How To Build A Product Launch Plan In 7 Steps
Launching the product is probably the scariest and most stressful milestone in the product development lifecycle for the majority of product managers out there.
But the good news is that, with a bit of experience and a good product launch checklist, the process is way easier than you expect.
While I can’t help you gain experience here, I can definitely share a checklist that has saved me numerous times when launching over a dozen products during my product management career.
What Is A Product Launch Plan?
Your product launch plan is the set of actions you are going to take in order to properly prepare for and execute your product launch.
Having a sound plan before doing your launch is crucial, as it will include a detailed game plan on when to launch, who to target, how to deal with a wide variety of risks and problems, as well as what to do after the launch phase is over.
The Importance Of A Product Launch Plan
Your product launch strategy is not only a plan that you need to follow, it also serves a couple of other crucial purposes, such as:
- Aligning everyone on your team with the goals and activities required for a successful launch.
- Helping you properly allocate resources to get the most out of your team’s time and efforts.
- Lets you coordinate the timing of your team members’ activities and avoid costly delays.
Finally, it helps your team maintain a consistent message and branding when communicating with prospects.
Types Of Product Launches
Depending on the maturity of your product and the market you are about to enter, the type of product launch you do will be one of these three.
Minimal Launch
This strategy works best in the very early stages of the product lifecycle management process when you have little to no idea if people will need it at all. It usually involves building a bare-bones version of your product that can cover only your users' core need. The version of the product described here has a special name—the minimum viable product or MVP.
That’s right, it’s the MVP version that you are going to use for your minimal launch. You will usually attract a small, select group of people to sign up and use your product. Just like your feature set, the marketing/promotional campaign is minimal in this case, too.
There are two reasons for this:
- You don’t want too many people to try the raw/unpolished version of your product and get discouraged.
- You are not sure if the product is even capable of properly solving the problems of your target audience. Therefore, you don’t want to risk spending too much marketing money on it yet.
As you can guess, the main goals of your minimal launch are to gather user feedback, identify major flaws in your features, and, of course, test your problem-solution fit.
I would argue that the latter is the most critical goal of your minimal launch. After all, all the product decisions you have made by that point are based on mere hypotheses and assumptions.
So, without proper validation that you can solve your users’ pain points, you are nowhere near soft launching your product.
Soft Launch
Although you can do the very first launch of your product this way, traditionally, a soft launch is the next phase when you have validated your problem-solution fit with a minimal launch.
The soft launch is usually about releasing your product to a slightly larger audience (usually, a couple of hundred users for B2C and a couple of dozen for B2B products). The feature scope, in this case, is also larger than MVP. A product ready for a soft launch will cover additional important use cases for your audience and include a basic payment and monetization feature set.
This is also when you will start actively promoting it using a multitude of channels.
The three main objectives for a soft launch are:
- Understanding whether your product is stable when used by a larger user base. You will usually find scalability problems and bugs associated with corner cases at this phase.
- Testing and measuring your product-market fit. You want to understand whether your product can cover the pains of your target audience so well that they are ready to pay for it.
- Actively trying out different marketing channels and tactics in order to measure the product-channel fit for each of them.
The latter is especially important when preparing for a full-scale launch where you’re investing a significant amount of resources in your marketing campaigns. You don’t want to waste your precious marketing budget on channels that aren't performing.
Full-Scale Launch
If you think your product is ready for it, you can go for the final stage and do the largest type of release—the full-scale launch.
This is when you’re officially public and everyone is talking about you (hopefully). Technically, your minimal and soft launches can be public, too. It means that you’re not distributing your product among a select close group of users, and anyone can sign up.
However, you’re truly public once you start the full-scale promotion of your product across the different marketing channels that you have found effective in the previous stage. This is also when you can consider sending out press releases to different media outlets to make sure that people are talking about you.
My only advice for this type of launch is to make sure that your product has reached its PMF and problem-solution fit before spending an exorbitant amount of money on marketing. Well, it’s only the latter that is a must, as you can still risk and go fully public without reaching a PMF yet.
