pressure on your team. You might undertake an initiative that actually wasn’t feasible from the outset. You might design your organisation or team poorly.
Why duration impacts success (and failures)
The main reason why the timeline of activities can be a problem in product development is because of dependencies on other people.
This manifests in different ways. Sometimes an activity just takes time for something as simple as fitting into someone’s calendar or someone needing time to think. Sometimes an activity takes time because you need to discuss, agree and go through consideration with multiple people in multiple steps of a sequential process. Sometimes it’s because holidays are on.
Activities can also just take time for reasons other than people. Some activities rely or interact with processes or organisations that are designed or function in a way where time will or must pass.
Getting duration and timeline right will help set you up for success and avoid headaches or more serious problems.
Activities and Duration
With these challenges in mind it’s worthwhile having a guide to help better estimate how long activities common to product development will take.
To make it a little more digestible it’s been broken down by subject area below.
Some subject areas and activities that usually sit outside the product development organisation have been included because they often impact product development in some way.
Size Multiplier: For each activity you may need to apply a multiplier to the duration listed based on the size of the parties involved in the activity. As a rule of thumb, 2x for a mid-sized company, 4x for an enterprise, 5x for government involvement.
Product Discovery Activities
Here are the durations for product discovery activities:
Product Development
Here are the durations for product development activities:
Team
Here are the durations of team related activities that usually impact product development timelines:
Business Development
Here are the durations of business development activities that usually impact product development timelines:
Plan for time
From this guide, that is by no means comprehensive, you can get a sense of the timeline involved in many of the activities you are probably working on right now.
Having a sound understanding or at the very least a discussion with your team about how long things might take can help you speed it up, plan around it and make better decisions.
Originally published at https://terem.tech on November 23, 2022.
