Product Lifecycle

A thin orchestration bundle that routes a product through nine lifecycle phases by composing existing specialist product skills. It provides cross-skill routing and evidence handoff — it does NOT duplicate any specialist's step-by-step methodology. Load this umbrella when you need to navigate a product across multiple lifecycle phases; load individual specialist skills directly when you only need one phase's capability.

Phase routing table

Each phase routes to one or more specialist skills. Entry evidence must exist before the phase starts. Output artifacts are handed off to the next phase through the lifecycle evidence ledger. Every phase has explicit escalation behavior and completion criteria. Full phase contracts are in references/phases.md.

#	Phase	Primary specialist(s)	Entry evidence	Output artifacts	Escalation behavior	Completion criteria
1	Discovery	product-discovery	Product idea, market signal, or stakeholder request	Problem statement, stakeholder map, discovery log, product type classification	Stop if: problem cannot be articulated in user terms; no stakeholder describes a real need; problem is already solved; out of organizational remit	Problem statement exists that a stakeholder recognizes; product type classified; proceed/pause/stop decision recorded
2	Strategy and portfolio choice	product-strategy, strategy-frameworks	Problem statement and discovery log from Phase 1	Strategic assessment, market sizing, portfolio recommendation, investment thesis	Stop if: opportunity conflicts with strategy; market evidence contradicts thesis; resource constraints are infeasible; strategic direction is ambiguous	Strategic assessment with fit/no-fit reasoning; portfolio decision recorded; resource estimate recorded
3	Roadmap	product-roadmapping-and-portfolio	Strategic assessment and portfolio decision from Phase 2	Outcome roadmap entry, Now/Next/Later placement, strategic bet record, dependency map, capacity allocation	Stop if: dependencies cannot be resolved; capacity unavailable; confidence below threshold; conflicts with higher-priority bet	Roadmap entry exists; bet record complete with kill criteria; dependencies mapped and acknowledged
4	UX and requirements	product-design-and-ux	Roadmap entry and bet record from Phase 3; discovery log	Information architecture, task flows, interface contracts, acceptance criteria	Stop if: UX reveals fundamentally different problem; user research contradicts hypothesis; behavior cannot be specified testably; constraints cannot be satisfied	IA and task flows documented; interface contracts exist; acceptance criteria are testable and traceable
5	Experimentation	product-experimentation	UX contracts, assumptions register, risk assessment	Experiment brief, experiment readout, updated assumptions register, proceed/pivot/stop decision	Stop if: experiment cannot be designed ethically; method infeasible; reveals safety/privacy/security risk; hypothesis disproved with no viable pivot	Experiment brief exists with hypothesis and decision rule; readout exists; proceed/pivot/stop decision recorded with evidence
6	Delivery handoff	implementation-planning, production-readiness, release-engineering	Proceed decision, UX contracts, acceptance criteria, assumptions register	Implementation plan, formal spec, production-readiness verdict (Go/No-go/Defer/Exception), release plan	Stop if: infeasible dependency; readiness returns No-go or blocked Exception; security/privacy/compliance blocks launch; release plan cannot satisfy change-governance	Implementation plan accepted by delivery team; readiness verdict recorded with evidence; release plan documented and reviewed
7	Adoption	product-adoption	Launch decision (Go), release evidence, target segments, success metrics	Adoption plan, activation baseline, segmentation record, adoption metrics	Stop if: adoption materially below threshold after intervention; fundamental product-market mismatch; structural adoption problem beyond product changes	Adoption plan executed; activation and adoption baselines measured; proceed/intervene/pivot/stop decision recorded
8	Success	product-analytics-and-measurement	Adoption evidence, success criteria, experiment readouts	Outcome measurement, metric tree with actuals vs. targets, success/mixed/not-met assessment	Stop if: outcomes materially below expectations with unknown root cause; measurement infrastructure insufficient; evidence contradicts investment thesis	Outcome metrics measured against criteria; success assessment recorded; ledger complete for review
9	Lifecycle review	product-lifecycle-learning	Outcome measurement, full evidence ledger, original assumptions register	Outcome review (expected vs. observed), assumption ledger update, continue/improve/harvest/pivot/pause/retire decision, retained learning record	Stop if: retirement has material implications beyond team authority; retained learning contradicts foundational assumption; systemic pattern requires executive attention	Outcome review recorded; lifecycle decision recorded with rationale; retained learning captured; ledger closed

Supporting and cross-cutting skills

These skills are loaded on trigger, not by phase. They support multiple phases and are routed to when their specific capability is needed.