Checklists For Product Launch Phases
I have finally arrived at my core deliverable to you—the checklists. The reality is that there’s no single checklist for the entire process, as each part of the launch has a different focus. So, let me share a separate checklist for each phase.
Pre-Launch Checklist
The proper preparation is arguably the most important part of the launch process since you will be facing a lot of uncertainties out there in the public and need to be prepared to handle them all.
From experience launching over a dozen products, here’s what you need to pay attention to in the pre-launch phase:
- Know your target audience: Who they are, what problems they have, what they are looking for in the market, which geography they are from, and more. Usually, you achieve this by conducting market research paired with user interviews and surveys.
- Set clear goals and KPIs (key performance indicators): How can you tell if your launch was a success or a flop? What is it that you want to achieve as a result of your launch? These are the questions that you need to answer to make sure that your launch is aligned with your global product goals and vision.
- Know your competition: Unless you conduct competitor research and know who you’re playing against, you’re bound to fail. After all, how are you going to stand out from the crowd if you don’t know anything about them?
- Have a clear market strategy: You will need to know how exactly you’re going to promote your product, which channels you need to focus on, and what is your core message.
- Know how to position your product: With your knowledge of the market, your users, and competitors, you need to understand which specific part of the market you want to target and how you are going to differentiate yourself from the competitors.
- Finalize your communications plan and materials: Based on the positioning and target market, you will need to have a clear plan on how your team will communicate with customers and the types of promotional materials they will use for it.
Finally, let’s talk about the engineering side of the launch prep. What you need here is to assess your risks and develop an action plan for them. There are many ways that your launch can go sideways—large bugs, bad reception from the crowd, heavy load, and more. Your engineering team needs to be ready for it.
Launch Checklist
The second set of activities that you need to be ready for are related to the process of launching the product itself. Here’s what I can suggest you to pay attention to:
- Monitoring all technical health metrics: If there’s a surge in errors or your infrastructure is struggling under the load, you want to learn about it as quickly as possible.
- Monitoring key product metrics: You also want to make sure that there are no significant drops on your core funnels and that the activation and engagement rates seem healthy.
- Actively engaging with customers via sales and customer support: There might be a wide variety of questions or concerns that you have not addressed in your landing page or elsewhere. So, your support and sales teams need to be ready to help your users with it.
- Closely monitoring feedback on social media and forums: Users might love or hate your product. There might be serious issues that you don’t know about it yet. To learn what people talk about you, you will need to actively monitor social media and other similar platforms.
My main advice here is not to panic when issues arise. I have never seen a single product launch that has gone smoothly. Believe me, you will always find a solution.
Post-Launch Checklist
This is the relatively calm phase when compared to the other two. It is also the one that many product teams pay little attention to (or even outright ignore it). I strongly disagree with this, though. Post-launch is as important as the other two phases.
After all, this is the phase when you understand whether the launch was a success or a failure.
To conduct a proper post-launch, here’s what I suggest you to do:
- Analyzing user feedback: You will get a torrent of praise and complaints about your product. This is a gold trove of insight that you can later use to improve your product. So, never ignore it.
- Analyzing technical performance: You will most likely make a couple of quick and dirty fixes in your product to keep up with the load or get rid of errors. Now that the storm has calmed down, it is time to analyze and build permanent fixes to the issues identified.
- Planning for new iterations: Digital products are ever-evolving in their nature. Launching a version does not mean you’re done with development. So, it is time to use the feedback you have gathered to plan for new features and optimizations.
Finally, post-launch is the time to start thinking about your next launch and start preparing for it.
How To Build A Product Launch Plan In 7 Steps
Now that you have the checklists necessary for successfully launching your product, let's focus on the process of preparing for and executing the launch, learn about its seven core steps, and go over a couple of handy tips.
1. Conduct Research
The research in question includes the following:
- Analyzing competitors, their product features, positioning, and user feedback about them.
- Interviewing users to understand their needs and the reality they are living in.
