3 Lessons Learned When Moving a Product Out of Beta
In March I joined Broadlume’s DealerHQ team as a Product Manager. I was tasked with product management and related work to help publicly launch DealerHQ, which had been in development for about 2 years. Over the course of this past year, I’ve learned a few key lessons about moving a product out of beta.
DealerHQ Product and Team Overview
DealerHQ is an operational tool for flooring dealers which allows them to view digital reporting, manage leads, view and respond to reviews, and more, all from one platform.
Broadlume recently moved this product line out of a beta state with our dealers earlier this year. As of December 2020, DealerHQ has over 1,200 flooring retailers activated on our platform. These retailers collectively make up over 1,300 stores which have logged over 600,000 leads on the platform.
The DealerHQ development team is composed of 4 engineers and 1 product manager. Each developer is full-stack, although each member has their strengths and particular focus.
Our product launch out of beta was successful for a variety of reasons. Here are some tips for scaling a product to a large client base.
Establish Stakeholders, Timelines, KPIs and Expectations
Once a project is confirmed, it’s important to quickly establish an ongoing meeting with all stakeholders. To do this, a project tracking document was drafted and shared which included each milestone of the project with expected dates and assigned stakeholders. Representatives from sales, marketing, account management, data, and product teams were all presented this document and provided sign-off to ensure buy-in across teams.
Stakeholders should also be included in the drafting of Key Performance Indicators (KPI). For example, the goal of DealerHQ was to continuously grow Weekly Active Retailers (WAR). This KPI indicated that our clients were accessing the tool and continuing to utilize it over time.
Having clear stakeholders and KPIs will make expectations across all teams transparent. An ongoing weekly or biweekly meeting is also helpful to maintain close communications with stakeholders as the project progresses.
Work with Developers to Handle Tech Debt and Data Integrity
It’s important to make sure a launch moment runs smoothly once scale is brought into the picture. To do this, a Product Manager needs to work with their development team to fully grasp what problems may occur as user growth intensifies. Through that, a plan of attack can then be developed to address those issues ahead of the launch.
A lot of times things like data integrity can be ignored, and if so, can generate a lot of headaches after a launch moment. For example, before DealerHQ launched, we documented a batch of issues around user accounts which were created through a later deprecated self-service sign up flow. These users were not properly tied to their correct stores, and the DealerHQ development team spent a good deal of effort diagnosing and addressing these issues.
Establishing new processes as a team was also helpful in identifying these issues ahead of launch. Group meetings such as mob programming served as a good way to identify issues and prioritize them. We even created a rotating on-call schedule where a different developer was assigned client issues each week that were inbound from our account managers who worked directly with customers. This approach has worked successfully the whole year for our team.
Market the Launch Moment Properly
A launch moment cannot be successful unless the users are aware and know exactly how to activate their accounts. Communication with marketing needs to happen early. For DealerHQ’s launch moment, a go-to-market plan was created through partnership with marketing. The main goal should be to notify users ahead of and after launch.
For example, a “sneak peek” drip campaign was first sent to all clients on a bi-weekly basis, notifying all users of the upcoming launch moment. Reminder blasts like these are key to ensure that users aren’t blindsided once the launch moment occurs.
It’s important to ensure that emails are sent to the correct type of user. DealerHQ’s marketing team worked closely with product and development to ensure that the correct communications were sent out at all times. Clients who were already activated on the platform did not receive any emails related to first time users. On the other hand, other email blasts were sent out to new users with very specific instructions on how to activate their account for the first time.
One should always remember that email marketing doesn’t end once the product launches. It’s important to maintain communication with users who have activated and have yet to activate to ensure a user base continues to grow over time.
While 2020 has been a unique year to say the least, our team has been proud of the work we’ve done to help our customers navigate these uncertain times. The flooring industry has had its own economic challenges as customers move more of their shopping online in times of social distancing.
The DealerHQ team has helped our thousands of small business customers excel operationally through the launch of our product for lead management and reporting tools. While launching a new product line is never easy, these key lessons will help guide you through a successful launch moment.
