Your guide to a successful launch

Launch checklist: A guide to launching new products and digital experiences

In order for your product and its latest features to be successful, you need to promote them. And this promotion usually starts with some sort of launch.

Like many things in product management,?launches ?have evolved in the last several years. Instead of releasing products every six months, the rise of Agile methodologies and continuous delivery practices has enabled research and development (R&D) teams to shorten their software delivery cycles. They now release new functionality every few weeks, with small product changes even happening daily.

This means launches are more frequent, and vary in size. So, product managers (and their partners in product marketing) must scale launches to the size of what they’re releasing. Is it a small update to a feature that only a subset of your user base consistently uses? Is it groundbreaking functionality that every user should know about? These are the types of questions you’ll want to ask as you solidify your plans.

Since there’s so much that goes into a product or feature launch, we’ve outlined a checklist of considerations and steps to take, broken down into four different categories.?

(Note:?This checklist assumes you’ve already gone through phases of the?Product Management Life Cycle ?like discovery and validation, and you’re ready to plan how to bring new functionality to market.)

1. Details to document

Since launches are such a cross-functional effort, you’ll want to document key information that other teams like marketing, sales, and customer success can reference. After all, you as the product manager know the ins and outs of what you’re releasing the best.

What you’re releasing:?This should include a description of the new product or feature, key messaging and value props, and any details on pricing and packaging.?Pendo pro tip:?If you create a?Pendo Dashboard ?to measure the success of the launch, you can include a Text Block widget with this information so anyone viewing the dashboard has the context they need.

Target audience:?Who is this new functionality for? Chances are what you’re releasing won’t be relevant to your entire user base (though this of course is the case sometimes). Document your target audience—whether it’s users with a certain job title, permissions level, job to be done, or otherwise.

Goals:?You’ll also want to detail the goals and objectives for the launch. Beyond driving adoption, what other outcomes are you looking to achieve? Are you trying to drive cross-sells, upsells, or free trial conversions? Increase customer retention? These goals should be measurable and ideally, aligned to a larger business objective.

Release plan:?Note any plans for a limited release, and whom you’ll be rolling out the new functionality to first. Which users will get access at the outset? Are you doing any beta testing?

Continue reading

The 3 elements of a successful product or feature launch

For?product-led ?companies, a product or feature launch isn’t just a celebratory occasion for the product team who conceptualized and built the new functionality. It’s an opportunity for teams across the organization—from marketing, to sales, to customer success—to come together around the launch and ensure users know about (and are able to get the most out of) what’s new in the product.

A marketing team, for example, is likely focused on education—users need to understand what problem this new product or feature solves, the value it will bring them, and how it works. And customer success managers (CSMs) need to be able to effectively communicate the latest product capabilities during customer check-ins or through targeted in-app communication.

Before we dive into more tactics and best practices around launches, it’s important to understand how advancements in technology have shaped the modern product or feature launch.

Continue reading

Why product experience software should be the foundation of your feature launch strategy

Despite what the term “feature launch ” may imply, your strategy for launching a new feature isn’t something you should only be thinking about in the lead-up to go-live. Any plan for how you bring a new feature to market should begin well before launch (even before you start building it), and should help shape every stage of the journey—from research and development to marketing and adoption.

Creating a clearly defined launch strategy—and sticking to it—can determine whether your new feature sinks or swims. And when a successful release relies on the actions of many different teams, having a coordinated and data-informed plan is crucial, particularly at scale. The good news? Aligning your entire organization around and informing your go-to-market motions with a unified?product experience (PX) ?solution can help.

With PX software, enterprise and large-scale organizations can:

• Become more data-driven—to ensure they’re building the right features in the first place
• Prepare and guide their users through change—to ensure the right people see and try the feature
• Drive steady usage—to encourage feature adoption and improve customer retention
• Gather usage data and feedback—to continually iterate on and improve the feature?

Let’s take a closer look at how PX software helps teams build and execute the best feature launch strategy possible—setting their products up for success.

Continue reading