Status: 

Status
colour Green title LIVE

Project Maturity Stages

A project starts as an idea (e.g. “A dating app that focuses on long term relationships, not hookups”), and goes through an incremental process of refinement, until it is a market-ready product. It’s valuable to standardise upon shared vocabulary with regard to these milestones. At 9Y we talk about the following.

Initial Concept Stage (+- 16x)

• Idea

  • one to two sentences.

• Executive summary

  • ~ half an A4 page of content explaining the product

  • Usually made by the client, to help them explain their project

• CRD (Customer Requirements Document)

  • More detailed explanation of the product

  • Might include a rough list of features, and a rough list of priorities

  • Which platforms

  • Rough timeline

Product Definition Stage (+- 4x)

• PRD (Product Requirements Document). Now we’re starting to get to a level of detail where we can make meaningful estimates.

  • User stories

  • Sketches

  • External dependencies identified

  • Priorities for the scope (must-haves vs nice-to-haves).

Detailed Requirements Stage (+- 2x)

• UX Design.

  • In addition to the CRD and PRD

  • All screens of the product as sketches/mocks

  • Almost all user journeys are well defined

  • Click-Dummy

User Interface Stage (+- 1.2x-1.6x)

• UI design.

  • Pixel perfect designs, that we can go ahead and implement

    • Final XD/Figma file

  • Some important details might be missing

Full Specification Stage (+- 1.2x)

• Full specification

  • PRD

  • UI/UX

  • External dependency specifications (API, …)

  • Maybe edge case specification

  • Error handling

  • …

• Reference implementation

  • Product already exists.

    • E.g. building a web-version of an existing mobile app

Final Product Stage (+- 1x)

• Final product. It’s deployed in the wild and users are using it.