Product Management Playbook — Part 5/6 — Launch

The question we ask in this segment is “How do we come up with awesome launch plan for the awesome product we are building?”

In my series “Product Management Playbook — 6 Part Series”, I focus on how product managers can build awesome products that users will actually love and use. In the First Part, we understood the users and their problems. In the Second Part, we looked at how do we combine all the research and define where the problem’s exist. In the Third Part, we looked at how can we ideate to find an appropriate solution for the needs and problems we defined. In the Fourth Part, we looked at how do we prioritize and actually build a product. In this Fifth Part, we will look at how do we come up with awesome plan to launch our awesome product to the market.

The goal of this phase is to come up with a launch plan for the product we are building.

Throughout my career in software industry, I have been responsible for launching various products. For any product launch, there will be three distinct phases — Pre Launch, Launch and Post Launch.

We’ll look at each of them in detail.

Pre Launch

• Rigorous Product Testing — When you launch your product, you need to be sure that the product is working as expected. In today’s hyper competitive world, customers are not afraid to jump the ship because of a poor product or service. So, ensure that your product is thoroughly tested for usability, reliability, performance and efficiency.
• Beta Program — Once the product is in a prototype state, it is of utmost important to get it evaluated by a group of beta testers. This beta program will help you gather feedback from real customers helping you to improve the product before it is released to the public.
• Value Proposition — You need to come up with a value proposition for your product. Positioning defines where the product stands in relation to similar products in the market. Positioning is all about focusing on only the most values aspects of the product. Refrain from highlighting how great individual features of the product are, concentrate on the whole product at the very high level.
• Activating Stakeholders — Building up to the actual launch of the product, you need to work closely with internal stakeholders to coordinate for the day of the launch. Work with management to clearly chalk out the launch plan, sales team to build sales pitches, marketing team to build the marketing collateral, service team to be prepared for the new service requests on more information, clarifications and bugs if any.
• Scheduling — This is most obvious thing to do. You need to come up with a date and time at which you’ll launch your product to the world. And like any other timelines, you need to be sensible and realistic on the timelines. You must work on trade-off between aggressive and conservative schedule.

Launch

• Choosing Channel — For the launch, you need to narrow down on the channel you want to share your message. Choose the channel where the majority of the audience is present. Pick any main channel — an event or blog post. Use auxiliary channels like email, social, paid media and other channels to support the main channel.
• Launch Event — You can possibly launch your product in an event. You can create an event where your customers and prospects are invited and then you launch the product in their presence. This will make sure that your customers and prospects are aware of your product and then one less step to adoption.

Post Launch

• Product Marketing — Work with internal stakeholders to keep the launch momentum flowing through nurturing emails, free trials, product demos, webinars, blogs and so on. Focus on driving demand, adoption and overall success of the product.
• Customer Feedback — Once the product is in the market for public, use all mechanisms possible to gather all feedback related to the product. Capture all the feedback somewhere right away and be sure to segregate and record appropriate feedback at later point.
• Service Requests — Concentrate on the service requests from the customers and see how the product is actually performing. Looking at the service request trends, you can figure out which part of the product is performing well and which part is falling short. This should give some direction for the next steps.

“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” — Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn

What am I missing here? Let me know in the comments, and don’t forget to share your ideas too!

Enjoyed what you read? Hit the CLAP below and share it, so that others can read it too.