Development Lifecycle framework

The six stages of how modern product teams ship.

Development Lifecycle reads how you ship: 6 stages, 36 tasks, 8 operations-stack categories, and 3 cross-cutting reads (token economics, role fluidity, cognitive debt). Where Team Operations measures capability, Lifecycle measures the work itself.

Development Lifecycle framework

This framework maps the modern product development lifecycle. The build process for capability-rich products has its own stages, concerns, and operational requirements that don’t exist in conventional software development.

Six lifecycle stages

1. Specify and constrain

   Define the problem with the right constraints. What can the system actually solve here? What are the guardrails? What does “good enough” look like when outputs are probabilistic?

2. Build system of context

   Assemble the knowledge layer the system needs to perform. Data pipelines, embeddings, retrieval, prompt engineering, context window discipline.

3. Orchestrate and generate

   Wire up models, agents, and pipelines. The system takes shape here: model selection, chaining, tool use, orchestration architecture.

4. Validate, eval, and craft

   Test quality at the speed of inference. Traditional QA doesn’t work for probabilistic outputs. This stage runs on eval frameworks, human review loops, and quality benchmarks.

5. Ship and manage economics

   Deploy and manage inference cost. Variable cost structures (tokens, GPU time) need active management and optimization.

6. Learn and compound

   Close the feedback loop and compound insight. Usage data flows back into model improvement, creating the flywheel that separates Compounding from Scaling.

36 lifecycle tasks

Each stage carries 6 specific tasks that represent the work. The lifecycle report shows which tasks your team has done, partially addressed, or not yet started.

Operations stack (8 categories)

We also read your team’s operational tooling across eight categories.

Category	What it covers
Context and knowledge	RAG, embeddings, knowledge graphs, context management
Model and inference	Model selection, fine-tuning, inference optimization, model registry
Orchestration	Agent frameworks, workflow engines, tool use, chaining
Eval and quality	Evaluation frameworks, benchmarks, human review, regression testing
Deployment	CI/CD for models, feature flags, rollback, A/B testing
Economics	Cost tracking, token budgets, usage metering, margin analysis
Observability	Logging, tracing, drift detection, performance monitoring
Feedback	User feedback collection, RLHF pipelines, data labeling, model retraining

Three cross-cutting reads

These forces span all six stages and shape every decision.

Token economics

The cost of every interaction. Where traditional software has marginal cost approaching zero, capability-rich products have real per-request cost. Managing token economics is a continuous discipline, not a one-time optimization.

Role fluidity

The shift from specialist to generalist. Modern teams blur traditional role boundaries. Engineers write prompts. Designers evaluate model outputs. PMs manage token budgets. The lifecycle read tracks how well your team has adapted to that reality.

Cognitive debt

The capability equivalent of technical debt. When you ship without proper evaluation, monitoring, or feedback loops, you accumulate cognitive debt: models that drift, prompts that break, and outputs that degrade quietly.

Using the lifecycle assessment

The lifecycle report shows your team’s progress through each stage.

• Done stages are where your team has mature practice.
• Partial stages have some practice but gaps remain.
• Not started stages are areas your team hasn’t yet addressed.

Stages aren’t strictly sequential. Most teams work several at once. But skipping a stage outright (especially Context and Eval) creates compounding problems.

How is the lifecycle different from sprints or cycles?

Sprints and cycles are time-bounded execution windows. Lifecycle stages describe the work itself. You’ll touch multiple lifecycle stages every cycle. The framework helps you see whether the work is balanced (don’t ship a feature that skipped Eval) and whether your team has the muscle to do all six stages well.

When should I take the assessment?

Run it once at onboarding to set a baseline. Re-run it after a major ship or quarterly. Lifecycle scores move faster than capability scores because they reflect process, not investment.

API access

See Get lifecycle stages and Submit lifecycle assessment for the endpoints.