Product Launch — 4 — Final
Launch and Post-Launch Activities
New Terms
Landing the Product: Landing the product means that you launched your product, monitored your metrics and did improvements based on the metrics and user’s feedback
Things to Remember About Launch and Post Launch Feedback
- Launch vs. Landing: Your goal is not solely to launch, but to launch and then iterate to the next improvement (a.k.a. landing)
- Post launch feedback: Successful landing requires monitoring KPIs and user feedback
Launch Day and Timeline
Launch Timeline Recap
New Terms
Immediate Release: Launch the product to all the users at the same time.
Gradual Rollout: Launch the updated product to a small percentage of current users and slowly add more users.
Launch Day!
The actual mechanism to launch a product is different for different types of products
- Physical products need to be shipped
- iOS apps have a button that needs to be pressed to release the product
- For other software products, you may need to have the engineering team remove a flag or enable code on the production server
Who Should You Notify About Your Launch?
- Leadership
- Teams Working on the Product (Engineering, Testing, Legal etc.
- Partner Teams for Launch (Marketing, Sales Customer Support, Technical Writers)
New Terms
Immediate Release: Launch the product to all the users at the same time.
Gradual Rollout: Launch the updated product to a small percentage of current users and slowly add more users.
Launch Day!
The actual mechanism to launch a product is different for different types of products
- Physical products need to be shipped
- iOS apps have button that needs to be pressed to release the product
- For other software products you may need to have the engineering team remove a flag or enable code on the production server
Who Should You Notify About Your Launch?
- Leadership
- Teams Working on the Product (Engineering, Testing, Legal etc.
- Partner Teams for Launch (Marketing, Sales Customer Support, Technical Writers)
How Should We Rollout Our Product?
Launch Patterns
- A gradual rollout is the safest choice for a software product:
- Allows you to closely monitor performance metrics to identify issues and make any necessary fixes before launching to everyone. Oftentimes you might run into bugs at scale that you could not catch or predict before rolling out
- Gives you an early read if the product is on track to achieve goals
- Easy to rollback the launch if any major issues arise
- A full launch makes more sense for a:
- Hardware product. Once a product is on the shelf it has to work for any user who purchases it. You can still do beta testing, but it will be more challenging to get a physical product to your target users. Additionally, you can’t just “push” a new feature to an existing physical product like you can with software since you are limited by the capabilities of the hardware.
- “No-brainer” product. It is a low-risk launch if your team is confident that the product will be well-received in the market and will work as expected.
- It also may make sense to do a full launch to meet a product goal or a legal requirement. There may be times when leadership decides that the need for immediate revenue is worth the risk of launching an imperfect product. Or changes in law, that require product updates for compliance, like GDPR privacy regulations in Europe.
How to Manage a Gradual Rollout
- For a new product, a gradual rollout involves launching the product to a small or geographically contained group of users
- For a new feature on an existing product, you’ll want to make the feature available to a select group of users of the existing product.
- You’ll want to be strategic about the number of users you start with. You need enough users to get a good read on the users’ reception of the project and to make sure any issues are uncovered. You will almost always want to start with 1% on the first day
- After launch, monitor KPIs and user feedback
- No issues -> release the product to more users.
- If KPIs look problematic or issues appear in user feedback, halt the rollout or roll the feature back. Fix it and try again.
Additional Reading
Both the Apple App Store and Google Play support gradual releases for feature updates:
Read more about product rollouts:
- The Art of Staging a Rollout
- Why phasing your product launch might be your best product idea ever!
- 9 things you should consider before going for a Big-Bang product launch
Example: Launching a Paid Product to Users of a Free Product
Our Timeline
Our product was a completely new product on the market.
- The product took a long time to develop due to the complexity of the system
- We wanted a quick win so we started by launching our product to a small percentage of users with a high probability of conversion
- We started with minimal marketing and monitored our KPIs and user feedback
- We gradually launched to more users and increased our marketing presence.
- Once the rollout was complete, we announced the product both internally and externally.
- We celebrated our milestone!!!
- After launch, we continued to monitor feedback from the field, support calls and cancellation rates.
- We incorporated the feedback into an improved product design.
exercise: Launch Timeline for the Party App
It’s time to set a launch date for our Party App.
My Launch Timeline for the Party App
My Solution
- We will launch gradually to beta testers
- Once we feel confident that our product doesn’t have any issues, we will announce our product and create “buzz”.
- We can use the “waiting list” to create more interest in our product.
- Once the product has been out for a while, we will analyze our numbers.
- We will gradually increase the geographic area for the launch and increase the number of users who can sign up for our product.
Launch Emails
New Terms
Internal Launch Email : An email sent to leadership, partner teams, other teams and most importantly, your manager to announce the launch.
Things to Remember About Internal Launch Emails
Why are Internal Launch Emails Important?
- Product launches are your resume. People need to know about the great work you did.
- Your team deserves recognition as well. It is a part of your job to make sure they get it.
Internal Launch Email Tips
- Start your launch email with a story to capture people’s attention.
- It is a good idea to add some graphics on top of it. Ask your UX design team to help out.
