Stop Expecting Hockey Sticks At Launch: How To Actually Use The Product Lifecycle

I was talking with a product leader last week. They had just shipped a major release. Lots of fanfare, big internal announcements, board slides predicting the classic hockey stick. Three months later, the numbers were flat and everyone was asking the same question: We launched, why is it not working.

That moment is where a lot of the dysfunction around product starts. Not in Jira. Not in the roadmap. In the gap between how product really works over time and how the rest of the business thinks it works.

The disconnect: most of the business is reactive, product is not

Most teams in your company live in a reactive world. Sales does something, they see the result that quarter. Support answers tickets, customer satisfaction moves. Marketing launches a campaign, traffic shows up the same day.

Product does not behave like that. It can take years to move from the first spark of an idea to a launched product that is actually mature in the market, throwing off predictable revenue or cost savings, and eventually ready to be sunset.

Because everyone sits in their own silo, that long arc is invisible. Stakeholders hear we are building this and mentally jump straight to this will work and this will move the number this year. When reality hits, they feel misled. Product teams feel blamed. Millions of dollars later, nobody is happy.

Underneath all of this is something very simple: most leaders have never really been taught to think in product lifecycle stages.

Sales already thinks in stages. Product usually does not.

Your sales team already understands this idea. They have a clear mental model:

• Discovery
• Qualified lead
• Business case
• Closed won
• Expansion

No one expects a prospect you just discovered to close tomorrow. The stage makes the expectation obvious.

Product needs the same shared language. Without it, executives treat concept, ideation, launch, and maturity like one blended blob called launch. That is where the hockey stick fantasy comes from.

Let me walk through how I think about the lifecycle and how to talk about success at each stage so your stakeholders stop expecting magic the moment something ships.

Stage 1: Concept – maximum optimism, minimum certainty

The concept stage usually happens in a boardroom or strategy offsite. Everyone is optimistic. We are at the whiteboard talking in big strokes about:

• What problem we are going to solve
• Whether the thing is technically feasible
• How we will launch it and go to market
• The millions in revenue this will obviously generate

It is very easy to hypothetically sell something that does not exist. We conveniently forget that none of us has ever worked on a product that was actually easy to build or easy to sell. The brain is generous like that.

The truth is that we should have almost no certainty at this stage. We are still making educated guesses. The only honest definition of success here sounds like this:

• We have a clearly defined problem and target customer
• We have a directional sense of feasibility and business impact
• We agree what we need to learn next

That is it. Not a revenue forecast. Not a guaranteed launch date. Just a shared understanding of the bet we are considering.

Modern product lifecycle management platforms talk about this same top of the funnel work in a more structured way. If you look at how tools like Airtable describes product lifecycle management or how Bluestar PLM talks about PLM in 2025, they are essentially formalizing this concept stage and its connection to everything that follows. Most companies never get that explicit.

Stage 2: Ideation – where you discover how big the problem really is

Then we get into ideation. This is where the big shiny idea gets cracked open and you finally see the mess inside.

Suddenly there are 50 user stories and epics. Product and engineering are deep in the details. Design is exploring flows. The business leans in because their big idea is finally moving. Everyone is excited.

But most stakeholders are still not engaging at the level of detail where risk actually lives. They are not seeing:

• The 50 holes in the ship we are about to push into the ocean
• The assumptions in pricing, packaging, and positioning
• The support volume this could create on day one

If we take that ship and roll it straight into the water, it sinks. Then we all act surprised.

This is also where a critical idea usually gets missed: distribution is a second product.

Building the core experience is one thing. Building the engine that gets it adopted and supported is another. Think offense and defense on a football team. You need all of the following planned together:

• A product that actually solves the problem
• A distribution plan that can reach and convert the right customers
• A customer success plan that keeps them successful once they are in

Companies that take lifecycle seriously treat those elements as one integrated system, not an afterthought. You can see this mindset in the way WorkForce Institute writes about balancing innovation with stakeholder priorities and in how Aha talks about collaborating with business stakeholders. The point is the same: you cannot treat product in isolation.

In ideation, success is not shipping. Success is:

• Breaking the problem down into something buildable
• Surfacing the biggest holes across product, distribution, and success
• Aligning the business on what will be ready in the next 6 to 8 months and what will not

Stage 3: Launch

Launch is where reality shows up.

We finish the build. Everyone gets excited again. We cut the ribbon and put the release into the market. Internally the expectation is clear: this is when the hockey stick starts.

What actually happens is closer to Mike Tyson. As he said, you do not really know what is going to happen until you get punched in the face.

That punch is the first real usage. Suddenly we see leaks we missed. Edge cases we never thought about. Support tickets we did not forecast. We quickly move from strategic thinking into technical debt and fix mode.

