Crush Your Product Launch

Client challenges to a successful product launch can be varied and complex, depending on the specific market, product, and context. Here are some of the most common challenges:

1. Market Understanding:

Clients may struggle with understanding the target market's needs and preferences, which is critical for positioning the product effectively.

2. Competition Analysis:

Identifying and differentiating from competitors can be tough, especially in a crowded market. Clients need to clearly communicate why their product is the better choice.

3. Resource Allocation:

Effectively allocating resources such as budget, time, and personnel can be challenging. There's often a need to balance product development, marketing, sales, and customer support.

4. Marketing Strategy:

Developing a coherent marketing strategy that effectively reaches and persuades the target audience is a major challenge. This includes digital marketing, public relations, and promotional events.

5. Product Quality and Readiness:

Ensuring the product is fully functional and meets customer expectations upon launch is crucial. Technical issues or product shortcomings can undermine a launch.

6. Supply Chain Management:

Logistics and supply chain issues can delay or complicate a product launch, especially in industries dependent on timely deliveries of components or products.

7. Regulatory Compliance:

For many products, especially in health, finance, and technology sectors, navigating the complex regulatory landscape is necessary but challenging.

8. Stakeholder Alignment:

Ensuring all stakeholders, including internal teams and external partners, are aligned and committed to the launch goals can be difficult.

9. Customer Education and Onboarding:

Teaching potential users about the product’s benefits and how to use it effectively is essential for adoption but often overlooked.

10. Feedback and Adaptation:

Gathering and incorporating customer feedback quickly to iterate on the product or strategy post-launch can be daunting but is vital for long-term success.

Understanding these challenges can help in planning more effective product launch strategies and in providing better support to clients through the process.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

Successful product launch planning provides insight into market dynamics, operational efficiencies, team performance, and the product's overall value proposition, informing future decisions and strategies.

Impact and Result

A well-documented collaborative product launch plan that was done with methodical planning and execution transformed challenges into opportunities, setting a gold standard for future product launch planning within your company.

Crush Your Product Launch Research & Tools

1. Crush Your Product Launch Storyboard – Executive summary and phases to build and launch successfully.

Use this storyboard to enable your launch team to align organizational partners with a common approach to managing the product build and launch phases of a successful product process.

2. Crush Your Product Launch Workbook – Eliminate process gaps and ensure readiness for a successful product launch.

This workbook is designed to help marketers ensure launch readiness. It should be completed after reviewing the Crush Your Product Launch blueprint.

3. Crush Your Product Launch Executive Presentation – Summarize your launch plan to get approval.

Use this template to document your final strategy outputs, including executive-facing business decisions relating to alignment and launch activities

Crush Your Product Launch

Activities for Building a Lifecycle of Success

Analyst perspective

Strategies for a successful product launch

Joanne Morin Correia

Principal Director, Marketing
Info-Tech Research Group

Building an exceptional product is the first step to success. Product management and marketing must work together for customer acquisition, retention, and sustainable revenue growth. A detailed but practical product launch and execution plan is essential to a product marketing strategy and can make all the difference in a product launch.

Achieving a successful product launch requires thorough planning and unwavering attention to the intricacies of the process. This includes adhering to timelines and meeting sprint objectives as well as diligently following sales and marketing checklists. However, as the product moves into the market, the focus gradually shifts: the question isn’t about logistics anymore, but the reception and reputation of the impact of the product throughout its lifecycle. This change in focus leads us straight into the realm of product launch, lifetime metrics, and key performance indicators (KPIs).

Monitoring these indicators is crucial. It’s not just about aiming for a particular end goal; it’s essential to keep checking and ensuring you’re on the desired trajectory throughout the process. This approach ensures that everyone involved feels responsible for the product’s success or potential setbacks.

Not all product launches are equal

Pain Points

Launches are complex and require balancing the needs of multiple people, roles, and divisions into a cohesive plan. Bad launches hurt ROI and destroy confidence and reputations/brands.

