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Product launching is not an easy task to plan, but with this article, you can easily figure out a successful roadmap of your product launch. 

It isn’t much different than any other event, just it involves technical tits-and-bits. As a product owner, it is important to figure out who, what, and when the product will be launched to gain the market benefits in a right manner. 

There are various challenges which product managers face during product launch:

• Missing responsibility for every product feature
• Product development delays
• Incomplete product positioning reports
• Improper customer feedback looping

To tackle these, a legible product launch planning is necessary, which can lead to successful product launch. There are many roadmaps available in the market for a good product launch, but it varies with your niche and product category. You need to filter out lots of details, and then incorporate the right roadmap to your product launch. This article provides the general outlook for planning a good product launch roadmap. 

Let’s start with “Who” part of the product launching roadmap.

Who: Product Target Audience and Team

As a team, product people find accurate data metrics through user research, customer feedback, competitor analysis, and market research, different customer pain points for the jobs to be done.

The product manager needs to prepare timelines for the product development, with timely internal and external effective communication for improving the product’s value. 

Here are some tips for better targeting your audience through the product launch.

Effective User Research

Your product has an ideal customer, which is eagerly waiting for the solution to apply and become a loyal customer to the product. This involves a lot of research on:

• how your product benefits the customer, 
• how the product ideation got included in the roadmap, 
• what are the different customer jobs-to-be-done with that product,
• Do we need a new audience or the product is appealing to the same audience.

After gathering answers to these questions, you can create different user personas and their accurate purchasing behaviour points. The data metric can help in getting useful customer insights for your sales team to pitch a good product launch message. 

Let’s learn more about product messaging.

Effective Product Messaging and Positioning

Here comes the creative part of the product launch phase. The new product launch message should start with positioning your product in the niche market, its competitor resilience, and how the target audience catches it in the best manner. 

Your product positioning should include:

• Price comparison of the product features with your competitors, and factors deciding the price choice.
• Product fitment with different user applications or jobs.
• How is your product better than the existing competitors?
• What is your brand value, or inspiration which can connect with the pain points of your target audience?

After this, you can focus on your product’s messaging part, which includes the value, relevance, and solution your product offers.

You can deviate a little from your original brand’s messaging or values, but it should not be different completely from it. Like, the product message should fit the present needs and message conception idea by the customers, as done by various old brands like McDonalds, KFC, etc.

The product message should also fit different launch channels appropriately – your website, emails, social media, and sales collateral. Now you can communicate the product message and positioning to your internal team, including customer service and sales departments, to maintain a similar product message in the organisation. 

What: Product Launch Approach

Now, the product launch approach varies with different factors into consideration.

• Are you launching a new product, or new features in an existing product?
• What is the percentage of the new and existing customer base that needs this product?
• What are your internal resources requirements to launch the product?
• What is the timeline to launch the product or its parts?

On the basis of the answers to these questions, you can decide what type of product launch you want to go for.

Soft Product Launch

This type of product launch is fit for the situation where your product isn’t ready for a full-scale launch, and you need time to test your product’s performance with the customer feedback. 

Feature-based Product Launch

This launch type is good when you have larger features to launch, which may be attracting new customers, or helpful for the existing customers. This helps in creating the attention or hype for a full-scale product launch.

Full-scale Product Launch

Here you need the most coordination and planning, for launching the full product. This makes sense mostly when you’re launching a new product, and you want the most attention from all the channels possible. 

For products which are not ready for the go to market, and there may be a few bugs, which can ruin the product launch. You need to align every team and task with the launch timeline, and proper messaging for optimum resources utilisation.

Now, let’s understand when to launch the product for best results.

When: Product Launch Timeline

The most easy way to plan a successful product launch is to plan the calendar for every step of product development, and its other steps. 

Your approach to product launch timings depend on your internal resources availability. These are some things which need to be considered while devising the product plan:

• Product messaging finalisation
• Time required to combine the product details with your website deck, collateral and sales deck.
• Prioritise your blog post announcement for your new product, social media posts, and email campaigns.
• Line up the channels for press announcements, webinars, and podcasts. 
• Prioritise the tasks with deadlines, and those which got delayed.

Also, the delay happens a lot, and product development continues even after the product launch to fix bugs and other technical glitches. Therefore, you need to plan some time for such contingencies too. 

Conclusion

Once you start planning your product launch, you need to keep track of who, what, and how your product launch will be planned. Also, there are different metrics which need to be constantly measured during the product development and launch phases, like new signups, email subscriptions, conversions, etc., which become the base for product innovation and improvement.