BEYOND THE BUILD
The Strategic Product Launch Playbook
A massive 5-step guide to successful new product launches: 1) Strategize, 2) Bring in people to collaborate, 3) Build the launch plan, 4) Hack growth using the ‘AAARRR’ funnel, and 5) Reflect and iterate.
Table of Contents
Step 1: Considerations Before Launching a Product
Step 2: Stakeholder Management
Welcome!
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A large share of new product launches will fail and the minority that succeeds must have an amazing launch plan.
Whether you’re a product manager leading an established product or an entrepreneur launching a new business, you will need to develop a product strategy and get your message market fit right for a successful launch.
Step 1: Considerations Before Launching a Product
Use problem statements as a guiding star
Every successful product aims to solve a problem, each with a unique problem statement.
The problem statement is a clear and concise description of the problem and fills in the blank between what should be happening (situation to-be) and what is happening (situation as-is).
The problem statement is something that you can refer to throughout a product’s journey starting with the design and development to introducing it to the market.
Make sure you spend time with all your team members to outline the best problem statements that everyone is committed to.
This will help your team focus, stay on track, and ground you and your team in goal setting, strategies, planning, execution, and assessment of the product launch plan. A simple formula for a problem statement could be the following:
‘X target users’ need a way to do ‘Y-needs’ shown by the ‘Z-insight’
For Uber, that may look something like this:
‘San Francisco commuters’ — need a way to ‘get from point A to point B’ because ‘taxi cabs are too scarce to hail and too slow to respond’.
Target the right audience
For successful product development and launch, you need to discover your target customers, understand their needs, and know how to communicate with them. Go beyond the run-of-the-mill demographics and personas and use the jobs-to-be-done framework by Clayton Christensen, as a compass to hone in on your target market and their needs.
Follow these steps to define your target market, craft the right messaging, and connect with customers on a deeper level:
- Identify a job-to-be-done as an action verb followed by the object of the action and the clarifying context. For an iPod, that may be listening to music while working out. Ask your customers questions to gain insights. With the iPod, you might ask, when listening to music while working out, how do you struggle to get the job done? For example, they may have difficulty running while carrying a bulky Walkman or battle boredom with the same 12 songs playing on the CD.
- Go beyond the functional jobs-to-be-done and determine if the customer has emotional or social jobs-to-be-done as well. Ask questions like, how do you want to achieve your workouts? The customer may respond with an insight that they want to feel motivated to push themselves harder.
- Focus on how to message your product as solving the customer’s job. To do this, you mustn’t focus messaging on the features of your product and instead use the jobs-to-be-done lens to focus on your product’s position in the customers’ minds. When Apple first released the iPod, they used the catchphrase, “1,000 songs in your pocket.” They did not focus messaging around a feature, such as a device’s ability to store five gigabytes of music. Instead, they translated the storage size into the number of songs stored. A message that resonated with the customers’ job described earlier.
Validate your product market fit
Product market fit will drive the success of your offering.
Test your customers’ motivations, desires, and needs, and figure out how to communicate with them before launching a product.
A great way to validate your product market fit before launch is to create a test or fake landing page. Develop a page with a single and focused call to action. Your call to action may be a web form to collect data, like names and email addresses, or it may be a simple button you press to purchase something.
- Test multiple variations of the landing page and see what sticks with users (A/B testing) while gathering data and customer feedback along the way.
Don’t wait until the product launch date to validate your product/market fit. This will help you and your team to go beyond opinions and identify what strategies and messages resonate with your customers because, in the end, data always beats opinions.
Track performance with metrics
A product leader can get fixated on daily tasks and lose sight of what’s important — achieving business goals.
If product teams do not identify goals early on and set metrics for what success looks like, product launches may fail. Product teams need to develop product launch goals. Below are some guidelines:
- Create a product launch goal statement. The statement could take the form of: we are launching this product to X, Y, and Z. For example, “we’re launching the widget product to increase awareness, engagement, and conversion of new customers.” Try to gather input from team members to ensure you strike the right balance of high-level details and simplicity.
- Identify goals associated with why you are launching the product. Cross-check goals with the executives and other functional teams. An example of goals could be: “an increase in revenue or margin, establishing a foothold in a new market segment to land new clients.”
