Follow us on LinkedInEvery product marketer who’s been around the block at least once knows there’s no single recipe for the perfect product launch. Much less a 90-day launch.
I'll always remember hearing a product executive comment, "I've never worked in an organization that has figured out the launch process."
I'm paraphrasing, but you get the point. The comment lit a fire in me to figure out how other organizations bring products to market and how I, as a product marketer, can hone and evolve a tried and true launch process. By sharing best practices, we can build a repeatable framework together.
So, consider this article your mission possible – a playbook to successfully launch your new product, feature, or enhancement. I promise this won't be as hard as Tom Cruise jumping from building to building in Mission Impossible. With the right tools on your desktop, nothing can stop you.
Let's roll up our sleeves and talk about a 90-day launch roadmap – from kickoff to release.
⏰ T-90 days to product launch
Any 90-day runway to launch will feel just a little scary. You have just three months to strategize, align, create, and execute a launch plan that will help you reach your big, hairy, audacious goals, be they:
- Increase product growth and adoption
- Convert more of your sales pipeline
- Increase customer satisfaction, driving retention
Before you dive into the details, step back and assess the forest.
First, pinpoint your key goal for this launch and what key performance indicators (KPIs) will help you measure success. This is the first step you need to take in your launch planning. Align with your critical internal Product partners on the KPIs. Apply the SMART method to ensure your KPIs are specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and timely.
Second, analyze the scope of the launch, looking at characteristics such as revenue impact, number of customers impacted, satisfaction driver, competitive differentiation, and complexity.
Apply a scale of 1-3 for each characteristic of your launch, and then add up the score.
The higher the score, the larger the tier. The lower the score, the smaller the tier.
Product launch hot tip 🔥
As you start to build your launch plan, analyze past launch learnings and performance.
Look at what channels best drove awareness and adoption. Identify what you learned about your users and persona mapping to inform segmentation and targeted messaging for your upcoming launch.
With a Tier decided on, you're ready to build your launch plan. Identify who you’re bringing this product to and the key personas who will either buy it or use it (these could be one and same, or two unique personas). This will inform your audience segmentation.
Next, work with your sales and marketing partners to identify content needs (updates or new content) and channel strategy.
When it comes to channel strategy, I apply a simple approach: Identify your target audience and then determine the proper channels to reach them, engage them, and ignite a desired action.
With a 90-day launch, be thoughtful about the channels you prioritize for the launch. You want to optimize for speed and impact. In short, what channels persuade your customers to listen, care, and do something about it?
Some channels I typically slate into a 90-day launch plan:
- Landing page to drive organic or paid traffic to
- Direct marketing emails and sales outreach
- In-portal or in-app targeted messaging to existing users
- Live and on-demand webinar with a demo included
- Social media (your audience may influence which platforms)
Consider budget, as this may impact your launch plan and channel strategy. If your launch has an intended revenue impact, estimate budget ROI to pinpoint what you should spend and justify the budget internally.
In the hustle to create and execute, document how you’ll measure success and report on the launch to internal stakeholders. This should appear in your launch plan and be communicated to your product, marketing, sales leadership, and executive leadership teams. Agree with your collaborators on the metrics to measure channel success and how they connect to your key goals and KPIs.
This is a great point to lead a launch kickoff meeting. Bringing together internal stakeholders and collaborators, use this forum to share an overview of what you’re launching, why you’re launching it, what you want to accomplish with the launch, and an overview of the proposed launch plan.
I like to use this forum as an opportunity to vet the plan with your internal partners. They can weigh in with insights about the market, your customers, user feedback, and organizational readiness – feedback that is critical to ensuring your launch is set up for success.
Now let's talk about my favorite part of the launch process: Positioning and messaging.
Positioning queen April Dunford defines positioning as:
"How your product is a leader at delivering something that a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about."
As product marketers, we’re storytellers. Our job is to deeply understand our customers and what they care about and create an emotional and logical connection between our product and their needs.
So as you think about the positioning of your new product, start with your why.
