Planning Your Product Launch
Microsoft must have thought it had something in Zune that could contest favorably well against the iPod in 2006. Google probably also felt the same way as regards its social network that launched in 2011, targeted to rival Facebook. Neither of the two products was able to withstand the competition for long.
Stories abound of products that companies dreamed of becoming something big but ended up flopping. Going by estimates, up to roughly 50 percent of new launches fail. Thankfully, there are steps we can take to ensure that our product doesn’t add to the undesirable statistic. Successful product managers have used such to great effects to get their launches right. We share some of the vital ones in this piece.
Have a Vision
What are we hoping to achieve by building a product? What direction is it headed and how do we get there? These are critical questions we must first answer before launching anything.
It means that we need to develop a solid product vision. This charts the course for the product, showing where we intend it to be over time. What do we expect to become some years from now? We can’t simply build and ship just for the sake of doing so.
Our product vision influences our goals which, in turn, provide the basis for assessing what features to work on. It helps to promote proper alignment with all relevant stakeholders in the organization.
Target the Right Market
Going back to the Zune and Google+ examples; it must have seemed to Microsoft and Google respectively that a market exists for those products. They were right. But what the companies didn’t quite get right was whether their products were right for the market.
Those products flopped mainly because they were “me too” products. The success of another product was more or less the immediate reason for their creation. Microsoft reportedly admitted that it simply created Zune just to take some of the market from the iPod.
We cannot afford to be chasing the competition blindly. It is important to do our research to confirm the product we have in mind is a worthy one.
Don’t Lose Sight of the Problem
It’s not sustainable having a product that only offers shiny new features. What makes a product a winner is its ability to meet the needs of the user. For instance, the looks of a car don’t count for much, if anything, if it cannot help us move from one place to another.
Our attention should be less on building features but on solving problems. What are the pain points of the customer? How can we ease those? Apple did this brilliantly with the iPod slogan, “1000 songs in your pocket”. Forget about the tech, this is an elegant statement of the value and that’s all customers needed to hear.
It’s been observed that a major reason startups fail is running out of resources. This is sometimes the result of building shiny or gorgeous features rather than solving critical problems. We shouldn’t follow the same path. Rather, we want to take our time to understand the key problem. This should be a problem that the customer so much needs to solve that they wouldn’t mind paying.
We don’t want to solve a problem that doesn’t exist or matter. And it is only when we have a good understanding of the problem that we can know what the right solution should be.
Drop The Assumptions
We can’t afford to rely on guesses when launching a product. This remains true even if it’s not our first time successfully building and shipping something. We just cannot afford to assume that we know.
We must go out there and talk to the customer. We need to do this to be better sure of what ideas are more likely to fly or not. For new product launches, we have to both interact with our target market and observe their current processes. This is how we can know what resonates (more) with our prospects.
Make Overall Customer Experience Enjoyable
Some products fail due to poor execution that impacts adversely on user experience. Windows Vista may be used as an example of what could happen when we provide a poor customer experience. Users became so frustrated with that version of Microsoft’s famous operating system that they preferred having older versions instead.
It is useful for us to take a step back to carefully assess what user experience would be like and see how we can make it better. This isn’t limited to just how customers feel when interacting with our product. It also embraces every step of the customer journey, including interactions with our team. Improving customer experience is doing everything that can help to simplify and enhance the customer journey.
Don’t Delay
AT&T’s Picturephone offers us a lesson in not putting off new product launches for too long. The company spent years researching and “perfecting” the product, hoping to have a winner. But a lack of interest by customers forced AT&T to pull the Picturephone off the market after it was launched (and re-launched).
A lesson for us here is that we should not spend too much time trying to build a perfect product. After talking to customers, we can quickly build prototypes to put before them for feedback. We can then go ahead to create a minimum viable product (MVP) and launch.
Making our product available to real users early enough helps to build our knowledge of the market. It affords us valid feedback that keeps us from working with unproven assumptions of what’s needed.
