100 questions to answer before launching your product

Launching a new product or a new service is not a rocket science, it is indispensable to realize in advance the why of the product and what are the number behind.

During the lifespan of the project many teams are involved in a company, instead, in the early stage start up just few change maker are doing all the job, but one thing companies and start ups have in common when it comes to release a new product: answer many questions.

What follows is a list of 100 questions that will surely be useful for covering each step of the life of a product, from vision to launch.

Planning

Vision & wonders

• What is the vision?
• What is the "right" name for it?
• How well does the business fit with your core competencies?
• What is the timeframe?
• What are the goals for the next 1-5 years?
• Is there a mentor or industry advisor that you can call on?
• Which risks will be taken?
• What assumptions have been made?
• How it is determined if the product is successful?
• What do we want our customer to do 30 days / 1 year after the purchase?
• What’s can go wrong? And how we can mitigate it?
• What of the new product can be used for improving other products?
• How will you track customer satisfaction?
• What happens if no one uses it?

Customer focus

• Who is the audience?
• What are your audience’s pain points?
• Does end user have a real pain or need for the product?
• How are your customers addressing this need today, however poorly?
• To what extent are your customers hurt by not being able to meet this need effectively?
• How are you uniquely addressing these pain points?
• Do you have customers you can leverage?

Competition & market

• Who are your competitors?
• How do you compare to them?
• How big is your total addressable market?
• Is my category growing or shrinking?
• Is my product in demand?
• Why should people do business with you rather than your competitors?
• Why are other customers not buying a similar product?
• What is the 20% of the product that 80% of the customers want?

Product Design

• What is the problem that you are trying to solve?
• What improvements could be made to your product or service to meet people's needs even better?
• What is your proposed solution (product, service, or combination)?
• How will your customers benefit?
• Can you quantify customers benefits?
• Who will be involved in defining your product?
• What characteristics will make it stand out from the crowd?
• What are the functional requirements of the product?
• What are the technical constraints?
• What external technologies are needed?
• What are the regulatory requirements or standards for your product?
• Is your product truly one of a kind?
• Can it be "modularized" in some way?
• What are the features of your product or service?
• What key features does my product or service have that others will have a hard time copying?
• How the UI design has been and will be validated?
• What resources do you already have, and what do you need to acquire?
• What are its assets and insufficiencies?
• From which data the product has been design?
• What standards to you have for the quality of this product?
• How can you involve customers in creating a superior solution?
• What are you willing to compromise to save costs?
• Is the product intuitive?
• Have you considered first-time-use?

Validation and testing the product

• What would it take to build a MVP minimum viable product to test the market?
• How soon can you build a minimum viable product?
• Do we pilot before widely marketing the offering? If so, what's the plan?
• Who are our "pilot" targets?
• Have you reached out to potential customers for feedback?

Marketing

• What is our go-to-market communication / marketing approach?
• What the online presence will look like?
• Have you developed messaging and positioning that resonates with your audience?
• Can you leverage product launch content across other channels?
• How are you going to follow up with the product launch?
• Are there credible testimonials?
• What is your maximum cost to acquire a new customer?
• What target keywords do you want to rank in Google?
• What image do people have of your brand vs your competitors'?
• How will you do your marketing and advertising?
• What results do you expect to see from your marketing and advertising efforts?
• How do you measure marketing investments?

Business

• What's the business model?
• Have you done a business/Wardley map?
• What is the estimated lifespan of the product?
• Do you have a strategic business plan?
• Where are you getting funding?
• What is your development cost?
• What is your research cost?
• What is your marketing cost?
• What are the cost constraints?
• Can the business generate sustainably high profits?
• How soon will you break even, or start generating profit?
• Can you get paying customers from your target market to pre-order based on a blueprint or mockup?
• What is the right price to charge?
• Is the customer price sensitive?
• What’s the minimum and maximum price that people are willing to pay for the product?
• How the price has been determined ?
• What are the sales/revenue projections for this new product?
• Do you think your customers will be repeat customers, steady customers, or just one-time customers?
• From where will your growth come from?
• What happens after the spike?

Sales

• What is your sales demographic?
• Who will sell the product? (Internal or external team?)
• Who will train your salespeople?
• Who will train your service technicians?
• Who will service your product? (Internal or external team?)
• Can you get prospects or paying customers even before launch?
• Do you have distributors or partners to help you scale your business?
• What will you charge, and why?
• How do people make purchase decisions in your space?
• Is it a free trial? A demo?