Try this exercise: Imagine sitting down with a customer to talk with them about the product you’re launching. It’s even better to have a live conversation with real customers. What do you know about them and their day-to-day that informs how you would pitch the product to them? What are they using today to try and fix the problem you believe you’re in the best position to solve? What else is going on in the market that influences their perception of your company and the product?
All of these questions and all of these conversations with your customers help ground your story in the customer's current reality. You must understand how they’re navigating this reality today and how your product will change that – hopefully for the better.
This is your value proposition. At this point, I capture the value proposition along with the rest of your positioning brief. This brief will serve as the north star to inform your launch.
It goes without saying that you need to know who else in your space has a similar product or is trying to solve a similar problem. I recommend that you conduct a quick and dirty SWOT analysis. Identify your product's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Identify what
is different about your solution or your approach to solving the problem, and then make sure that comes through in your positioning.
Product launch hot tip 🔥
Remember that your competition isn’t always a competitor that has a similar solution.
Your competition could be an in-house product, a DIY solution, or a legacy product your customer uses today.
Next, build out your messaging.
If your positioning is a differentiated viewpoint about your product and the value it delivers, your messaging articulates the right way to talk about it to a specific audience. It speaks to the job to be done, how your product helps them, and what doors it unlocks for them.
Always center your messaging around your customers. As much as possible, talk to your customers to ensure you speak their language (literally). This comes down to the exact words and phrases you use. I recommend vetting your messaging with your sales and customer experience teams or utilizing tools like UserTesting to ensure your messaging will resonate. Test it in the field (think of a demo call, finalist presentation, or customer roadmap meeting) and analyze the reaction it gets:
Excitement?
Nonchalance?
Confusion?
Product launch hot tip 🔥
This is an excellent opportunity to leverage your Sales Advisory Council if you have one.
This gets individual contributors – people on the ground and in the field – providing valuable feedback on your positioning, messaging, collateral, and overall launch plan.
Iterate quickly based on the feedback you receive.
Your finalized messaging should be captured in a centralized document that internal collaborators can access (it could be that positioning brief). This ensures that your messaging is consistent across various channels.
Now, at this stage, you may be tempted to hit the green light to execute, execute, execute.
Before you do, I recommend that you align once again with your key internal stakeholders.
Pull your stakeholders together in a 60-day check-in. Use the time to share your finalized launch plan, validate that you haven't discounted any tactics, assess any internal needs or risks that need to be factored in, and (most importantly of all) align on the KPIs you’ll use to measure success. You can also establish secondary KPIs that influence your critical KPIs.
Include an overview of the channel metrics and who will be tracking them. Ideally, that’s your channel owner.
Product launch hot tip 🔥
Align at each 30-day mark in your path to launch. A smooth launch is highly dependent on coordinated collaboration among your internal teams so that they’re on board and supportive of the launch strategy.
It’d help if you connected the dots between the launch and their priorities as they’ll then be more willing to prioritize their time and resources to work with you on the launch. Know their strategic goals and OKRs and demonstrate how this launch supports them.
⏰ T-60 days to product launch
At this point, you've got content on your mind.
With a 90-day launch plan, you must quickly identify what content you must create to support your launch goals.
This could include a product one-pager, email templates, a PR announcement, or talking points for sales. In your launch plan, capture who will create the content and critical collaborators who'll provide inputs, approvers, and timelines to deliver the final content. To ensure optimal efficiency in the content creation process, give reviewers a heads up early on about impending reviews, be upfront on your timelines, and make sure to follow up.
A key driver of launch success is internal enablement.
Any successful launch includes thoughtful enablement of the right teams, ensuring they have the information and resources they need to go out and evangelize the product, sell the product, or drive adoption among end users. They need to understand the big story inside and out and pitch it as well as you can.
Product launch hot tip 🔥
Utilizing internal channels can help you get information to your internal audiences quickly.
Existing Slack or Teams channels, company pages, team huddles, training forums, and company all hands are excellent forums to help your colleagues understand the what, why, how, who, and when behind the launch. Consider the internal socialization a “soft launch.”
In your training, highlight the pain points you're solving and how your product or feature differs from what's out there. Point them to available resources, and record a training session that your colleagues can access on-demand.
