Milestone Basics
This page covers basic terms for UX and product teams related to product development lifecycles.
What is a Product Milestone?
A project milestone is a concept to understand in Agile product development. Milestones make up groups of completed deliverables and represent a significant point of progress in product development. They may need to be completed multiple times, or adjusted as teams progress towards release cycles of their products.
Phase vs. Milestone
Agile teams should rely on "milestones", not "phases".
"Phases" in project work assume that work starts and stops during a specific timeframe. "Phases" assumes that the work is sequential with certain deliverables needing to be delivered after another after a fixed time.
"Milestones", however, do not imply timeframe. They are simply a subset of deliverables that represent important progress on the way to launching products, and iterate over time. "Milestones" is more akin to Agile product development than "phases" because multiple milestones can be sought in parallel, while phases of work implies one must be done before the next can begin (which is Waterfall in concept and to be avoided in Agile work).
Applying Milestones to the Industry
Applying Milestones to Non-Existent Products
Applying milestones to non-existent products is relatively linear. Minimum marketable products portray the goals for what should be released to-market with revenue generation. Minimum viable products act as the checkpoints along the way to bringing a product to-market.
Applying Milestones to Existing Products
Products have MMP's for features that get delivered even if they are already "at market" and generating revenue. MMP and MVP are concepts to apply to anything being delivered, whether "live" or not. When changing the state of things, one can move towards a vision and scope, deliver, learn, and move into the next milestone continuously.
Applying Milestones to Client Work
Client work may be fixed-scope, but should still have minimum viable product milestones and minimum marketable product milestones defined and delivered. It's important for anything that's delivered to check assumptions being made by researchers, the client, stakeholders, or whomever is making assumptions. Follow this workbook if you have client work so that the work can be aligned and iteratively delivered.
Terms Used In Product Development
Feature
A feature is a single piece of value that's delivered to end-users. It can solve one or many problems for end-user audiences.
Product
A product is the entire chunk of functionality that end-users interact with. It's made up of many features. Product MVP's include only a few features that are most important to end-users. Product MMP's include most or all of the features that teams want to release to market.
MVP vs. MMP
A "MVP", or minimum viable product, is the concept showing the bare minimum set of deliverables you can release and learn from. "MVP" can apply to a single feature or an entire product release. It includes the most important problems you are trying to solve at any given time. On the way to launching a product at market, multiple "MVP" releases will be designed and launched to learn from the market multiple times. Instead of waiting to release until the product is ready "for the market", MVP development allows teams to release things to users early and often in order to adjust upcoming releases.
An "MMP", or minimum marketable product, is the concept showing the pieces of value something must have in order for it to achieve success in the market. MMP's are unlike MMP's because they often include more features and deliver more value than MVP's (which are minimal in nature).
Vision
Vision describes a larger picture of a finished product or feature. It represents the ideal state of a released product and is often planned up front before design and development. Teams define the vision and constantly refine it based on learnings. Vision can and should change over time, because Agile teams need to respond to change when learning from users along the way. Vision is defined for each release (MVP or MMP) and then iterated on so that it changes and becomes more refined.
Discovery
Discovery is a term used to describe learning about the "current state" of the world before planning to solve problems. Often, this includes research and understanding about many things like the state of the market, the state of user needs, current user behavior, opportunities against competitors, or other key learnings. Discovery findings help refine vision for products.
Scope
Scope describes a product will include ("in scope") and what a product will not include ("out of scope"). Product teams must define this for MVP and MMP because they should be measuring their progress toward the completed result that they are going to release. Scope gets defined after a vision is defined.
Scope can also be referred to as the "definition of done". That is to say, what must the product include in order for the team to consider their work (either for a feature or for a product) "finished"?
Requirements
"Requirements" is a term that describes the communications about what should be delivered. These are documented deliverables, either worded or visual, that describe everything about the product features: who it's for, what should be done, when it should be offered, where in the product, why it brings value, and how it should be handled in logic of the product.
Common requirements deliverables include:
User story statements
Acceptance criterion
Task flows
Use case scenarios
Business-driven development scenarios
Low fidelity or high fidelity prototypes
Annotations
Iterative Product Development
Each release (MVP or MMP) includes multiple milestones along the way that teams must hit. There can be an unlimited number of MVP's on the way to an MMP. Teams launch multiple MVP's in order to remain iterative in their adjustments of plans. Each MVP solves minimal, important problems, and is released quickly so that teams can learn from users. The feedback that teams collect should inform the plans and vision for the next MVP.
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