What this is
Every other Map on StackNova covers one corner of the stack. This one covers the whole journey: the path a product takes from an idea on a whiteboard to something a customer pays for. It pulls the best article from each Path and puts them in the order the work actually happens - design, build, ship, grow - so you can see the shape of the whole thing before you dive into any one part.
It is deliberately a route, not a catalog. Each stage links to a handful of starting articles, not every article in that Path; follow the cross-links and the Path indexes for depth. Think of it as the onboarding Map: the one you read first, and the one you send to anyone trying to understand how the pieces fit.
Design what to build, build it well, ship it so it stays up, then make people find it. Four stages, one product.- the whole map in a sentence
1 · Design
Before a line of code, decide what you are building and what it looks like. Cheap decisions first - structure and flow - then the visual surface.
Get the vocabulary straight, move up the fidelity ladder from sketch to clickable, and lean on a system so the work stays coherent. Figma is where most of it happens.
- → UX vs UI LEVEL 101
- → Wireframe, mockup, prototype LEVEL 101
- → What is a design system? LEVEL 101
- → What is Figma? LEVEL 101
- → Design-to-development handoff LEVEL 101 - the bridge into Build
2 · Build
Turn the design into a running application. The language and framework on the front, the local orchestration and tooling underneath.
Pick the language and framework, understand the build tool that bundles it, and set up the local dev environment that ties your services together. Start broad, then go deep on the tools you actually adopt.
- → Web developers in 2026 LEVEL 101 - the lay of the land
- → What is TypeScript? LEVEL 101
- → Modern web frameworks LEVEL 101
- → What is Vite? LEVEL 101
- → What is Aspire? LEVEL 101 - local orchestration
3 · Ship & run
Package the app, put it in the cloud, and control who gets in. This is the stage that turns "works on my machine" into "works for everyone," and keeps it that way.
Containers are the unit of deployment; a managed runtime hosts them; an identity platform guards the door; and observability tells you what is actually happening in production.
- → What is a container? LEVEL 101
- → What is Docker? LEVEL 101
- → What is an Azure Container App? LEVEL 101
- → What is Microsoft Entra ID? LEVEL 101 - sign-in and access
- → What is observability? LEVEL 101
4 · Grow
A shipped product nobody finds is a hobby. The last stage is making people discover it, measuring what they do, and improving the numbers on purpose.
Get found in search, run campaigns to bring people in, wire up analytics to see what they do, and use conversion tracking and A/B testing to make the funnel better than a guess.
- → SEO basics LEVEL 101
- → What are campaigns? LEVEL 101
- → What are analytics events? LEVEL 101
- → What is conversion tracking? LEVEL 101
- → What is A/B testing? LEVEL 101
AI, all the way through
AI is not a stage - it is a tool you reach for at every stage. Design a prototype with it, write code with it, and let it draft the marketing copy. The AI Path is the toolbox that sits alongside the whole lifecycle.
Claude Design for the design stage, Claude Code and GitHub Copilot for the build stage, and the model itself underneath all of it. Read these in parallel with the stages above, not after them.
- → What is Claude Design? LEVEL 101 - design stage
- → What is Claude Code? LEVEL 101 - build stage
- → What is GitHub Copilot? LEVEL 101 - build stage
- → What is Claude? LEVEL 101 - the model underneath
Three reading orders
The map runs design to grow, but not everyone starts there. Three routes, depending on who you are.
You are doing all of it, alone
You can build - now ship and grow
You want the shape, not the internals
The lifecycle at a glance
If you read only this section, here is the whole arc, in order:
- Design: decide what to build and how it looks - wireframe to prototype, on a design system, in Figma.
- Build: turn it into a running app - TypeScript, a framework, Vite, and Aspire underneath.
- Ship & run: containerize it, host it on Azure Container Apps, guard it with Entra ID, and watch it with observability.
- Grow: get found with SEO, bring people in with campaigns, and improve with conversion tracking and A/B testing.
- AI throughout: Claude Design, Claude Code, and Copilot at every stage.