Product Launches

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.

Jasmine shares a Positioning exercise used by product and marketing teams at Intercom to ensure each product launch is executed with consistency across teams.

Product 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.

Shreyas 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

Julie 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.

Greg explains what product marketing teams can do after a product launch: listen to the response, analyze the feedback, and ship continuous updates.

Brian 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.

Eric advises startups not to synchronize their marketing launch and product launch, as doing so early is often a bad idea. A marketing launch establishes Positioning, which companies need time to figure out correctly. It also raises expectations that the product must fulfill. Instead, companies should focus on product iteration and renewable customer acquisition before considering a marketing launch. A strategic launch requires understanding growth drivers and targets. It should not be done out of anxiety, ego or fear, but because it strategically solves business problems. Overall, the advice is to delay launch until the product and strategy are proven rather than rushing into a potentially damaging publicity stunt.

Slack 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.