The Strategic Product Launch

Playbook
A massive 5-step guide to successful new product
launches
Nima Torabi

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Photo by SpaceX on Unsplash

A large share of new product launches will fail and the minority that
succeeds must have an amazing launch plan. Whether you’re a product
manager leading an established product or an entrepreneur launching a
new business, you will need to develop a product strategy and get your
message market fit right for a successful launch.
Step 1: Considerations Before Launching a
Product
Use problem statements as a guiding star
Every successful product aims to solve a problem and each product will
have a unique problem statement. The problem statement is a clear and
concise description of the problem and fills in the blank between what
should be happening (situation to-be) and what is actually happening
(situation as-is). The problem statement is something that you can refer
to throughout a product’s journey starting with the design and
development all the way to introducing it to the market.

Make sure you spend time with all your team members to outline the best
problem statements that everyone is committed to. This will help your
team focus, stay on track, and ground you and your team in goal setting,
strategies, planning, execution, and assessment of the product launch
plan. A simple formula to a problem statement could be the following:

‘X target users’ need a way to do ‘Y-needs’ shown by the ‘Z-insight’

For Uber, that may look something like this:

‘San Francisco commuters’ — need a way to ‘get from point A to point B’

because ‘taxi cabs are too scarce to hail and too slow to respond’.

Target the right audience

For successful product development and launch, you need to discover
your target customers, understand their needs, and know how to
communicate with them. Go beyond the run of the mill demographics
and personas and use the jobs-to-be-done framework by Clayton
Christensen, as a compass to hone in on your target market and their
needs. Follow these steps to define your target market, craft the right
messaging, and connect with customers on a deeper level:
Customer Development: a product manager’s top
priority
A guide to customer discovery, validation, creation, and
building G

uxdesign.cc

Identify a job-to-be-done as an action verb followed by the

object of the action and the clarifying context. For iPod, that may
be listen to music while working out. Ask your customers questions
to gain insights. With the iPod, you might ask, when listening to
music while working out, how do you struggle to get the job done?
For example, they may have difficulty running while carrying a bulky
Walkman or battle boredom with the same 12 songs playing on the
CD.
Go beyond the functional jobs-to-be-done and determine if the
customer has emotional or social jobs-to-be-done as well. Ask
questions like, how do you want to achieve your workouts? The
customer may respond with an insight like they want to feel
motivated to push themselves harder.
Focus on how to message your product as solving the
customer’s job. To do this, it’s important you don’t focus
messaging on the features of your product and instead use the jobs-
to-be-done lens to focus on your product’s position in the
customers’ minds. When Apple first released the iPod, they used the
catchphrase, “1,000 songs in your pocket.” They did not focus
messaging around a feature, such as the device’s ability to store five
gigabytes of music. Instead, they translated the storage size into the
number of songs stored. A message that resonated with the
customers’ job described earlier.

Jobs-to-Be-Done by Prof. Clayton Christensen

Validate your product market fit

Product market fit will drive the success of your offering. Test your
customers’ motivations, desires, needs, and figure out how to
communicate with them before launching a product.

A great way to validate your product market fit prior to launch is to

create a landing page. Develop a page with a single and focused call to
action. Your call to action may be a web form to collect data, like names
and email addresses, or it may be a simple button you press to purchase
something.

Test multiple variations of the landing page and see what sticks with
users (A/B testing) while gathering data and customer feedback along
the way. Don’t wait until the product launch date to validate your
product/market fit. This will help you and your team to go beyond
opinions and identify what strategies and messages resonate with your
customers because, in the end, data always beats opinions.

Planning for product-market fit before launch

A five step framework to planning for product-market fit

uxdesign.cc

Track performance with metrics

A product leader can get fixated on daily tasks and lose sight of what’s
really important — achieving business goals. If product teams do not
identify goals early on and set metrics for what success looks like,
product launches may fail. Product teams need to develop product
launch goals. Below are some guidelines:

Create a product launch goal statement. The statement could

take the form of: we are launching this product to X, Y, and Z. For
example, “we’re launching the widget product to increase
awareness, engagement, and conversion of new customers.” Try to
gather input from team members to ensure you strike the right
 balance of high-level details and simplicity.
Identify goals associated with why you are launching the
product. Cross-check goals with the executives and other
functional teams. An example of goals could be: “an increase in
revenue or margin, establishing a foothold in a new market segment
to land new clients.”
Translate goals into traceable metrics. Use SMART criteria
(specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely) in developing
targets for your goals, for example, “to reach $3.2 million in
revenue.”