Let's dissect the internal evangelization of the product.
Build excitement leading up to your launch. It sounds overly simple, but it can make all the difference. Getting your internal teams invested and excited about what you're bringing to market brings everyone behind your goal and ensures all hands are on deck to bring awareness to the product.
Utilize internal town halls, all hands, and huddles to share what's coming, provide updates, and follow up periodically leading up to the launch.
Consider taking the party to the streets.
A simple tactic could be planning teasers on social media channels. Provide a sneak peek to your customers through email, demos, or a small pilot before making the product generally available. Partner closely with your customer success or account management teams to identify beta clients who can test the product and provide immediate feedback to inform your launch.
With a 90-day launch, there may be little time to test and learn via a pilot. If possible, pilot the product or feature with a select user base. This could be a couple of key customers who will use the product and provide constructive feedback. At the least, pilot it internally and encourage testers to be generous about what they like, don't like, or think could be improved.
Take these insights back to your product team so you can understand how they impact your launch strategy, ongoing improvements to the user experience, or even the product roadmap. Consider the feedback as an opportunity to iterate and improve post-launch.
Product launch hot tip 🔥
If your organization has a Customer Advisory Board (CAB), you may consider previewing the concept with your CAB.
Focus on the use cases, jobs to be done, and value propositions. Demo the user experience. Gather initial feedback to inform positioning, customer rollout, and product or feature experience.
And in the hustle and bustle, remember to keep your internal stakeholders appraised of progress. At the least, you should provide monthly progress updates and weekly tactical meetings with critical collaborators.
Use the monthly meetings to call out blockers or risks, ask for help, and highlight what's next. You may also need to prepare a recurring, executive-level update on the launch to ensure your executive team is appraised of progress.
⏰ T-30 days to product launch
Go-live is starting to feel more real. You're entering your execution era.
Take a breath. Take a sip of water. Stretch. And keep your nose to the ground.
It's time to launch your external pre-launch communications (if applicable), ensure your content is packaged and ready, complete your internal training, and keep building the excitement.
Stay close with your customer experience teams leading up to the launch. This is especially critical when launching a product or feature to your existing customer audience. These teams must understand the value proposition and partner with you to execute a successful adoption strategy.
Make yourself available to answer questions, conduct impromptu demos, and create continuous feedback loops with your product team.
Product launch hot tip 🔥
Encourage employee advocacy to create a network effect. Put together a launch packet for your internal teams to leverage.
It can include copy for social media posts, talking points for prospect conversations, an email template, or a recorded demo. Share the materials and source field feedback.
It's product launch time 🚀
Finally, the long-awaited day is here. If you do nothing else, complete these activities:
- Send out an internal announcement sharing that the product is live.
- Work with your product team to closely monitor results post-launch: Watch for unexpected bugs, initial adoption, and how your users use the product, and apply a segmentation lens to see which users use the product or feature most and how often.
- Monitor social media mentions and other methods to gauge user sentiment.
- Analyze post-launch queries or feedback from your prospects or customers.
- Closely track metrics that tie back to your launch KPIs. You need to track the performance of your launch to be able to understand success.
And if you're an ambitious PMM, plan for a retrospective.
A launch retrospective sets you up for success as you identify areas of continuous improvement and innovation around your launch strategy.
As part of your retrospective, you'll identify what worked, what didn't, and what you'd do differently. You'll want marketing, product, customer success, and sales at the table.
Internal surveys are a helpful mechanism to source feedback from teams internally and then identify trends or themes.
Product launch hot tip 🔥
During your retrospective, identify three to five opportunities, and then outline how these opportunities translate into action items that will be applied to future launches.
These action items should be concrete and attainable – with a clear owner, timeline to execute, and method to measure impact.
Socialize these opportunities and action items post-launch with critical stakeholders, and build these learnings into your evolving launch process and go-to-market frameworks.
Conclusion
You did it! You completed a 90-day product launch. Pat yourself on the back.
And then gear up because you likely have another launch on your calendar, and time and products wait for no man.
