What are the Discovery, Alpha, Beta and Live stages in developing a service?

Discovery: Before you start building a service, you need to find out whether users need it and whether other services exist. This part of your project is called the discovery phase.

Alpha: In the alpha phase you need to build prototypes of your service, test your prototypes with users and demonstrate that the service you want to build is technically possible.

Beta: The objective of the beta phase is to build a working version of the service based on your alpha prototypes. The version you build must be able to handle real transactions and work at scale.

Live: this phase is the time to keep improving your service based on user feedback, analytics and your ongoing user research

Richard Pope, a product manager at GDS explains each phase.

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