How can you avoid the risks of a delayed product launch?

2 Use agile methods

Agile methods are a set of principles and practices that enable you to deliver your product in small, frequent increments, rather than in one big release. This approach can help reduce risks, improve quality, and adapt to changing needs and feedback. Scrum is a framework that divides development into short cycles called sprints, where you plan, design, build, test, and review a working product increment. Kanban is a visual system that helps manage workflow, prioritize tasks, limit work in progress, and identify bottlenecks. User stories are a way of expressing product features from the perspective of users, focusing on their needs, problems, and benefits. Testing is a process that ensures your product meets quality standards and expectations of users, stakeholders, and the market. It can include unit testing, integration testing, user acceptance testing, and beta testing.

3 Communicate regularly

Communication is essential for any product development project, as it helps keep everyone informed, engaged, and on the same page regarding progress, challenges, and changes. This can include regular and structured meetings involving the team, stakeholders, and customers to discuss goals, plans, status, feedback, and issues. Additionally, online tools can be used to collaborate, share, and track product development activities like project management software, communication platforms, document sharing, and version control. Written documents summarizing key information, achievements, and learnings of the product development can also be used such as sprint reports, release notes, and post-launch reports.

4 Manage risks

Risks are any factors that can negatively affect your product development and launch, such as technical issues, resource constraints, market changes, or customer feedback. To manage risks effectively, you need to identify and list all potential risks that can impact your product development and launch, categorizing them by likelihood and severity. Then, analyze the causes, consequences, and implications of each risk to rank them by priority. After that, define and implement actions to prevent or reduce the impact of each risk such as contingency plans, backup solutions, or alternative strategies. Finally, monitor and review the status and outcome of each risk to update your actions and plans accordingly.

5 Learn from feedback

Feedback is essential for any product development, as it helps validate assumptions, understand users, and improve products. Feedback can come from customers, stakeholders, and the market. To learn from feedback, you need to collect it from various sources using surveys, interviews, reviews, analytics, or benchmarks. Then use qualitative and quantitative techniques to analyze the feedback for themes, patterns, metrics, or scores. Finally, use the feedback to inform and improve product development and launch decisions. This could include adding or removing features, fixing bugs, or adjusting marketing strategies.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?