Frequent unplanned releases
Limited budgets, time, and people
Changing market dynamics
Rapid shifts in customer preferences and competitors’ actions
Unpredictable customer response

Obstacles

Product launches face diverse organizational goals, resource constraints like budget and workforce, market shifts due to competition and regulation, technical issues like insufficient testing, and market reception challenges such as inadequate research and messaging mismatches.

Diverse goals and objectives
Budget limitations
Competitor movement
Insufficient testing
Inadequate market research

Info-Tech’s Approach

A successful product launch framework involves market research, product development, defining a unique value proposition, identifying the target audience, strategic planning, crafting a marketing strategy, allocating resources, building prelaunch hype, executing the launch, and conducting postlaunch analysis for continuous improvement.

Customer and competitive landscape
Product addresses market needs.
Measurable goals and key performance indicators
Launch plan covering product, packaging, pricing, and promotion

Info-Tech Insight

A successful launch begins with the first day of planning. By understanding the activities by department, setting timelines, and planning your launch in tiers, you lay the groundwork for continual growth and robust brand establishment.

What is a successful product launch strategy?

A Good Product Launch Plan Is:

A well-thought-out product launch plan is a comprehensive yet flexible roadmap that aligns with a company’s broader objectives while ensuring the product meets the target market’s needs. It is a dynamic blueprint that paves the way for long-term success.

Strategic: Sets clear launch goals in line with company objectives.
Inclusive: Involves key departments early for a unified approach.
Detailed: Outlines each step needed before and after launch.
Flexible: Plans must accommodate unexpected issues.
Customer-centric: Focuses on fulfilling market needs.
Metrics-driven: Uses KPIs for evaluation and improvement.
Budget-conscious: Manages launch funds for optimal ROI.

A Product Launch Plan Is NOT:

Superficial, inflexible, or a vague scheme that operates in a vacuum or aims only for immediate gains. Rather than being static and disconnected from a company’s strategic vision, it should recognize the market’s demands and the importance of setting the stage for sustained achievement.

Rigid: Flexibility is crucial; a plan must adapt.
Isolated: Collaboration across teams is essential.
Assumptive: Decisions should be data-driven.
Short-term: Plan for ongoing success beyond launch.
Overly complex: Keep it clear to avoid confusion.
Vague: Define goals and responsibilities precisely.

Overcoming product launch challenges

The symptoms outlined for a product launch can relate to several underlying problems:

Category	Problem	Impact
Alignment with stakeholders	Miscommunication or conflicting priorities among stakeholders (like investors, management, development teams.)	A misaligned team can result in delays, wasted resources, and a product not meeting market or customer needs.
Resource constraints	Limited budget, time, personnel, or other resources.	Insufficient resources can lead to a subpar product, missed deadlines, and an inability to launch successfully.
Changing market dynamics	Insufficient resources can lead to a subpar product, missed deadlines, and an inability to compete.	The product may need to meet the current needs or expectations of the market, leading to poor results.
Technical glitches	Bugs or other technical problems not caught during the development phases.	Technical problems can tarnish the company’s reputation, incur additional costs for fixes, and diminished returns.
Market reception	Unpredictable customer response, poor reviews, or lack of market.	If the market does not receive the product well, it could lead to low sales figures and negative brand association.

The image was created using an AI model from OpenAI’s DALL-E, which generates images from textual descriptions, with the text in the table to the left as input.

Info-Tech Insight

To mitigate these problems, companies need a robust product launch strategy that includes comprehensive communication plans, flexible resource allocation, responsive market analysis mechanisms, thorough testing protocols, and proactive marketing and customer engagement efforts

Balance product launches with tiering to outperform the market

McKinsey’s research found that companies that launched four or more businesses “in the past ten years were upward of twice as likely to generate five or more times the ROI compared to less seasoned business builders.”
“Importantly, these serial business builders continue to devote sufficient resources to their core while successfully launching and scaling adjacent and breakout ventures.”
Growth begins with the current or core product. McKinsey found that “high-performers focus on ‘innovating new’ in their core business as much or more as they do on ‘scaling old.’ The key is to do both.”