Using this method as your guideline, you and your team will be able to
later judge whether or not the goals were accomplished. It will also help
you to identify where resources are needed and help you and your team
deliver on the expectations.

The goal-setting phase may require a lot of strategic analysis and

planning but will keep your team focused on the purpose of the product
launch, align activities based on success metrics and keep everyone
motivated to really impress your customers.

Monitor and benchmark the competition

Always be conducting a competitive analysis. Only then will you
understand what makes your product unique and useful to your target
market. Let’s take a look at the three steps you can take to conduct your
own analysis and create a strategy to take on your competitors.

Brainstorm a full list of your competitors. Be comprehensive and

think of direct and indirect (substitute) competition. So if you are
launching a new fitness watch, search for related keywords, such as
activity tracker, exercise monitor band or pedometer. Or if you are
selling an electric toothbrush, go beyond just researching other
electric toothbrushes and think about regular toothbrushes, or even
floss.
Understand competitors’ offerings. Evaluate their offerings
 comparing them to your own. Assess their website, follow them on
social media, and sign up for their newsletters. Create a document,
such as this, to capture your research
SWOT it out! Identify the strengths and weaknesses of each
competitor and potential opportunities and threats you might have
against them. Your competitive advantage should be unique and
appeal to your target customer.

Take a step back and talk out your research with all of your team. It will
take time, but landing on your competitive advantage will help drive your
product’s messaging by relying on what makes you different (USP).

Step 2 : Stakeholder Management

Identify potential candidates to engage
Your customers come first, but they aren’t the only stakeholders you’ll be
selling to. Your company is full of stakeholders that you must convince to
help your product succeed. Identify your stakeholders early on to
strategize the best ways to communicate, collaborate, and launch your
product with their support, rather than friction.

Brainstorm a list of people in your organization based on their

titles that you’ll need to communicate your efforts and request
resources through. When thinking about people based on their title,
ask yourself who has the authority to make things happen? Who can
empower others on the team to get things done?
Then, go beyond titles, and think about people’s roles or their
job descriptions. For example, one important role in the product
launch is maintaining client relationships. These stakeholders are
often the gatekeepers between your company and the customer.
When you’re identifying stakeholders based on roles, ask yourself,
who has a stake in your product’s success or failure? Who has the
performance metrics or obligations toward your product’s success?
 There are influencers and cheerleaders throughout the
organization who will have doubts about you and your efforts.
These influential stakeholders are the people that may have control
over resources in unexpected ways or hold clout within your
company to help push things forward. Early on, sit down with these
candidates, establish rapport and maintain a healthy communication
channel. Ask yourself who are the people that have a good
understanding of how the company works? Who are the people that
others ask for help, advice, or ideas?

Prioritizing your stakeholder communication

plans
A successful product launch strategy requires you to create a deliberate
and strategic communication strategy that balances the stakeholders’
needs with your own time and resources. A great way to map your
communication efforts is to use the Mendelow’s matrix to make your
launch run more smoothly and garner the right level of stakeholder
engagement.
Mendelow’s Matrix used for stakeholder analysis and prioritization

Take your list of stakeholders and place them within the matrix.

Your direct superiors will fit in the key player quadrant as they
will be high in power and high in interest. For stakeholders here,
you’ll want to manage communications closely and engage in
frequent updates and conversations along the way. You could create
weekly meetings to share progress updates or ask for advice.
Determine what level of engagement works for you and aim to keep
everyone informed on efforts.
A system administrator may be a stakeholder that you put
within the minimal effort quadrant. They will hold less interest in
your product and less power within the organization. Keep this
stakeholder satisfied by sharing monthly updates on the launch date
and any other details that are required for their work. Minimal effort
should go into the communications strategy with this group.
A developer or someone that’s testing the product will have low
power and high interest and fit within the keep informed
quadrant. For this stakeholder, share a bi-weekly email with product
launch details to keep them informed and engaged.
A busy executive may fit in the keep satisfied quadrant when
they have a lot of power at your company but little interest in
your product. These people will be great for testing new ideas and
checking in once a month to bounce ideas off them. Though they
may influence the decision, they’re not good for communicating
throughout the process because of their lack of interest and time for
your project.

15 Example on Mendelow’s Matrix — by the expgroup

Prioritizing your stakeholder communication

plans
A product launch team is a cross-functional team, pulling members from
product management, development, customer support, sales,
accounting, legal, marketing, or any other areas needed to support the
launch.

