Is your product ready to launch in the market?
When you are ready for the product launch, you know who will handle it, what it means, and when the product launch will happen.
It is crucial to strategize a successful launch strategy for your product by understanding the processes involved in the product launch, which makes it easy. A product launch with a full-proof launch strategy implementation can build product anticipation and market awareness, generate revenue, and ensure a customer-friendly product launch. Also, you get early-customers feedback, which is a great benefit in improving the product in the early-launch phase itself.
But, creating a successful product launch needs proper coordination and planning across all the departments in a company. As the product launch process is very complex and requires strategic understanding, this article helps you understand the three pillars of product launch – who, what, and when.
What Is A Product Launch?
A product launch requires a documented plan of activities, ideas, and processes a company implements to release its product into the market.
It starts with spending a lot of time and resources on market research, competitor analysis, and prospecting customer segments to determine the customer pain points and values to be delivered by the product. Then, you have to craft a generic product launch roadmap, followed by various processes – prototyping, beta testing, building, iterating, and improvising.
These processes have different timelines and require various departments to invest the resources to build the final product in the desired outcome. To do so, the product team requires a product launch plan, which describes the commercial goals of the product launch, and includes the communication and promotion plan of the product launch.
You must understand different product launch elements crafted from successful product launches in the past.
What is your business intent?
The customers must understand your business intent to connect with your product offerings easily. During the phase of developing and designing the product marketing strategies, you need to incorporate actionable insights into the launch plan, aligning with your business goals.
Who is your target audience?
With an ocean of potential target customers willing to buy a product, why do you think they need your product?
Here, you must identify your target customers and their pain points, which can get resolved through your product offerings. Once you detail the customer categories, you need to incorporate the analysis into your product launch plan, to improvise the customer needs in the product launch.
After this, it requires testing your product’s effectiveness and viability through customer feedback and reviews.
Did you prepare the Jobs-to-be-done framework?
While performing target customer research, the purpose of the product launch must be customer-focused. Your jobs-to-be-done framework should involve all the customer personas, their feedback, and improvements done on those feedbacks. It helps you align the product launch with the jobs that the customers want to accomplish through your product. Such an important step makes the “product for the customer” rather than a “product for the company”.
Do you know your competitors?
In this competitive business environment, you must know that a poor product launch can ruin the best product offering. The different brands competing in the market serve the same product offerings to their target customers, which is why you need to perform competitor analysis before launching your product. You must bring up your product’s USP and competitive advantage clearly in front of your customers.
Have you conducted testing?
This step provides you with an innovative opportunity to test your product on your actual target customers during the early stages of product launch.
Where should you announce your product launch?
It is an easy step if you know where your target customers are active the most. It can be through social media – Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter, etc., or through some dedicated product launch platforms, which ensure your product launch reaches the right audience at the right time. You can also do press releases and offline seminars in the tech parks, which provide good audience interaction.
Who Is Involved In The Product Launch?
The product managers of a company handle the product launching and management tasks by creating, supervising, and implementing the product launching processes.
Usually, to create a product launch plan, the product manager involves and aligns with various departments, at a bare minimum, sales support, engineering, customer success, marketing, and development. Moreover, the product launching exercise happens at the intersection of marketing and product development teams.
When To Schedule A Product Launch?
Your product launch timeline can shrink or extend depending upon the product type and size. The schedule of the product launch is dependent upon the product requirements and customer expectations from the product launch.
The product launch tasks and processes can be divided into different timelines, depending on the time and resources needed, into different timelines – four months, three months, four weeks, and one week to launch.
This approach provides easy goal targets, which product managers abide by, and allows you to implement customer-feedback improvements post-product launch.
Final Thoughts
While planning your product launch, neither you need to follow your gut feeling nor get entangled with the fear of failure. You must follow a well-documented product launch plan with the above-enlisted elements and through proper market research.
This article helps you understand the processes involved in a product launch plan, and you get some valuable insights to revamp your product strategies.
Author’s Bio:
Kriti Saraiya is a blogger and journalism student and writes on technology and health related topics. She has good experience across technology, consulting and marketing. She has written for Thrv – Jobs to be done.