- Translate goals into traceable metrics. Use SMART criteria (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely) in developing targets for your goals, for example, “to reach $3.2 million in revenue.”
Using this method as your guideline, you and your team will be able to later judge whether or not the goals were accomplished.
It will also help you to identify where resources are needed and help you and your team deliver on the expectations.
The goal-setting phase may require a lot of strategic analysis and planning but will keep your team focused on the purpose of the product launch, align activities based on success metrics, and keep everyone motivated to impress your customers.
Monitor and benchmark the competition
Always conduct a competitive analysis. Only then will you understand what makes your product unique and useful to your target market.
Let’s take a look at the three steps you can take to conduct your analysis and create a strategy to take on your competitors.
- Brainstorm a full list of your competitors. Be comprehensive and think of direct and indirect (substitute) competition. So if you are launching a new fitness watch, search for related keywords, such as activity tracker, exercise monitor band, or pedometer. Or if you are selling an electric toothbrush, go beyond just researching other electric toothbrushes and think about regular toothbrushes or even floss.
- Understand competitors’ offerings. Evaluate their offerings comparing them to your own. Assess their website, follow them on social media, and sign up for their newsletters. Create a document, such as this, to capture your research
- SWOT it out! Identify the strengths and weaknesses of each competitor and potential opportunities and threats you might have against them. Your competitive advantage should be unique and appeal to your target customer.
Take a step back and talk out your research with all of your team.
It will take time, but landing on your competitive advantage will help drive your product’s messaging by relying on what makes you different (USP).
Step 2: Stakeholder Management
Identify potential candidates to engage
Your customers come first, but they aren’t the only stakeholders you’ll be selling to.
Your company is full of stakeholders that you must convince to help your product succeed. Identify your stakeholders early on to strategize the best ways to communicate, collaborate, and launch your product with their support, rather than friction.
- Brainstorm a list of people in your organization based on their titles that you’ll need to communicate your efforts and request resources through. When thinking about people based on their titles, ask yourself: “Who has the authority to make things happen? Who can empower others on the team to get things done?”
- Then, go beyond titles, and think about people’s roles or their job descriptions. For example, one important role in the product launch is maintaining client relationships. These stakeholders are often the gatekeepers between your company and the customer. When you’re identifying stakeholders based on roles, ask yourself: “Who has a stake in your product’s success or failure? Who has the performance metrics or obligations toward your product’s success?”
- There are influencers and cheerleaders throughout the organization who will have doubts about you and your efforts. These influential stakeholders are the people who may have control over resources in unexpected ways or hold clout within your company to help push things forward. Early on, sit down with these candidates, establish rapport, and maintain a healthy communication channel. Ask yourself: “Who are the people that have a good understanding of how the company works? Who are the people that others ask for help, advice, or ideas?”
Prioritizing your stakeholder communication plans
A successful product launch strategy requires you to create a deliberate and strategic communication strategy that balances the stakeholders’ needs with your time and resources.
A great way to map your communication efforts is to use Mendelow’s matrix to make your launch run more smoothly and garner the right level of stakeholder engagement.
Take your list of stakeholders and place them within the matrix.
- Your direct superiors will fit in the key player quadrant as they will be high in power and interest. For stakeholders here, you’ll want to manage communications closely and engage in frequent updates and conversations along the way. You could create weekly meetings to share progress updates or ask for advice. Determine what level of engagement works for you and aim to keep everyone informed on efforts.
- A system administrator may be a stakeholder that you put within the minimal effort quadrant. They will hold less interest in your product and less power within the organization. Keep this stakeholder satisfied by sharing monthly updates on the launch date and any other details that are required for their work. Minimal effort should go into the communications strategy with this group.
- A developer or someone who’s testing the product will have low power and high interest and fit within the keep informed quadrant. For this stakeholder, share a bi-weekly email with product launch details to keep them informed and engaged.
- A busy executive may fit in the keep satisfied quadrant when they have a lot of power at your company but little interest in your product. These people will be great for testing new ideas and checking in once a month to bounce ideas off them. Though they may influence the decision, they’re not good for communicating throughout the process because of their lack of interest and time for your project.
