Four Phases of Implementation

four fingers

Jacques Murphy Describes the Four Phases of Implementation at productmarketing.com.

Four Phases

When selling a software product to a customer, your customer tends to go through four phases of emotional satisfaction with their purchase.

  1. Oh Boy! – Excitement about the anticipated benefits of using your software.
  2. Oh Shoot! – Discouragement about the anticipated work required to use your software.
  3. Oh Well – Resignation that the work just needs to be done.
  4. Oh Wow! – Excitement about the realized benefits from your software.

Jacques writes a fun, easy, oh so true article about this experience. We’re adding a visual.

emotional satisfaction

The Oh Boy phase generates a lot of excitement, and possibly even hype, if your message isn’t properly managed. Like the sugar rush you get from eating a bowl of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs, the invetible crash comes hard and fast. Jacques provides some suggestions for reducing the pain of this phase.

Things start turning around in the Oh Well phase – as your customer makes progress in implementation (or data scrubbing, or training or rollout) and change management, your customer will begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

The bit flips when your product goes live. And the better your product is, the steeper the climb in the Oh Wow phase.

  • Scott Sehlhorst

    Scott Sehlhorst is a product management and strategy consultant with over 30 years of experience in engineering, software development, and business. Scott founded Tyner Blain in 2005 to focus on helping companies, teams, and product managers build better products. Follow him on LinkedIn, and connect to see how Scott can help your organization.

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