Product Phases: How to Successfully Launch a Product

Launching a new product is always exciting for Product Managers. It can be a daunting task and often requires meticulous planning and preparation. Whether you’ll be selling SaaS, enterprise software or a physical product, it’s critical to lock down a strategy to ensure you can effectively build buzz, reach targets and hit your sales numbers.

Every company is different and targets a particular market segment for their product. But every successful product launch example has one thing in common: The business had an effective strategy and stuck to it.

We will be discussing 5 Phases that a product has to go through for the successful product launch.

PHASE I: Product Discovery and Denotation

In this phase, the objective is to find the problem to solve and determine the minimum viable product.

Product discovery is the initiation phase, where the Product Manager talks to potential customers, listens to their feedback and pays attention to customers using competing products. Once you know which features are most valued by customers, the main goal is to obtain, validate and implement customer feedback.

The goal is to have a product that has a minimum set of features to test key assumptions. In this phase, it is important to not waste valuable resources where they are not necessary. Work until you get a solid understanding of the problem to solve and the needed features.

One of the most dangerous things you could do for your product is to use assumptions about customer needs and behaviour without testing. Even if you and your teams have worked in the same space before, test your assumptions with data. This will help you create better-informed customer insights. Having fresh perspectives going into a new product will save you a lot of pain when it comes to the feedback loop, as you’ve already anticipated what your users want from you.

There are 3 different things you can do with this data to make sure it stays at the forefront of your teams’ minds.

1. Personas: Create Personas of your target customer with the list of traits to under their needs and jobs to be done thoroughly.

2. Journey Map: Create a customer journey map predicting how your customer will move through your product and build it in a more informed way.

3. Empathy maps: Gain deeper insight using the empathy map with the focus on how your customer feels about your product and try to articulate that in your MVP.

In short in this phase you should have:

· A Vision Statement

· An MVP

· Data-backed customer insights

· Journey Maps, Empathy Maps and Personas

PHASE II: Product Design and Implementation

At this stage, you’ll be coming up with the roadmap, an important strategic tool for product teams.

Essentially a roadmap:

· Is the journey plan for a product from drafting to releasing

· Reflects the product vision and plots out certain goals and targets

· Helps to plan what resources and tools will be needed and when

· Is a tool for cross-team communication and keeping everyone on the same path

· Provides a way of communication with stakeholders and users

Your mindset as a product manager will play a huge part in planning well across teams. Leading without authority is all part of the fine art of product management, and it’s easy to get wrong. Too loose a handle on things leads to chaos, but too firm leads to resentment. Without authority, a product manager needs the art of influence.

These are 3 steps to influence without authority:

1. Make your teams problems your problems.

2. Share the vision with the team and make them believe in it

3. Communicate openly with your teams and ask for help

The implementation phase is where the actual product is built. During this phase, the product manager will work closely with the tech teams and the project manager who will be ensuring that everything runs on time. The project manager will also be focusing on economic constraints (i.e. if another designer has to be brought in to share the workload.) The product manager needs to have a strong working relationship with the project manager at this stage as they’ll often be working in tandem.

Being a Product Manager is all about being adaptable. The design phase is arguably the most hectic stage of development and prioritization is key. While it might sound pessimistic, plan for things to go wrong from time to time!

PHASE III: Product Marketing

In this stage define your marketing goals for your product. But for creative executions, product launches etc, PMs rely on their perfect duos: Product Marketing Managers.

Product Marketing Managers (PMMs) coordinate the launch period and act as a bridge between technical product knowledge and the messaging, while PMs coordinate technical rollout and make sure everything goes according to the PMMs’ plan.

Apart from the launch, PMMs have two main responsibilities:

1. Drive Demand with Positioning and Key messaging

2. Drive Usage with User Education on the value of the product

As the work that these two managers do is so closely linked they must work together well. The best way to achieve this is regular communication. Strong communication between the marketing teams and the product team is hugely influential on the success of a product.

PHASE IV: Product Launch

This phase is to release to product into the market and understand how it performs.

There is no guaranteed method of success for the perfect product launch because every product is unique and has a different target audience. However, having a well-crafted plan to follow for launching a product can help avoid failure.

Create the checklist for your product launch and tick all the boxes once.

· Market research & positioning

· Defining buyer personas

· Get in-sync with other teams

· Beta stage

· Prepare a press kit

· Build the infrastructure to gain insights

· Prepare a follow-up plan

After all, a product is never really finished! “Build, measure, learn and iterate, always with the user in mind”.

PHASE V: Train Your Users

User Onboarding is a crucial process that starts when a user acquires a product or a service and ends when the user gets fully acquainted and integrated with it. A successful User Onboarding process helps

users gradually and solidly understand all a product can offer and give a positive first impression.

A rich User Onboarding experience could include an easy to use design an interactive in-depth tutorial and a brief explanation of the product, with just enough detail to cover all of its uses.

Every company wants their product to be successful and their users to be loyal to them. But that is easier said than done. Both acquiring and keeping users loyal is a challenge that can only be achieved if you do everything correctly when engaging with your users.

To conclude, a product needs to go through these 5 phases to be successful and gain positive acceptance in the market.