Prioritizing your stakeholder communication plans
A product launch is a cross-functional effort, pulling members from product management, development, customer support, sales, accounting, legal, marketing, or any other areas needed to support the launch.
To recruit these team members, speak directly with their managers and ask whether this person can join the product team, and only then set up a one-on-one with the potential team member to talk about the project, and how the person can contribute.
Be ready to share the vision and explain why this is an exciting opportunity. But be honest about the work required, you don’t want anyone to join who isn’t ready to help.
As you start to put your team together, the last step is to ask team members what competencies your team lacks. Talk through the different goals you’re trying to reach.
Do you have the key players that can help achieve the goals?
If not, continue recruiting until you’ve assembled the best team for your product launch.
Now what makes leading this launch team a challenge is that these people don’t typically work together, and probably won’t report directly to you if you are working in a large organization.
Instead, they’ll have other direct reports and other obligations within your company. They may even hold a more senior role than you.
The best way to lead this team is by setting ground rules early on, living by example, and asking all team members to adhere to the rules.
Cross-functional teams are made of interdependent, autonomous candidates. Consider these four rules of engagement:
- Members are to be autonomous decision-makers. The representatives of a functional area like communications should be capable of making decisions on behalf of their area. So if someone comes representing the communications team, they should have the ability to make a final decision on the date to publish a press release. This first rule will empower the team to move quickly, as is required in a product launch.
- Team members are active participants, not observers. A digital marketing team member will do the work to set up a marketing campaign, create different messages to test, and track performance to report back to the team. On the product launch team, everyone has a responsibility to the team and actively works towards meeting the launch goals.
- Status meetings will be held frequently, have a set agenda, start on time, and be used for updating the team on activities. Problem-solving issues and non-status-related conversations that come up will be tabled and saved for other meetings.
- The project goals are your road maps. Goals will be set and clearly defined. This will allow team members to understand what they’re working toward, and create buy-in on the goal set. So for example, if a goal is to sell a certain number of products in the first week of launch, the marketing team member will work toward reaching an audience to help make that happen. Or the sales team member will work toward closing that number of sales.
These rules of engagement will ground you and your team, focusing on the task at hand. It’s your responsibility to convene the right people and keep engagement on the project productive and focused.
A great product launch will only happen if the team is made up of the right high-quality, motivated people who communicate well and believe in the product.
Engage your team in strategic planning
The SOAR framework is a great planning tool that can provide a more meaningful and clear strategic direction to your team. The framework is made up of four key areas:
- Strengths
- Opportunities
- Aspirations
- Results
When you lead your team through this activity, the collaboration and diversity in thinking will help you land on a better strategy. Plus, people are more likely to commit to the goals and objectives when they help to create them.
- Strengths. These are your differentiation advantages; ask yourself and your team: what is your USP/what makes your product desirable to customers? For example, Lyft entered the market well after Uber was an established market player. For drivers, Lyft stood out from Uber by creating a system where the drivers made more money per hour, and for the riders, Lyft chose transparent pricing due to the pain of surge pricing.
- Opportunities. Ask yourself, what trends or partnerships might you capitalize on? For example, a brand new product has some built-in opportunities such as leveraging early adopters and influencers or Slack capitalizing on a partnership with NASA to generate buzz, implying that if it was good enough for large teams of scientists at NASA, then it’s good enough for anyone!
- Aspirations. Express your future goals and plans. Ask: how can we make a difference? And what are we passionate about?
- Results. Quantify your thinking and ask yourself: what measures and tangible outcomes will tell us we’re on track toward success?
The SOAR framework allows you and your team to be forward-thinking and identify the potential of your product. The analysis will inform many of the moving pieces involved in your product launch and when done right, can help you launch your product in synergy with the market.
I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Share your insights and feedback in the comments below and let’s continue this discussion.
Step 3: Developing the Launch Strategy
Build a checklist
A product launch checklist will guide you and your team to think through all the processes, steps, and assets that you’ll need to complete and help prepare for any stumbles that can happen along the way.
Here is a product launch checklist you can download.
You can adjust based on your own needs and move it to an Excel file, visualize it, and even make a formulaic Gantt chart for the team to monitor their progress.
