4 Steps to a Successful SaaS Product Launch
You created the perfect product, but they didn’t buy. You brought your best developers to give the most experience to your project, yet something didn’t resonate with your customers. And you invested in the best PR campaigns but realized the media attention wasn’t scalable.
As VP of Product for a high-growth software team, I’ve faced these challenges, and more.
Recently, I tackled my biggest launch of the last six years. The latest addition to Raygun’s suite of products competes head-to-head with one of the giants of Silicon Valley in the Application Performance Management (APM) space.
Talk about pressure!
Going head-to-head with New Relic, a company that ranks No. 111 on Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500™ and who have an unlimited budget was just one of the challenges.
Despite this, our beta launch was a success. I’m proud to say we have some happy customers with some great results.
What made a difference this time round was how I tweaked my usual processes during the usual phases of a launch; customer research, onboarding, the offer, and delivery. I’d like to share those tweaks today. Although they don’t seem huge, believe me, it’s the small things that make the difference.
Here are my top four learnings from my biggest product launch to date.
1. What you need to discover in the research phase
Customer research is the key to understanding the best (and often hidden) opportunities in the market. Although there are thousands of articles on how to do research, I’ve found that it’s most important to:
- Understand the problems your product must address
- Plan how to differentiate yourself from competitors
- Assess the elusive product-market fit
Go into any research endeavor with these goals in mind, and you’ll come out with something useful.
How many people should I ask?
I keep it surprisingly small. I only ask 20 people in total — 10 of our current customers who have expressed prior interest, and 10 prospects from potentially thousands. Am I missing out? Well, no. I like to take the inch-wide, mile deep approach. A smaller group helps me develop closer relationships, and at this early stage, I want to encourage truth and honesty. Establishing an open door policy means that they can come to me at any time with feedback, and I can answer quickly.
What kind of questions do I need to ask?
Of course, ask all the usual demographic questions. But the real gold is found in just one question:
How do you manage that [the problem your product solves] today?
The primary goal here is to understand how your people do things now. Usually, people can’t picture a different way because they are so used to the way they already do things. Habit change is hard, so what you are looking for is the pains that would make them change the way they do things.
One way to do this is to ask follow up questions such as:
“Can you explain that a little more?”
You’ll discover all sorts of illuminating insights and key issues as they are walking you through their process. For example, a customer may have had trouble interpreting data because it was missing a key piece of information that your new product could easily provide with a little engineering time. The key is to listen actively and understand your market from your customer’s perspective without any preconceived ideas.
Who should I bring along?
During our APM launch, I found bringing a developer along to all my discovery sessions was invaluable. I realized a few years ago that there should be as little separation as possible between the developers working on the product and the end user.
When developers understand your users from the beginning, they are more likely to make decisions that will most benefit the user. Welcome their input.
What should I do with my findings?
Common themes will emerge at the end of your customer discovery sessions. Group them into several major areas and bring the findings to your executive and product teams. Your research will be vital in getting the team onboard with your roadmap. Here’s how I go about bringing departments together.
2. How to get your whole team onboard from the start
Leading a fast-paced team means I am always formulating plans. Almost weekly I’m cooking up feature launches, announcements, roadmaps, and stories. But the truth is that I practically never formulate these plans alone. (I wrote about why this is so important getting in my article “Taming Fires and Winning Friends.”) Here’s what I found works best for collaborating with my team.
Involve the team from the start
I mentioned involving your developers right from the start — what I should have said is involve the whole team from the start!
As a product manager, you no doubt have people skills, so put them to the test and wrangle engineering, front-end, design, marketing, and the executive team to bring them onboard with the plan. Take them on the journey with you and create a sense of excitement and competitiveness along the way.