To recruit these team members, speak directly with their managers and
ask whether this person can join the product team, and only then set up a
one on one with the potential team member to talk about the project, and
how the person can contribute. Be ready to share the vision and explain
why this is an exciting opportunity. But be honest about the work
required, you don’t want anyone to join that isn’t ready to help.

As you start to put your team together, the last step is to ask team
members what competencies your team lacks. Talk through the different
goals you’re trying to reach. Do you have the key players that can help
achieve the goals? If not, continue recruiting until you’ve assembled the
best team for your product launch.

Now what makes leading this launch team a challenge is that these
people don’t typically work together, and probably won’t report directly
to you if you are working in a large organization. Instead, they’ll have
other direct reports and other obligations within your company. They may
even hold a more senior role than you.

The best way to lead this team is by setting ground rules early on, living
by example, and asking all team members to adhere to the rules. Cross-
functional teams are made of interdependent, autonomous candidates.
Consider these four rules of engagement.

Members are to be autonomous decision makers. The

representatives of a functional area like communications should be
capable of making decisions on behalf of their area. So if someone
comes representing the communications team, they should have the
ability to make a final decision on something like the date to publish
a press release. This first rule will empower the team to move
quickly, as is required in a product launch.
Team members are active participants, not observers. A digital
marketing team member will do the work to set up a marketing
 campaign, create different messages to test, and track performance
to report back to the team. On the product launch team, everyone
has a responsibility to the team, and actively works towards meeting
the launch goals.
Status meetings will be held frequently, have a set agenda, start
on time, and be used for updating the team on activities.
Problem-solving issues and non-status related conversations that
come up will be tabled and saved for other meetings.
The project goals are your road-maps. Goals will be set and
clearly defined. This will allow team members to understand what
they’re working toward, and create buy-in on the goal set. So for
example, if a goal is to sell a certain number of products in the first
week of launch, the marketing team member will work toward
reaching an audience to help make that happen. Or the sales team
member will work toward closing that number of sales.

These rules of engagement will ground you and your team, focusing on
the task at hand. It’s your job to convene the right people, and keep
engagement on the project productive and focused. A great product
launch will only happen if the team is made up of the right high-quality,
motivated people who communicate well and believe in the product.

Engage your team in strategic planning

The SOAR framework is a great planning tool that can provide a more
meaningful and clear strategic direction to your team. The framework is
made up of four key areas: strengths, opportunities, aspirations, and
results. When you lead your team through this activity, the collaboration
and diversity in thinking will help you to land on a better strategy. Plus,
people are more likely to commit to the goals and objectives when they
help to create them.
The SOAR framework to provide focused strategic thinking to teams

Strengths. These are your differentiation advantages; ask yourself

and your team: what is your USP/what makes your product desirable
to customers? For example, Lyft, that entered the market well after
Uber was an established market player. For drivers, Lyft stood out
from Uber by creating a system where the drivers made more money
per hour and for the riders, Lyft chose transparent pricing due to
pain with surge pricing.
Opportunities. Ask yourself, what trends or partnerships might you
capitalize on? For example, a brand new product has some built-in
opportunities such as leveraging early adopters and influencers or
Slack capitalized on a partnership with NASA to generate buzz,
implying that if it was good enough for large teams of scientists at
NASA, then it’s good enough for anyone!
Aspirations. Express your future goals and plans. Ask: how can we
make a difference? And what are we passionate about?
 Results. Quantify your thinking and ask yourself: what measures
and tangible outcomes will tell us we’re on track toward success?

The SOAR framework allows you and your team to be forward thinking
and identify the potentials of your product. The analysis will inform many
of the moving pieces involved in your product launch and when done
right, can help you launch your product in synergy with the market.

Step 3: Developing the Launch Strategy

Build a checklist
A product launch checklist will guide you and your team to think through
all the processes, steps, and assets that you’ll need to complete and help
prepare for any stumbles that can happen along the way. Here is a
product launch checklist you can download. You can adjust based on
your own needs and move it to an excel file, visualize it, and even make a
formulaic Gantt chart for the team to monitor their progress.

Go through each section of the checklist and talk through it with your
team to brainstorm items, create timelines, set deadlines, and assign
tasks. Make sure everything is clearly defined and that you document the
who, the what, the when, and the how for every task. This will ensure you
don’t skip an important step or forget something along the way.

