Crush Your Product Launch
Make tough decisions when it comes to your products.
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
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 PointsLaunches 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.
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ObstaclesProduct 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.
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Info-Tech’s ApproachA 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.
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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
A winning launch: 12-month prep for go live
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.
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
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 Success1.1 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 Checklist2.1 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 |
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About Info-Tech
Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.
We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.
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A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.
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Guided Implementation 1: Framework for Launch Success
- Call 1: Review product launch blueprint.
- Call 2: Build tiering classifications.
- Call 3: Determine product innovation to tier.
- Call 4: Define launch activities based on tier.
Guided Implementation 2: Update Launch Checklist
- Call 1: Review launch activities by dept/role model.
- Call 2: Determine resources, metrics, and timelines.
- Call 3: Review executive presentation.
- Call 4: Post-executive review.