Product Launches
Intro to Product Launches
Product launches are critical events for businesses, and they can be the difference between success and failure.
Continuous Improvement vs. Big Launch Mentality: Which is Better for Product Marketing?This article is a great intro to product launches. It reviews the two high-level approaches: executing a big PR launch vs. continuous product improvement with small, incremental launches.
Big Product Launches
Big product launches require significant planning and resources, as they can make or break a company's reputation and revenue.
Co-ordination and Communication: The Secret to Great Product LaunchesJasmine shares a positioning exercise used by product and marketing teams at Intercom to ensure each product launch is executed with consistency across teams.
How Grading User Flows Helped us Launch a Delightful CMSProduct launches can be incredible complex. In the case of HubSpot's launch of their CMS product, 14 teams or departments were involved. In order to speed up the launch approval process, Jonathan and his team devised a way to grade the user journey in order to get get a cross-team view of the product's quality.
What to Do Pre-Launch
Pre-launch activities include market research, creating a launch plan, and building buzz through social media and influencer marketing.
Pre-mortems: How a Stripe Product Manager predicts & prevents problems before launchShreyas explains how a launch pre-mortem can be used to prevent major problems for important launches and initiatives. He includes: • Explain the concepts of Tigers, Paper Tigers, and Elephants to the team • An agenda for a 1-hour pre-mortem meeting • A Youtube walkthrough video where he fills out the document template
What to Do Post-Launch
Post-launch activities include monitoring customer feedback, analyzing sales data, and making necessary improvements to the product.
Launch is the BeginningJulie advocates for following through on product iteration post-launch. In particular, use product analytics and user feedback to assess which direction to take with each iteration.
- After product launches: how to complete the feedback loop
Greg explains what product marketing teams can do after a product launch: listen to the response, analyze the feedback, and ship continuous updates.
Continuous Small Launches
Continuous small launches can help businesses stay relevant and keep up with changing consumer preferences.
How To Launch A Product or Feature To Maximize GrowthBrian uses Superhuman as a case study to detail a very counter-intuitive approach to product launches: don't launch too broadly, because broader audiences might care less about your value proposition and produce less word-of-mouth. Instead, launch to smaller, targeted audiences.
Don't launchEric explains the pitfalls of launching a product before reaching product/market fit or understanding the right positioning for your product.
Product Launch Case Studies
Product launch case studies provide valuable insights into successful and unsuccessful launches, highlighting the importance of thorough planning and execution.
From 0 to $1B - Slack's Founder Shares Their Epic Launch StrategySlack iterated privately with a progressively larger set of companies until the product was performing well with strong feedback, before launching a traditional PR blitz. However, they stayed in "beta" for six months to encourage more user feedback and to learn how to scale within organizations.