Have a section for testing the product, QA, and the complete
value chain cross-checking prior to launch.
Cover marketing and sales in detail. Cover subjects such as the
design and distribution of sales promotional plans or the pricing
structure.
Include your communications and customer support. Cover
items including the creation of support documentation for an online
FAQ, or an owner’s manual.
The legal section is an essential part to a product launch. Include
activities like creating customer contracts, terms and conditions,
 and other legal or regulatory documentation required. Cover matters
with your legal team to make sure you have everything in place.
Include a product leadership section. Here include tasks such as
ensuring the entire organization is informed of the product launch
date and how that may affect their job responsibilities.

Every product launch checklist will be unique and the items on your list
will vary based on your industry, company, and product.
Product launch checklist by A Maqsood — https://pin.it/7krAyzl

A successful product launch plan

To launch your product, you must plan, execute, and iterate along the
way. Setting a launch plan will help you monitor each moving piece,
readjust resources and timing if something derails, provides a high-level
overview of your performance, and helps align various project
stakeholders.

A strong product launch starts with the hard work of preparation. Map
out your product launch plan. Make it easily adjustable for risks involved
so you can modify your plan as work changes and deadlines shift. And
make your plan visual so you can share with stakeholders to get buy-in
and make sure everyone is on the same page.

I would personally prefer to build my own spreadsheet to monitor the

launch plan. You can see samples here, here, and here. Do your own
search online and see what makes sense for you. You’ll need some
project management know-how to perform great planning. But it’s not
rocket science, so just get your hands dirty, and use Google search to
guide you along the way.

Product Launch Campaign Planner Template

Speed vs. quality

“If you aren’t embarrassed by the first version of

your product, you shipped too late.” — Reid
Hoffman, LinkedIn

Product teams should aim to launch fast and get products to customers
as quickly as possible. But being too quick carries its own risks. The goal
is to find the right balance of a fast launch without sacrificing quality. To
set your product launch timeline, follow these two important rules:

Prioritize strategically. Focus on tasks and projects that have the

biggest impact on your main goals (e.g. hit $300K of sales in four
weeks) and push the less relevant items to later.
Set a realistic timeline with reasonable deadlines and consider
project risks. The timeline should reflect how long the work will take
and how much time is needed to move it forward within your
organizational bureaucracy. Don’t make any assumptions without
talking with others experienced in the task to help plan out the time
needed and resources required. Gather input from team members
on how long they believe different projects will take. Make sure your
team members are part of the planning process and have the
opportunity to share input on the timeline.

Don’t forget to work closely with your team to prioritize the activities that
will have the biggest payoff and ensure you set realistic and reliable
deadlines.

The three tools of a “Product Launch” leader

A product launch isn’t easy. The challenge to a product launch is the
ability to plan and monitor, mitigate, and repeat. For a successful product
launch, you will need three tools:

A tool to manage your team: to track all the tasks and activities
that happen behind the scenes, from testing to press release. There
are many moving pieces across different team members. Use project
management tools such as Asana or Trello.
A tool to manage your marketing: something to assist in managing
your marketing efforts, in streamlining, automating and measuring
marketing tasks and workflows. Tools like MailChimp or HubSpot can
help you follow prospective customers’ early activities. These
solutions allow you to schedule and track campaigns and foster
leads, getting them ready for your sales team.
A tool to manage your customers: a CRM manages all of your
company’s interactions with current and prospective customers.
Salesforce is a great CRM tool to track your customer relationships,
from optimizing the customer journey to your product or forecasting
sales.

Generally, team members may have difficulty adopting usage of these

tools. In order to encourage team adoption:

Start with your engineers as early adopters. Engineers use tools

such as Jira, a bug tracking and agile project management tool and
they are used to using such software. Make them use your tools and
showcase them as role models to the rest.
Evaluate the tools for the features you need. Some tools start out
free, but once you add a certain number of team members, you get
charged.
Sit down with your team and agree on what will be used. Get
buy-in on which solutions have the necessary features, then make
time to train team members on how to use them.

The challenge for a product launch is the ability to manage team

members and activities so that the project can go beyond planning to
monitoring, mitigating, and repeating. You’ll need to invest in the tools
that will ensure your product launch will be a success, way after launch.