Go through each section of the checklist and talk through it with your team to brainstorm items, create timelines, set deadlines, and assign tasks. Make sure everything is clearly defined and that you document the who, the what, the when, and the how for every task.
This will ensure you don’t skip an important step or forget something.
- Have a section for testing the product, QA, and the complete value chain cross-checking before launch.
- Cover marketing and sales in detail. Cover subjects such as the design and distribution of sales promotional plans or the pricing structure.
- Include your communications and customer support. Cover items such as support documentation for an online FAQ, or an owner’s manual.
- The legal section is an essential part of a product launch. Include activities like creating customer contracts, terms and conditions, and other legal or regulatory documentation required. Cover matters with your legal team to make sure you have everything in place.
- Include a product leadership section. Here include tasks such as ensuring the entire organization is informed of the product launch date and how that may affect their job responsibilities.
Every product launch checklist will be unique and the items on your list will vary based on your industry, company, and product.
A successful product launch plan
To launch your product, you must plan, execute, and iterate along the way.
Setting a launch plan will help you monitor each moving piece, readjust resources and timing if something derails, provide a high-level overview of your performance, and help align various project stakeholders.
A strong product launch starts with the hard work of preparation.
- Map out your product launch plan.
- Make it easily adjustable for the risks involved so you can modify your plan as work changes and deadlines shift.
- Make your plan visual so you can share it with stakeholders to get buy-in and make sure everyone is on the same page.
I would personally prefer to build my spreadsheet to monitor the launch plan. You can find samples here, here, and here. Do your own search online and see what makes sense for you. You’ll need some project management know-how to perform great planning. But it’s not rocket science, so just get your hands dirty, and use Google search to guide you along the way.
Speed vs. quality
“If you aren’t embarrassed by the first version of your product, you shipped too late.” — Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn
Product teams should aim to launch fast and get products to customers as quickly as possible.
But being too quick carries its risks.
The goal is to find the right balance of a fast launch without sacrificing quality.
To set your product launch timeline, follow these two important rules:
- Prioritize strategically. Focus on tasks and projects that have the biggest impact on your main goals (e.g. hit $300K of sales in four weeks) and push the less relevant items to later.
- Set a realistic timeline with reasonable deadlines and consider project risks. The timeline should reflect how long the work will take and how much time is needed to move it forward within your organizational bureaucracy. Don’t make any assumptions without talking with others experienced in the task to help plan out the time and resources required. Gather input from team members on how long they believe different projects will take. Make sure your team members are part of the planning process and have the opportunity to share input on the timeline.
Don’t forget to work closely with your team to prioritize the activities that will have the biggest payoff and ensure you set realistic and reliable deadlines.
The three tools of a “Product Launch” leader
A product launch isn’t easy.
The challenge to a product launch is the ability to plan monitor, mitigate, and repeat.
For a successful product launch, you will need three tools:
- A tool to manage your team. To track all the tasks and activities that happen behind the scenes, from testing to press releases. There are many moving pieces across different team members. Use project management tools such as Asana or Trello.
- A tool to manage your marketing. Something to assist in managing your marketing efforts, in streamlining, automating, and measuring marketing tasks and workflows. Tools like MailChimp or HubSpot can help you follow prospective customers’ early activities. These solutions allow you to schedule and track campaigns and foster leads, getting them ready for your sales team.
- A tool to manage your customers. A CRM manages all of your company’s interactions with current and prospective customers. Salesforce is a great CRM tool to track your customer relationships, from optimizing the customer journey to your product or forecasting sales.
Generally, team members may have difficulty adopting the usage of these tools. To encourage team adoption:
- Start with your engineers as early adopters. Engineers use tools such as Jira, a bug tracking and agile project management tool and they are used to using such software. Make them use your tools and showcase them as role models to the rest.
- Evaluate the tools for the features you need. Some tools start free, but once you add a certain number of team members, you get charged.
- Sit down with your team and agree on what will be used. Get buy-in on which solutions have the necessary features, then make time to train team members on how to use them.
The challenge for a product launch is the ability to manage team members and activities so that the project can go beyond planning to monitoring, mitigating, and repeating. You’ll need to invest in the tools that will ensure your product launch will be a success, way after launch.
Step 4: “Growth Hack” It
Tell stories
Stories create powerful and emotional connections.
