Lore

Life-Cycle Framing for Market Expansion

A Product Vision technique: rather than defining the vision around the single stage of a customer process the company currently serves, map the entire life cycle of that process and treat each adjacent stage — earlier and later — as a distinct expansion opportunity.

At Datasite this took the shape of the "M&A life cycle" vision: the existing product only covered the diligence stage of an M&A deal, but the multi-year vision reframed the opportunity as covering the whole life cycle — pre-deal, diligence, integration, ongoing operation, and future M&A — turning a single-product company into a platform company. The framing was reinforced by the stakes involved: "nothing is more expensive than an M&A deal," which justified investing in a broader platform around the whole process.

Apply: for a product embedded in a customer's high-stakes process, map the full life cycle of that process and treat under-served adjacent stages as the natural boundary of the Product Vision and future expansion, rather than the current feature set.