What is a Product Launch? Strategy, Tools

Learn about best practices and tactics for launching a product to elevate your launch.

A company's concerted attempt to introduce new or updated items to the market is known as a product launch. Product launches that are well-thought-out and executed make an announcement to the world after creating significant buzz. To guarantee that the entire company is united in its approach to supporting the new product, they also synchronize members of a product team with other divisions.

A comprehensive product launch involves a significant time and manpower investment. Product-focused businesses, however, will find that these obligations are worthwhile. A new product can draw in the proper kind of clients with a great launch. As a result, a corporation might see a quicker return on their investment in the product's creation and accelerate the rate of product uptake.

Key takeaways

• A product launch is the process a company undertakes to bring its new or updated products to market.
• Tips for building a successful product launch include:
  • Focusing on the customer experience
  • Using your product data to inform strategy
  • Creating a product launch checklist
  • Launching early and tweaking as you go
• The success of a product launch can be measured quantitatively through tracking KPIs and qualitatively through internal and external feedback.

What is a product launch?

Posting "We're open!" on social media is not enough to describe a launch. It takes a committed effort to finish the product well in advance of the deadline and to properly promote it through various media. It's a big project that needs cooperation from a lot of different teams and departments inside an organization.

63% of consumers find it enjoyable when businesses release new goods. It's common for customers to be more enthusiastic and involved with a new item. It's easy to lose out on grabbing your target audience at the height of their attention when a fantastic product is released without first ensuring that the world is ready for its arrival.

A launch can be divided into three stages:

1. Planning

Product teams define objectives, investigate their target market and rivals, coordinate expectations, and devise a marketing plan during this phase. Along with closely collaborating with product development, the launch team also sets a schedule for the product's introduction and determines its most marketable features.

2. Execution

This is the time frame in which the product is officially made available. This covers both the actual release day and the ensuing marketing campaigns to keep the buzz going for the next few weeks. Product and marketing data are gathered during this period, which will ultimately be used to assess the launch's performance.

3. Analysis

The product will eventually move from the "launch" stage of its life cycle to the "growth" stage, at which point marketing efforts will cease. Product teams evaluate if KPIs and other objectives were accomplished as a consequence of the launch by comparing data gathered throughout the release window.

Tips for building a successful product launch strategy

Because every product is different, there are special problems associated with each launch. Even a new edition of an established product will need to follow a different plan than when it was first introduced. Having said that, in order to lay a solid basis for their product launches, businesses need adhere to a few best practices with each strategy they employ:

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1. Focus on the customer experience

Before generating ideas for a new product, the majority of productive teams conduct product discovery. This procedure compels businesses to consider the initial purpose of their new product and determine the issue that it addresses for prospective clients.

The following inquiries for potential customers should be addressed by your product launch team:

• Why customers use the type of product you’re building
• The specific pain points your product addresses
• What your product does better than any other

The investigation is necessary to fully grasp these ideas. First, you ought to conduct market research to get input from your clientele. This gives you the opportunity to question customers directly about the things they're most looking forward to or about problems they've had with comparable goods in the past.

2. Use your product data to inform strategy

Important product data from beta testing provides insight into how users interact with your product. Businesses can utilize a data analytics tool such as Amplitude to examine the data generated by beta testers and develop a strategy for the next product launch.

For example, a cursory look at the data from your beta test indicates that your e-commerce product's "recommendations" function is heavily utilized. Additionally, beta testers who make use of this feature are more likely to remain interested in your product than those who do not. It would make sense to emphasize the suggestions feature strongly in your marketing strategy in order to draw in clients who are more likely to engage right away.

3. Create a product launch checklist

Beta testing generates insightful product data that illuminates customer behavior with your product. In order to create a product strategy for the impending product launch, firms can utilize data analytics tools such as Amplitude to examine the data generated by beta testers.

An examination of beta testing data, for example, indicates that your e-commerce product's "recommendations" feature is heavily utilized. Furthermore, compared to testers who do not use this function, those who do stay more involved with your product. To get clients who are more likely to engage right away, it would make sense for your marketing messaging to place a lot of emphasis on the suggestions function. A running checklist is a crucial component of every launch of a new product. During product launches, teams from marketing, sales, and other departments collaborate to achieve a shared objective. With a constantly evolving to-do list, even the most well-organized manager or team lead may find it difficult to stay focused on what has to be done.

It's important to make sure that nothing gets overlooked as the launch date approaches by maintaining an ongoing list of all necessary tasks. It is best to cross things off as they are finished or add new ones when problems or new ideas come up. It's a good idea to arrange tasks according to their kind or the teams who are in charge of completing them.

While lists differ from company to company and launch to launch, typical action elements on checklists are as follows:

• ☑ Creating a product launch timetable
• ☑ Identifying relevant KPIs
• ☑ Defining your target audience
• ☑ Choosing distribution channels
• ☑ Crafting marketing messaging
• ☑ Aligning internal teams, including sales, IT, and customer support

4. Launch early and tweak as you go

As soon as the essential functions of your product have been fully tested, you should release it. Customers will use your product more quickly if you can collect and analyze their useful behavioral data sooner. This will help you with feature development, onboarding processes, and churn point identification.

Customers cannot use your product every day it is under development. Your potential clients are growing disinterested or switching to competitors while you're taking many months to polish a non-essential feature. If you provide a beta version of your main product, you can win over early adopters who will support your product as you improve it.nch to launch, but typical action items consist of:

What to expect from a product launch

The first product launch for a firm is frequently the most challenging. Teams just don't have the experience, which makes creating and carrying out a launch plan particularly difficult.