This is exactly what should happen. But because nobody named it, everyone feels like something went wrong.

If you look at any public story of a company that grew into a hundred million in ARR, there were years of pain before the curve bent upward. Launch always takes more time than the slide at the board meeting suggested. My rule of thumb: expect it to take five times as long to see meaningful growth as you optimistically put on that first chart.

PLM vendors see the same thing across industries. In manufacturing, for example, Syscons Group calls out how extended PLM has to span from concept through market introduction because the early ramp is always messier and longer than it looks on paper.

In launch, success looks like:

• Getting punched in the face and responding quickly
• Fixing the biggest leaks fast enough that customers do not abandon ship
• Learning at high speed so the next releases are smarter

Not instant exponential growth. Not immediate payback on the investment.

Stage 4: Maturity – where the compounding actually happens

After the initial chaos, products that survive reach maturity.

This is where we finally have baseline metrics. We can see real data on activation, engagement, retention, revenue per account, cost savings, whatever matters for that product.

Now the work shifts to incremental improvement:

• Plugging the remaining holes in the experience
• Building the next high impact features
• Adjusting pricing and packaging based on what the market is telling us
• Driving revenue or cost savings up one decision at a time

This is usually the least glamorous phase and the most important for the business. It is where value compounds.

Mature PLM and system of systems thinking, like what you see in the Airtable product lifecycle piece or in the research on system of systems lifecycle management, is basically about making this stage repeatable at scale. Connecting data, feedback, and decisions so that every release makes the whole system smarter.

Eventually, even strong products reach the point where sunsetting is the right move. That is its own lifecycle conversation. The point is that maturity and end of life are part of the same continuum, not an afterthought.

The real work: make the lifecycle explicit for your stakeholders

So what do you do with all this if you are a VP of Product, Head of Strategy, founder, or consultant inside a mid market or enterprise environment.

Here is what I have seen work.

1. Name the stage in every conversation

Do not just say we are working on X. Say:

• We are in concept for X
• We are in ideation for X
• We are in launch for X
• We are in maturity for X

And tie that to how you talk about success. At concept, success is a clear bet. At ideation, it is a realistic plan across product and distribution. At launch, it is learning and stabilization. At maturity, it is measurable impact.

This is a simple narrative move that changes expectations overnight.

2. Translate the lifecycle into a sales like funnel

Executives already understand that a cold lead is not the same as a renewal. Use that.

Show them how concept is like discovery, ideation is like qualification, launch is like getting to first deal, and maturity is like expansion. You are not adding theory. You are giving them a mental model that matches reality.

If you want to go deeper on this storytelling side, I wrote more about it in how storytelling elevates product leaders.

3. Design for distribution and customer success during ideation

Do not wait until launch to ask how customers will hear about this or how success will support it.

During ideation, put product, engineering, marketing, sales, and success in the same room. Treat distribution and customer success as first class parts of the solution, not as downstream functions.

This is exactly the kind of cross functional collaboration that shows up again and again in work on stakeholder management, from Mind the Product to Phrase and others. The tactics differ, but the core message is consistent: engage people early, clearly, and often.

4. Set realistic time expectations

On your first lifecycle slide, resist the urge to draw a clean hockey stick.

Show a long, slow ramp where launch learning and maturity take years. Point to any public example of growth curves that took seven years before they looked like an overnight success.

Inside Iteright, we talk a lot about shifting from velocity to value and actually tracking outcomes. Time is a big part of that. You cannot be outcome driven if your time horizon is stuck at launch.

5. Celebrate finishing stages, not just hitting numbers

Here is the subtle but powerful mindset shift.

When a launch does not hit the initial revenue target, most organizations treat it as failure. The room gets quiet. People get defensive. Trust erodes.

Instead, you want a culture where people can say: we successfully finished the launch stage. We got punched in the face, we learned, we fixed the biggest holes, and now we are entering maturity with a better product and a clearer plan.

That is not spin. That is how product actually works.

Your next move

Every product and every feature you ship is somewhere on this lifecycle right now. Concept. Ideation. Launch. Maturity. Maybe sunsetting.

Your job as a leader is not just to move things along that path. It is to make the path visible so the rest of the business is aligned on what success really looks like at each step.

If you want more structure around this, I break the lifecycle down further in this piece on navigating the product life cycle. And if you are trying to connect that lifecycle to stronger business outcomes, there is more on our approach at Iteright solutions and across the blog at Iteright.

For now, keep it simple. Look at your main initiatives and ask yourself:

Are we being honest about what stage we are in, and are we explaining that clearly enough that our stakeholders could answer it without us in the room.

If the answer is no, that is your next conversation.