Step 4: “Growth-Hack” It
The Complete Growth Marketing Playbook
An essential collection of mindsets, tools, and strategies
in nine chapters

medium.com

Tell stories
Stories create powerful and emotional connections. If you want to sell
your product or pitch your vision, you have to leverage the power of
storytelling. A successful story needs to convey the following points:

Solve an emotional problem. Start with emotions. What’s the

problem your product solves? A number of companies connect their
sales to helping a non-profit cause or the environment these days.
Address a specific community. Center the story around the
specific individuals you are addressing. Who is at the heart of your
story? Zoom into their daily lives and correlate their pains to your
larger target audience.
Share through a personal connection. Tell the story so that it
triggers your own emotions. How does the story personally connect
to you? Especially as founders of a startup, explain how you came up
with the problem and solution. Finding your personal connection will
help you passionately share and connect with your audience.

When you land on your product’s story, practice it over and over with
different variations. Test what resonates with people and ask listeners
what made the story compelling. Continue to iterate and tweak your style
until you have a story that fits.
Use the story to guide your marketing and branding efforts. Evangelize it
throughout your organization, so people are drawn to the importance of
your product’s launch. Make products stand out through a compelling
story that creates an emotional connection with your audience.

Exponential growth — the AAARRR model

To leverage growth hacking for your product launch, follow the AAARRR
model. Let’s walk through each phase of the model.

Awareness, making your product visible to your target market.

Founder, an entrepreneurship magazine, created a competition
where people could earn prizes for sharing news about their book on
social media. They created a resources page with images and text
for people to copy and paste and generated exposure that exceeded
their goal by 4X.
Acquisition is where a person becomes a customer. Hotmail,
created a campaign, adding a single line with a link at the end of
each email read “PS: I love you. Get your free email at Hotmail.”
Hotmail’s growth averaged 3,000 users a day and within seven
months, it hit 2,000,000 users.
Activation, getting consumers to act. Duolingo allowed new users
to dive right into the language-learning activity, enabling usage
without signing up. This growth hack kept the users engaged
throughout the experience.
Retention, or how many customers come back after their initial
experience. A powerful growth hacking tool to encourage retention
is a well-timed and personalized email. Amazon maybe the best in
this space, reminding users of the date they made a purchase that
needs and upgrade or cross-sell.
Revenue, you up the revenue made from your customers. The Dollar
Shave makes a promise that’s attractive to their target market,
razors that show up at your door each month for a dollar each. But
on their site, they have a highly optimized landing page that offers a
pricier value added option, up-selling their offering.
 Referral, promoting your product to new customers through word of
mouth. Dropbox gave users free storage in exchange for
recommending their product to friends and family. Just over a year
into the campaign, Dropbox obtained 2.8 million users directly from
referral invites.

Utilize social media handles

Customers are busy, the market is crowded, and users don’t have the
time to find your product or seek you out to solve a problem. That’s why
you need to go to meet customers, at their location of interest, social
media.

Nike has over 83 million followers around the world and is one of the top-
followed brands on Instagram. This social media following raises brand
awareness and leads to increased sales. Nike’s strategy is to add value to
the conversations to amass an online community of athletes, influencers,
and customers.

Nike invests in its community on social media because that’s where

customers share their real-life stories. It’s an opportunity to connect with
target customers in an authentic way that builds relationships with the
brand.

Here are three tips to use for creating social media campaigns:

Go to where your audience is. Acknowledge current technologies

and meet your audience where they are. Don’t expect them to come
to you.
Find content that gets your community engaged. Nike
incorporates campaigns that encourages people to get moving and
share their stories using the “justdoit” hashtag to encourage their
community to make a commitment to a crazy dream. Through this
hashtag, customers engage with Nike by sharing stories, gain
access to products and rewards, and land the opportunity to be
showcased by Nike to the community.
 Make your content valuable so that customers want to share it.
By creating content that is motivational and inspirational, Nike taps
into what makes their community tick and shares. Engage and
activate your community to be an advocate for your brand through
word of mouth.

How Nike Turns Controversy Into Dollars — by CNBC

Product marketing videos

72% of customers prefer to learn about a product through videos. People
find videos way more engaging, memorable, and worthy of sharing, than
any other type of digital content out there. Take these notes into mind
when considering to make a successful viral video:

Get right to the point, tell a good story. 20% of viewers will drop
your video after ten seconds of watching, so make your introduction
stand out, and address your customer’s needs and desires.
Create catchy titles, have SEO in mind. Use titles that resonate
with people and keywords that are findable through search engines.
Consider the time length of the video. For lower end products,
consider keeping your video between 15 and 60 seconds long. For
higher end products, a five- to 15-minute video campaign is best.

To create your video, there are many free or affordable online tools that
will help you produce a professional looking video. All-in-one video
producing tools such as Promo or Biteable are great resources.