If you want to sell your product or pitch your vision, you have to leverage the power of storytelling. A successful story needs to convey the following points:
- Solve an emotional problem. Start with emotions. What’s the problem your product solves? Several companies connect their sales to helping a non-profit cause or the environment these days.
- Address a specific community. Center the story around the specific individuals you are addressing. Who is at the heart of your story? Zoom into their daily lives and correlate their pains to your larger target audience.
- Share through a personal connection. Tell the story so that it triggers your own emotions. How does the story personally connect to you? Especially as founders of a startup, explain how you came up with the problem and solution. Finding your connection will help you passionately share and connect with your audience.
When you land on your product’s story, practice it over and over with different variations. Test what resonates with people and ask listeners what made the story compelling.
Continue to iterate and tweak your style until you have a story that fits.
Use the story to guide your marketing and branding efforts. Evangelize it throughout your organization, so people are drawn to the importance of your product’s launch.
Make products stand out through a compelling story that creates an emotional connection with your audience.
Exponential growth — the ‘AAARRR’ model
To leverage growth hacking for your product launch, follow the ‘AAARRR’ model. Let’s walk through each phase of the model.
- Awareness, making your product visible to your target market. Founder, an entrepreneurship magazine, created a competition where people could earn prizes for sharing news about their book on social media. They created a resources page with images and text for people to copy and paste and generated exposure that exceeded their goal by 4X.
- Acquisition is where a person becomes a customer. Hotmail, created a campaign, adding a single line with a link at the end of each email that read “PS: I love you. Get your free email at Hotmail.” Hotmail’s growth averaged 3,000 users a day and within seven months, it hit 2,000,000 users.
- Activation, getting consumers to act. Duolingo allowed new users to dive right into the language-learning activity, enabling usage without signing up. This growth hack kept the users engaged throughout the experience.
- Retention, or how many customers come back after their initial experience. A powerful growth hacking tool to encourage retention is a well-timed and personalized email. Amazon may be the best in this space, reminding users of the date they made a purchase that needs an upgrade.
- Revenue, you up the revenue made from your customers. The Dollar Shave makes a promise that’s attractive to their target market, razors that show up at your door each month for a dollar each. But on their site, they have a highly optimized landing page that offers a pricier value-added option, up-selling their offering.
- Referral, promoting your product to new customers through word of mouth. Dropbox gave users free storage in exchange for recommending their product to friends and family. Just over a year into the campaign, Dropbox obtained 2.8 million users directly from referral invites.
Utilize Meaningful Campaigns
Customers are busy, the market is crowded, and users don’t have the time to find your product or seek you out to solve a problem.
That’s why you need to go to meet customers, at their location of interest [e.g., on social media].
Nike has over 83 million followers around the world and is one of the top-followed brands on Instagram. This social media following raises brand awareness and leads to increased sales. Nike’s strategy is to add value to the conversations to amass an online community of athletes, influencers, and customers.
Nike invests in its community on social media because that’s where customers share their real-life stories. It’s an opportunity to connect with target customers in an authentic way that builds relationships with the brand.
Here are three tips to use for creating social media campaigns:
- Go to where your audience is. Acknowledge current technologies and meet your audience where they are. Don’t expect them to come to you.
- Find content that gets your community engaged. Nike incorporates campaigns that encourage people to get moving and share their stories using the “just do it” hashtag to encourage their community to commit to a crazy dream. Through this hashtag, customers engage with Nike by sharing stories, gaining access to products and rewards, and landing the opportunity to be showcased by Nike to the community.
- Make your content valuable so that customers want to share it. By creating content that is motivational and inspirational, Nike taps into what makes its community tick and share. Engage and activate your community to be an advocate for your brand through word of mouth.
Product marketing videos
72% of customers prefer to learn about a product through videos.
People find videos way more engaging, memorable, and worthy of sharing, than any other type of digital content out there.
Take these notes into mind when considering making a successful viral video:
- Get right to the point, and tell a good story. 20% of viewers will drop your video after ten seconds of watching, so make your introduction stand out, and address your customer’s needs and desires.
- Create catchy titles, and have SEO in mind. Use titles that resonate with people and keywords that are findable through search engines.