Source: “Courageous Growth: Six Strategies for Continuous Growth
Outperformance, Growth, Marketing & Sales Practice.”
McKinsey and Company, 23 Oct. 2023.

80% of growth is from your core product

Share of total growth, 2019-2021. Bar graph shows growth from core business and growth from adjacent and new business building.

A winning launch: 12-month prep for go live

Impact on Company Resources versus Key Marking Activity Focus. In 1-2 months plan launch, in 2-3 months drive internal awareness, in 4-9 generate partner & customer awareness, and in 4-12 months drive market awareness launch date press release.

A successful product launch plan gives insight into market dynamics, operational efficiencies, team performance, and the product’s overall value proposition, informing future decisions and strategies.

A crowd gathers to witness a product unveiling, caption reads: You only get one chance to make a firmpression

The image was created using an AI model from OpenAI’s DALL-E, which generates images from textual descriptions. The AI was asked to make an image of a product launch inspired by the below.

“A successful product launch determines what that first impression is for large swaths of potential buyers and decision-makers.”

Source: Ultimate Guide to Product Launch 2023, Product Plan

Tier your launches to properly align your activities

Launch Tiers. Lower tiers are less frequent, but require more resources. Higher tiers are more frequent but require fewer resources.

Each tier follows a unique planning horizon, demand creation profile, and marketing investment to ensure effective innovation management. The innovation framework includes five tiers, each serving a distinct purpose in the product lifecycle:

Tier 1 focuses on significant innovation bets and offerings, aligning with market creation objectives, and follows a biannual release cadence.
Tier 2 involves add-on innovations, with a 60-90-day release cadence and a marketing investment.
In Tier 3, changes to innovation occur through continuous delivery of minor features, with a release cadence and marketing investment similar to Tier 2.
In Tier 4, incremental enhancements are made through continuous delivery, with no market-facing release.
Tier 5 represents end-of-life, focusing on time-limited delivery with minimal marketing investment.

Post-launch growth: Refine, scale, and monetize

Have a plan for the next steps after launching your product, such as incorporating user feedback, adding new features, and scaling your product. It would be best if you had a plan for further development and growth. This may include incorporating user feedback. Use the feedback collected from your initial product launch to refine and improve your product.

Adding new features: Develop a roadmap for adding additional features and functionality based on user needs and feedback. Discuss What? Don’t Include Features in Your Product Roadmap?

Scaling your product: Plan how to scale your product to accommodate a growing user base and increased demand. Read Deliver Digital Products at Scale.

Establishing a revenue model: Determine how your product will generate revenue and implement a suitable pricing strategy, including up-selling across product portfolios. Review Optimize Your Pricing.

Continued marketing and promotion: Develop a long-term marketing strategy to create more awareness, including press and analyst relations.

“Product launches play a pivotal role in a product’s success or failure.

As they say, you only get one chance to make a first impression. A successful product launch determines what that first impression is for large swaths of potential buyers and decision-makers.”

Source: Ultimate Guide to Product Launch , Product Plan, productplan.com

Info-Tech’s methodology for Crush Your Product Launch

Phase Steps

1. Framework for Launch Success

1.1 Identify key individuals critical to success

1.2 Determine departmental roles and responsibility

1.3 Update your project classifications for each tier

1.4 Determine launch tier level for this project

2. Update Launch Checklist

2.1 Define launch activities based on tier

2.2 Document activities checklists & timelines

2.3 Outline resources, budgets metrics, and deadlines

2.4 Present to executive to finalize plan

Phase Outcomes

Innovation classification system: Establishes a project value to categorize innovations by tier and impact, differentiating between major updates and minor enhancements.
Engagement framework: Uses a departmental activities model to identify key individuals and align their roles with the company’s objectives.

Project plan document: A detailed plan covering activities, departmental roles, resource allocation, and timelines.
Executive approval: A presentation summarizing the project for executive endorsement.