While a product is still being developed, launch planning is started. This implies that elements you want to use in your messaging can shift significantly or perhaps vanish entirely. Moreover, delays in the development process have the potential to significantly alter the delivery schedule.

Pre-planned product launches are the most flexible. Testing, cooperation, and development are frequently iterative processes. During the launch process, business leadership may decide to alter the marketing strategy. Rigid plans may be derailed by these adjustments and delays. Granted that just 55 percent of product launches are completed on time, it is imperative that you allow extra time for launch tasks.

Even the formal public introduction of your new product takes more than a day, but the launch process takes several months. Since information frequently takes time to disseminate, marketing initiatives like social media posts and email campaigns shouldn't be concentrated on "just" the day your product is published. Launch teams should instead concentrate on creating anticipation for the launch and keeping things moving in the days and weeks that follow the formal launch date.

How to measure product launch success

It's likely that your latest product launch won't be your final one. By analyzing the positives and negatives of a release, it becomes even more important to optimize future releases for success. The following actions can help accomplish this:

1. Define relevant KPIs

It is important to determine the parameters of a successful product launch before it happens. Different products in different marketplaces probably have different definitions of success. An e-commerce website, for example, might be thinking about a new revenue target. As an alternative, if a specific proportion of clients finish a second order, they can consider a launch to be successful.

Choosing a few pertinent KPIs to monitor in addition to a North Star Metric can help provide a comprehensive report on the success of your launch. These KPIs ought to accurately reflect your ultimate objectives. They must also be quantifiable. Typical KPIs for new product launches include:

• Web traffic
• Revenue gained
• Leads generated
• Customer usage and retention
• Trial subscribers signed up

You can determine whether your marketing met or surpassed expectations by calculating your KPIs. Examining data sets beyond those that are directly related to profit and loss is crucial, though. Your more comprehensive launch data collection can turn up unexpected information that later informs better marketing strategies or the creation of new features.

2. Tracking and analyzing data

A successful launch is probably going to produce a lot of data. To find out how well your KPI targets align with reality, you'll need to sort and evaluate marketing data from your website and behavioral data from your product. To focus on outcomes unique to the launch, this should be completed after the launch.

3. Gathering feedback

Quantity is the main emphasis of many product metrics, such as the number of things sold or users onboarded. Directly asking clients for feedback helps you gauge how well your messaging and goods were received. Typically, customer feedback is obtained by:

• Customer interviews
• Focus groups
• Surveys

Assessing the success of the product launch within your organization is also crucial. It's possible that other teams have found issues with the implementation of internal procedures that your team was unaware of. Furthermore, it's possible that during the product launch, divisions like IT or customer service meaningfully interacted with consumers. They might possess distinct perspectives on problems or worries that surfaced from the initiation of support tickets or direct client inquiries.

Tools for a successful new product launch

With the incorrect tools, it's difficult to produce anything worthwhile, and the same applies to product launches. Fortunately, there are many of solutions available in the digital product space to assist you in managing and perfecting even the most intricate product launch strategy.

Amplitude

It's simple to underestimate the strategic advantage of having an analytics tool like Amplitude at your disposal while organizing a product tour. Product and marketing data accessibility is critical for businesses that want to set objectives, examine consumer behavior, and gauge launch success.

For data management, several teams within an organization frequently employ department-specific software. As a result, the teams they are attempting to work with are unable to access the siloed data, which is a major issue for a project as large as a product launch. The simplest technique to combine multiple data sources into a single tool that even personnel who are not very tech-savvy can use is amplitude.

Amplification can:

• Unify data from your product, website, and other sources under a single umbrella
• Review beta testing data to see what features customers enjoy
• A/B test onboarding workflows to increase the likelihood of product adoption

Productboard

Productboard is a customer-focused product management platform that enables teams to expedite the launch of the most suitable goods. With Productboard, you can dynamically prioritize features for your roadmaps and create visually appealing roadmaps. Additionally, they have the ability to gather and arrange market input and supporting data to link to the features on the roadmaps.

Thanks to Amplitude's new integration with Productboard, users of Productboard can now filter customer feedback based on cohorts that have been built within Amplitude and organize the insights into themes that can help prioritize features and develop a product roadmap. When new features are released, product managers will be better able to decide what to construct and who it will affect. Find out more about the integration with Productboard.

Product Hunt

A website called Product Hunt was created especially to help with product launches. Businesses post about their new items to generate excitement before they debut. Products that users find particularly interesting or helpful receive upvotes from other users, which raises their ranking. The top-ranked products are featured as some of the day's most popular items on the home page.

The audience on Product Hunt is made up of investors, well-known product managers, and promoters who can support and publicize your idea through their own networks. Although it takes careful planning to pull off a successful Product Hunt launch, firms like Hotjar, Slack, and Trello have benefited from being featured as the "Product of the Day."

Trello

Speaking of Trello, when your team members get ready for the launch of your next product, they'll need a way to remain organized. Teams may make project boards in the Kanban method with Trello, an app. For particular tasks, collaborators can make cards and categorize them into groups like "Pre-Launch," "Launch," and "Post-Launch." Members of the Trello board can be given these jobs to do, and then mark each card as "completed" after the task is done.