Influencer marketing
If you have crossed the chasm and found your product market fit and
growth via cheaper digital channels is slowing down, then you will need
to use influencers to get your message across to the early and late
majority segments, in a fashion that they do not become skeptical of your
offering.

Influencers are people that have built up a large and engaged following
through social media and their followers admire and respect their
opinions. Influencers may have acquired their loyal followers due to their
lifestyle, job, hobby, or stories they tell, meaning any brand has the
potential to utilize influencer marketing for their product and target
demographic.

Use influencer marketing to boost your product’s authenticity, build trust,

drive engagement, and increase traffic and conversions.

Set your influencer marketing goal, identify the right social

channels, and find the right influencers to share your voice with.
Then you find your influencers. Benchmark competitors and
analyze their approach to influencer marketing.

How Influencers Have Transformed Modern Marketing | Rachel David | TEDxVancouver

Engaging case studies

A case study is your product-in-action story. It identifies a problem,
recommends solutions, implements action, and identifies factors that
contributed to its success. Case studies help your SEO and push
doubting users to try your product out.

Start by describing a problem and highlighting your solution in a

way that resonates and connects with your market. Read this for a
formula on developing case studies. Here is a good case study read
as an example.
Mention direct quotes from the customer. A satisfied customer
telling their story is real and relatable. Make your stories emotional,
this will better connect with prospective customers. The key is to
ask questions that will help you uncover emotions.
Highlight specific, relevant results. Mention metrics, data, and
corresponding results that have alleviated pain points.

Step 5: Considerations After Product Launch

Continue to invest in growth
The work of a successful product launch doesn’t end with the launch.
Instead, it’s the opportunity to evaluate what is and isn’t working for your
customers. This gives you insights to continue building a great
experience and customer journey. There are three post launch activities
that will take the momentum from a great product launch, and keep it
going beyond those early days.

Understand your early adopters. Who are those first few

customers that purchased your product?
Engage with your customers’ conversations on social media.
Have dedicated teams responding to customers through social
media channels. Start by monitoring keywords related to your
product, creating searches and setting up automatic notifications
when your company name or product name is used on different
platforms. The conversations happening on social media can guide
you in future product features or product launches.
Ask your customers for reviews and ratings. Ratings and reviews
provide a social proof that your product is a worthy purchase. Set up
an automatic system where every new customer receives a request
to leave a review.

Hold post mortem project meetings

Always be looking for insights that help your team improve internal
processes and increase customer satisfaction for future launches. Hold
debrief or post mortem sessions. The post mortem is a positive learning-
focused meeting held with your team and stakeholders.

Gather information through pre-meeting questionnaires. This

questionnaire should focus on aspects of your product launch
workflow. There are three main areas to cover. What worked so well
you wouldn’t change a thing, and why? What didn’t work that you’d
never do again, and why? And what worked out in the end, but if you
 did it again, you’d do differently, and how?
Share an agenda so team members are aligned on how the
meeting will be run. Set the tone creating a positive and optimistic
tone to the meeting. A sample meeting process would look like this:
remind team members the goal is to make changes and
improvements to the processes for the future. Give a brief synopsis
on the product launch and lay the groundwork for what you and your
stakeholders will be able to measure success and failure against.
Recap outcomes. Were the customers happy? Did you exceed the
budget or was the product launched on time? Spend a majority of
the time on team or stakeholder input. This is where you give team
members and stakeholders the opportunity to speak up and share
how they felt the product launch went. Make all team members feel
comfortable sharing and give everyone the opportunity to speak up.
Take notes throughout the meeting so the learning is captured and
shared later. Then wrap up the conversation. Thank everyone and
circulate the notes later on.
Notes need to be action-oriented. The notes to be circulated need
to be structured, condensed, and have actionable recommendations
to inform the team and help them grow for the next projects.

Collaborating effectively in cross-functional

product team settings
Organizations with well-defined functional areas or
departments such an IT department are finding that
these functional…

medium.com

Structuring and leading high performing, cross-

functional, and collaborative product teams
A product focused organization with the right people,
processes, and culture can continuously build and
improve upon…

uxdesign.cc

A large share of new product launches will fail and the minority that
succeeds must have an amazing launch plan. Whether you’re a product
manager leading an established product or an entrepreneur launching a
new business, you will need to develop a product strategy and get your
message market fit right, for a successful launch.

There are five steps to consider when launching a product:

Step 1: considerations before launching a product.

Step 2: stakeholder management.
Step 3: developing the launch strategy.
Step 4: “growth -hack” it.
Step 5: considerations after product launch.