- Consider the time length of the video. For lower-end products, consider keeping your video between 15 and 60 seconds long. For higher-end products, a five- to 15-minute video campaign is best.
Many free or affordable online video creation tools will help you produce a professional-looking video. All-in-one video-producing tools such as Promo or Biteable are great resources.
Influencer marketing
If you have crossed the chasm and found your product market fit and growth via cheaper digital channels is slowing down, then you will need to use influencers to get your message across to the early and late majority segments, in a fashion that they do not become skeptical of your offering.
Influencers are people who have built up a large and engaged following through social media and their followers admire and respect their opinions. Influencers may have acquired their loyal followers due to their lifestyle, job, hobby, or stories they tell, meaning any brand has the potential to utilize influencer marketing for their product and target demographic.
Use influencer marketing to boost your product’s authenticity, build trust, drive engagement, and increase traffic and conversions.
- Set your influencer marketing goal, identify the right social channels, and find the right influencers to share your voice with.
- Then you find your influencers. Benchmark competitors and analyze their approach to influencer marketing.
Engaging case studies
A case study is your product-in-action story.
It identifies a problem, recommends solutions, implements action, and identifies factors that contributed to its success.
Case studies help your SEO and push doubting users to try your product out.
- Start by describing a problem and highlighting your solution in a way that resonates and connects with your market. Read this for a formula for developing case studies. Here is a good case study read as an example.
- Mention direct quotes from the customer. A satisfied customer telling their story is real and relatable. Make your stories emotional, this will better connect with prospective customers. The key is to ask questions that will help you uncover emotions.
- Highlight specific, relevant results. Mention metrics, data, and corresponding results that have alleviated pain points.
Step 5: Considerations After Launch
Continue to invest in growth
The work of a successful product launch doesn’t end with the launch.
Instead, it’s the opportunity to evaluate what is and isn’t working for your customers.
This gives you insights to continue building great experiences. Three post-launch activities will take the momentum from a great product launch, and keep it going beyond those early days.
- Understand your early adopters. Who are those first few customers who purchased your product?
- Engage with your customers’ conversations on social media. Have dedicated teams responding to customers through social media channels. Start by monitoring keywords related to your product, creating searches, and setting up automatic notifications when your company name or product name is used on different platforms. The conversations happening on social media can guide you in future product features or product launches.
- Ask your customers for reviews and ratings. Ratings and reviews provide social proof that your product is a worthy purchase. Set up an automatic system where every new customer is requested to leave a review.
Hold post-mortem project meetings
Always be looking for insights that help your team improve internal processes and increase customer satisfaction for future launches. Hold debrief or post mortem sessions. The post-mortem is a positive learning-focused meeting held with your team and stakeholders.
- Gather information through pre-meeting questionnaires. This questionnaire should focus on aspects of your product launch workflow. There are three main areas to cover. What worked so well you wouldn’t change a thing, and why? What didn’t work that you’d never do again, and why?
- Share an agenda so team members are aligned on how the meeting will be run. Set the tone creating an optimistic tone to the meeting. A sample meeting process would look like this: remind team members the goal is to make changes and improvements to the processes for the future. Give a brief synopsis of the product launch and lay the groundwork for what you and your stakeholders will be able to measure success and failure against. Recap outcomes. Were the customers happy? Did you exceed the budget or was the product launched on time? Spend the majority of the time on the team or stakeholder input. This is where you allow team members and stakeholders to speak up and share how they felt the product launch went. Make all team members feel comfortable sharing and allow everyone to speak up. Take notes throughout the meeting so the learning is captured and shared later. Then wrap up the conversation. Thank everyone and circulate the notes later on.
- Notes need to be action-oriented. The notes to be circulated need to be structured, and condensed and have actionable recommendations to inform the team and help them grow for the next projects.
A large share of new product launches will fail and the minority that succeeds must have an amazing launch plan. Whether you’re a product manager leading an established product or an entrepreneur launching a new business, you will need to develop a product strategy and get your message market fit right, for a successful launch.
There are five steps to consider when launching a product:
- Step 1: Considerations before launching a product
- Step 2: stakeholder management
- Step 3: Develop the launch strategy
- Step 4: “Growth-hack” it
- Step 5: Considerations after the product launch