- Sending out surveys to your target audience to gather quantitative learnings from them.
- Analyzing your own data and trying to find useful patterns.
In this step, you will also conduct classical market research in order to understand the size of the market, the general trends in it, etc. You can use platforms such as Statista or Similarweb for this. Here’s, for instance, what the email marketing market looks like.
As we can see from this prediction, email is not dead and the world is expected to sell nearly $18 billion worth of products using this channel.
2. Develop Product Messaging
Product messaging is the way you plan to communicate with your prospects. A proper messaging will focus on the problem your users are experiencing and show how your product is able to solve it.
One of my favorite examples of product messaging done well is Grammarly’s multi-app support.
The simple words “works where you work” contains a powerful message in it. It tells you that you don’t have to use two different apps to improve your writing; Grammarly will just be present in the app where you create your content.
3. Create Market Strategy
Launching without a market strategy (a.k.a. Go-to-market strategy or GTM) is similar to playing the guitar without following notes or chords. You’re kind of making sounds using your instrument but there is no music.
Market strategy defines the following:
- Market segment you enter.
- People you target.
- Channels you will use to reach them.
- Messaging (from the previous step) that will attract your audience.
- The way you will outcompete others in the market and more.
It’s ok to have an incomplete marketing plan, especially in the early phases of your release as you don’t know your audience and market segment well enough. It is not ok, however, to have no marketing plan at all.
4. Define Launch Goals
Not every launch is about simply attracting potential customers and converting them into paid users. If you’re still in the MVP stage, you might not care about the number of signups as your primary focus is getting customer feedback on your functionality, user experience, or pricing. It’s also very common for MVP goals to be testing your value proposition or differentiation strategy.
You might even want to check if your understanding of buyer persona is the same as the people signing up for your product. This is, again, a valid new product launch goal.
But, no matter what the goal is, you must communicate it with everyone in the company, including your team and stakeholders.
5. Develop Promotional Materials
Great promo materials are one of the cornerstones of a successful product launch.
Your digital marketing team will usually spend a significant amount of time creating banner ad visuals, landing page designs, SMM post banners, and more.
In parallel to that, your content marketing folks will create taglines, launch event speeches, LinkedIn post texts, email campaign texts, blog posts, webinar scripts, and other pieces of content that can successfully attract the attention of your target demographics.
Despite the massive effort put into them, believe me, great content and visuals matter. Just look at this gem from Spotify.
Apart from being funny, this ad is also helping you associate your emotions with music on Spotify.
Now, about your role as a product manager here. What you need to do is communicate the following with your marketing team:
- Product positioning.
- Key features.
- Key messages.
- Target customer profile.
- Launch activities and milestones.
Sharing this information will help the product marketing team get the most out of their extensive marketing efforts.
6. Generate Hype
Some of the promotional content that your marketing team creates will aim to build anticipation and excitement among your prospects.
This will increase the likelihood of your post-release campaigns performing better as you already have an excited group of users who keep talking about your product all the time.
I have to admit I am a victim of this too. Being an avid gamer, I have been riding the hype train of the post-apocalyptic RPG game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 for the past year. This was all thanks to the visually stunning teaser trailers that they have been releasing recently.
These teasers are also paired with collaborations with social media influencers who analyze the content in them and make predictions—further amplifying the hype.
So, my advice is to take inspiration from AAA games on the way they generate hype as they excel at it.
7. Launch Product
This part is straightforward. Go over your launch checklist, make sure that your team is well-prepared for it, and launch your product.
Product Launches Are Messy—But Also A Lot Of Fun!
Smooth product launches only exist in books and the dreams of product managers. The real ones are usually messy and come with a wide array of challenges. Sometimes you miss a launch date due to a nasty bug. Or the servers barely keep up with the load. But, believe me, you will solve all the problems and have a successful launch in your hands. Just follow the checklists I shared with you, stay optimistic, and enjoy the ride!
And when the launch is over, you will need to optimize and further develop your product. So, make sure to subscribe to our newsletter for more product management resources and guides!