- Briefly describe next steps for your product: new features, scaling and improvements — but don’t go into too much detail. This is not a road map
- Thank all the people who worked on the launch by name. It is always important to recognize the people who did the work!
- Launches are a cause for celebration so the tone of the email should be upbeat and exciting!
“In the past year, we have heard from a lot of our users, in particular a lot of influencers that they would like to see the followers they interacted the most. The main complaint was that when the user has a lot of followers, they can’t find their most important ones and it makes the interaction with these followers less meaningful.
After a lot of internal discussions, we conducted User Research and decided to redesign our Followers tab! Now users can see the followers they interacted with the most.
Our numbers from the launch are… .
We are very excited to continue iterating on this feature as we see interactions between users as most essential for Instagram’s growth. Next are testing more . We are also exploring different options to show user’s new ways to interact with followers.
Thank you to the most amazing team ever!”
External Launch Emails
So far we have talked about emails you send to your team and others in your company. There is a different type of email that is written to send to people outside your company to increase the buzz for your product.
- When to Use: External launch emails can definitely be helpful for bigger product feature launches. they don’t always make sense for smaller features or behind the hood launches/improvements that aren’t visible to users.
- Purpose: While an internal launch email is more focused on congratulating the team, an external is more focused on driving adoption of the new feature.
- Target: External emails are sent to anyone who might be interested in your product. In many cases, this can be your existing user base or users who have joined a waitlist to hear more about your product.
What Should be in an External Launch Email?
External emails should include much more marketing messaging about the product or feature and its value.
- What the product or feature is
- Why users should care/be excited about it
- How users can use it
- When users can expect it (if it’s not available immediately)
- Where to go for more info/help
External Launch Email Examples
Additional Reading
Learn more about external launch emails here:
- The 20 best product launch emails that re-engage users
- 20 Announcement Email Examples to Hype Your Product Launch
Party App Internal Launch Email
It is time to share the news about our Party App Launch.
Here is some data about our launch:
- We had 100k downloads, with retention of 25% for the first 28 days.
- So far our users have created 30,000 new parties and it is getting better.
- The App Store rating is 4.5 stars with 2K reviews.
My Solution
We will start with a story. In this case: why we created this app.
Last year John tried to organize a surprise party for his wife Karen. He tried to understand what he needed for the party so he created a great spreadsheet, then he used multiple tools: one to invite people and manage RSVPs, then another one to order food and a venue, then answer multiple questions from a friend: what can they get for Karen. “
Then we will describe what we launched and share the results:
We launched our Party Master in the US. Our results are 100K downloads. We have 30K parties organized through our platform.
We will add some customer’s testimonials:
“Where was this app until now?? It made my party organizing so much easier!”
We will explain what is next for the product:
We are going to add more features based on our customer feedback and we are looking to launch internationally!
We will add “thank yous” to all the people involved in the development of our app.
This launch would not be possible without the hard work of all the members of our team.
Launch Emails are important for promoting your team and your work, and are a great tool for reaching a wider audience.
Post Launch Feedback and Landing the Product
Things To Remember About How to Land Your Product Successfully
- Monitor your metrics.
If something looks wrong, you need to understand why and how to fix it.
Have a dashboard that tracks all your KPIs, check the state of your product frequently. Dashboards also help you to communicate with your leadership. - Metrics might not be enough. You need to listen to your users and customers by reading reviews for your app, asking customer support to pull statistics for your app reviews, looking for articles about your product, sending surveys. For big customers, ask the support team to do outreach and pass you the feedback.
- Document the feedback in a central location.
Invite others to contribute. Look for patterns and themes in the data. Identify the underlying problems and start developing possible solutions - Add problems and solutions to the PRD.
Start planning how you will test your solutions.
A/B testing
New Terms
A/B testing: multi-variant testing where we compare one version of a product with another version of the same product. For example, we can A/B test text on a button on our page and see which text gets more users to click on the button.
Things to Remember About A/B testing
- Why is A/B testing so important? We don’t always want to risk and change our product without knowing if the change is really a good one. It is especially important when we are testing a major change.
- Ask for help from your Data Analysts when possible. They can confirm the validity of the test.
Additional Reading
Learn more about A/B Testing here:
A/B Testing Solution for the Party App
My Solution
We have feedback from the field that our users are struggling to enter their credit card information. We do not know if this is a trust issue or just difficulty of typing.
Potential Solutions to the Credit Card Problem
- Add Autocomplete for the credit card numbers
- Implement ApplePay
- Add a credit card scanner
We will test the credit card scanner because it would be the easiest solution for our engineers to implement
A/B Test
- For the users in the control group: we will do nothing (group A)
- For the users in the variant group: we will offer a credit card scanner (Group B)
- Our hypothesis is that the credit card scanner will make it easier for users to complete transactions so we will see more complete transactions in Group B
Things to remember
In this lesson, we launched our Product and started our Post Launch activities:
- We talked about the launch timeline — do we want to launch gradually or all at once?
- We discussed user feedback — what to look for and what to do with the feedback
- We wrote an email to share the news of our launch
- And then we used the user feedback to design a test for a new feature