Skill	When loaded
product-methodology	When a phase produces alternatives that need ranking (RICE, MoSCoW, Kano, OST)
product-operations-and-governance	When setting up or changing governance; at phase boundaries needing formal decision authority
financial-modeling	When unit economics, pricing, or business-model analysis is needed (Phases 2, 8)
go-to-market	When positioning, acquisition strategy, or growth modeling is needed (Phases 7, 8)
data-scientist	When statistical design, causal inference, or rigorous experiment analysis is needed (Phases 5, 8)
spec-driven-development	When formal specification with phase gates is needed (Phase 6)
privacy-engineering	When any phase handles PII, consent, retention, or data flows
secure-software-engineering	When any phase touches trust boundaries, auth, or sensitive data
verification-methodology	At every phase gate where evidence is required
qa-methodology	When test strategy and quality gates are needed (Phase 6)
site-reliability-engineering	When reliability, SLOs, or operational readiness is needed (Phase 6)
platform-engineering	When infrastructure, CI/CD, or platform capabilities are needed (Phase 6)
neckbeard	When the software delivery lifecycle (SDLC) change-request journey is needed for implementation (Phase 6)
production-excellence bundle (when available)	When the full production-excellence bundle is available as a handoff target (Phase 6) — composes production-readiness, migration-engineering, resilience-and-recovery, capacity-and-cost-engineering, and incident-learning

Loading protocol

This umbrella is the guaranteed discoverable entry point. Nested skills and referenced specialists load on trigger — the umbrella does not pre-load them.

1. Read this SKILL.md for the phase routing table and locate the current phase.
2. Load the phase contract from references/phases.md for detailed entry evidence, escalation behavior, and completion criteria.
3. Load the specialist skill(s) named in the phase row. Follow the specialist's method; do not re-derive it from the umbrella.
4. Write phase outputs to the lifecycle evidence ledger (see references/phases.md for ledger fields and conventions).
5. The next phase reads the ledger; it does not re-derive prior-phase evidence.
6. When the lifecycle completes or stops, the ledger is the durable record.

For capability lookup without traversing the full lifecycle, use the references/capability-map.md.

When not to use

• Single specialist task. If the work is entirely within one phase (e.g., a stakeholder interview, an experiment design, a roadmap update), load the specialist skill directly. The umbrella adds orchestration overhead that is unnecessary for single-phase work.
• Software delivery lifecycle. If the work is a code change, bug fix, or feature implementation — not product-level decision-making — route to neckbeard.
• Duplicate methodology. This bundle does NOT duplicate product-discovery, product-strategy, product-design-and-ux, product-experimentation, product-analytics-and-measurement, or release-engineering methods. Load those skills directly for their step-by-step instructions.
• B2B SaaS assumption. This bundle does NOT assume a B2B SaaS product. Customer-success routing (Phase 8) is CONDITIONAL on product type. Internal tools, public-service products, transactional products, and consumer products proceed without loading conditional-customer-success.
• Strategic frameworks. For standalone strategic analysis (Five Forces, Blue Ocean, Ansoff) without a lifecycle context, load strategy-frameworks directly.
• Financial modeling. For standalone financial analysis without a lifecycle context, load financial-modeling directly.

File map

Path	Loaded when
references/phases.md	Entering any lifecycle phase; defines entry evidence, output artifacts, escalation behavior, and completion criteria per phase
references/discovery-brief.md	Understanding the bundle boundary and how it compares to existing bundles
references/capability-map.md	Looking up which specialist skill owns a specific capability without traversing the full lifecycle
manifest.yaml	Machine-readable composition contract (schema v1): purpose, audience, stages, included skills, prerequisites, outputs, handoffs, conflicts, and eval suite; consumed by the lifecycle capability matrix