To motivate the Raygun team during our launch, we made our scrum boards available to the whole team and stuck a project board to the boardroom wall for visibility, much like the one below:
Share the feedback
It’s important all teams hear the customer feedback before you start work. This way, everyone will be on the same page as the user and what they want before the project starts. We use a project management tool called Quip for documenting all our feedback, and because our feedback sample size was only 20 people, it’s digestible; not sprawling. You could even just use a simple spreadsheet shared with the whole team. Our marketing team is a big fan of the strategic messaging map by Myk Pono.
Create progression reports
During your launch, be sure to communicate openly about your progress and plans. In the Raygun office, for example, we stick our roadmap onto an office wall with dates and major milestones clearly marked. (Of course, everything is in Jira, Post-It notes just give a visual.)
This helps everyone to understand how the project is progressing on an ongoing basis.
3. Hone your offering
If you have followed the steps above, your marketing team will be excited to push forward with the launch.
Not so fast. It’s time to hone your offering so everyone is crystal clear on what is needed and when.
Create a press release
Although press releases aren’t very exciting, writing one will help you understand what you are launching and how you differentiate from your competitors.
The press release should contain all the major benefits of using your product. Here’s an example of our press release for our APM launch.
Rank your features
The next step is to break up the benefits mentioned in your press release into the significant features that you will need to deliver.
Rank these major features in descending order, from the most important to the least important. Personally, I like to use product to feature prioritization framework to help, and I’ve found the model Daniel Elizalde recommends to be the best for my needs. He recommends assigning weights based on customer engagement, user experience, sales potential, and operational efficiency. Here’s an example that Daniel provides:
The feature rank will also be specific to how you approach building features and products within your own company. For example, if your company is all about delivering the best customer experience then you are more likely to rank things that are customer impacting first.
Discuss the launch plan
There is nothing worse than launching a consumer-facing product in the middle of a summer vacation when no one is around! At best it’s wasted ad spend, at worst it’s a competitor taking advantage of your mistiming and launching a counter-punch product.
Plus, if you put a date to your launch, at least you now have a deadline to work with! If the timing is flexible, then you will make sure to time your launch for maximum impact and exposure.
4. Put it all together
Now you have it all laid out down to the feature level, you’ll be able to look at your solution in its entirety and see if your product solves the key problem areas that you had identified in your customer discovery stage.
And remember, cool features don’t make a product. As Jeff Morris mentions in his article the Process vs. The Product, customers don’t care about how many Jira tickets you write. They only care about the feeling they get when they open your app and discover something new.
“Customers only care about how our products feel in their hands, and nothing else.” — Jeff Morris, Director of Product and Revenue at Tinder
Have I built something that people want?
That depends on a few critical factors. Have you built a coherent story from A to B, and do all the features answer the problems you are solving for your customers?
If you are having trouble differentiating value from features, the most helpful tips are:
- Keep asking why (at least five times) until you understand how the features would ultimately benefit the end user.
- Compare your customer discovery research from the first step to final product plan in the honing phase. Does it stack up to your conversations? If not, then don’t build it!
- Frame what you are building as answers to key problems that you’ve identified in your customer discovery research.
- Ask yourself whether you’ve adequately solved the problems with your features. If the answer is no, don’t build it!
If you go through those steps, you are far more likely to win the hearts of your users.
Successful product launches
In summary:
- Be thorough in your research phase, and ask the right questions
- Get your whole team onboard from the start by being clear in your communication
- Hone your offering so that features go out on time
- Reflect on what you have built so it measures up to your research phase
Launching successful products doesn’t need to be guesswork. As product managers, we can add process to the chaos and facilitate a successful launch. If your launch doesn’t do as well as you planned, troubleshoot and analyze why, and what you can do differently next time.
To help you on your way, here are my top resources for product managers who want to learn more about launching successful products:
Intercom on Product Management
Nils Davis: The Secret Product Manager Handbook
Steve Blank: The 4 Steps to the Epiphany
Want to learn more?
I also write for the Raygun Blog, where we talk about helping engineering teams build better performing apps. You can also follow me on Twitter @ZhengRaygun.
This article was written by Zheng Li and edited by Freyja Spaven.
