Let’s face it: Product launches are some of the most nerve-wracking experiences for product managers. The reason is simple: if you blow it, nobody will notice your new product despite all the hard work you’ve put into building it.
You need a solid product launch strategy to minimize the risk of your product launch flopping.
In the article, I will outline:
A product launch strategy is a comprehensive plan to bring a new product to market. Contrary to what many believe, it doesn’t just define what happens on the launch day.
Strategy coordinates all aspects of the launch—from defining the target audience and product’s value proposition to setting marketing, sales, and support tactics—so that each team member knows how and when to act.
A product launch strategy ensures that every aspect of your product launch is coordinated and aligned with your overall business goals.
Specifically, it enables:
Here’s the 5-step new product launch strategy design process we follow at Product Fruits:
BTW: Watch our 20-minute webinar on creating successful in-app communication and learn Adam’s expert tips for maximizing your in-app campaigns!
Now that you know how to develop an overarching product launch strategy, let’s look at a few tactics to help you implement it.
Before you commit your resources to developing a full-fledged product version, validate the ideas through prototype tests, starting from low-fidelity and making them increasingly more complex.
Here are a few ideas on how to do it:
Launching your product gradually, not to all users at once.
If it’s another product in your portfolio or a new feature, start with dogfooding. Launch it internally and test its performance among your employees. Only then roll it out to your users.
Do it one segment at a time, run tests, collect feedback, analyze its performance, and iterate so that each subsequent release offers more value.
The practice of releasing the product to a small representative user group to collect their feedback is called.
Beta tests not only offer valuable user feedback but can help with new customers.
When Slack launched to the general public in February 2014, 8,000 customers signed up within 24 hours. The main driver of such success? The beta tester word-of-mouth.
Product Hunt is a six-million-strong online community of entrepreneurs, tech enthusiasts, and investors who showcase and discover new products.
Launching your product on the platform can generate buzz, attract early adopters, and spark valuable feedback.
When you launch the product, the community can upvote and comment, giving you immediate exposure. Engage by answering questions and thanking supporters can raise your visibility even further.
The ultimate goal? To end up on the front page.
Your communication strategy should cover how you announce the new product on the launch day, create hype around the product in the run-up, and keep your audience engaged afterward.
Regardless of the launch stage, don’t rely on a single communication channel. Various channels allow you to reach various audiences.
For example:
How can you know that your launch is successful?
You can’t unless you track your product launch success metrics, including:
In addition to quantitative data, qualitative insights are collected from open-ended survey questions, reviews, social media mentions, or customer support and sales conversations.
BTW: Discover how FitnessPlayer doubled its user base and reduced churn 💪
Product Fruits is an AI-powered onboarding platform with feedback capabilities. Which is exactly what a product manager needs when launching a new product or feature.
With Product Fruits, you can announce your new features and products to existing customers via in-app messages.
These are super easy to create in the WYSIWYG editor without writing a line of code. So is making the announcement copy—the AI text assistant will craft it from scratch or edit it for you.
But wait—there’s more:
Thanks to the integrations with Customer.io and ActiveCampaign, you can target customers, existing or prospective, with email announcements to ensure they don’t miss your launch.
When users sign up for your newly launched product, you want them to experience its value quickly. Because the longer it takes, the more likely they are to churn.
Product Fruits offers a range of onboarding tools that will help your users reach the Aha moment:
Thanks to user segmentation, you can personalize the onboarding experiences for different user personas so that they learn only about the features that they need to achieve their goals.
The best part?
You no longer have to create them manually. Tell our AI assistant what your product does and your onboarding goals, and it will create a bespoke onboarding experience in seconds.
Product Fruits supports a knowledge base where you can upload support resources like product documentation, how-to guides, or video tutorials. Users can access it from the Life Ring button on the user interface, along with checklists and other onboarding resources.
Creating such resources is a one-off investment. Once ready, they can support multiple users simultaneously as long as they remain current. This is a more scalable alternative to traditional high-touch customer support.
Sure, it can’t solve all user problems. But, it allows you to dramatically reduce the number of support tickets by helping users solve simple problems independently. In the meantime, your agents are free to deal with more complex issues.
You can engage users and drive new product adoption with Product Fruit’s contextual in-app messages.
Imagine that a user needs to engage with a particular feature five times to adopt it. You can configure the triggering settings so that a tooltip prompting them to use it appears every time they navigate to the relevant screen—until they use it five times.
You can also trigger in-app messages for your users based on their previous actions.
Thanks to the in-app survey functionalities, you can use Product Fruits to collect user feedback about your new product.
This includes quantitative data, like NPS, PMF, CSAT, or CES, which can be tracked over time, and qualitative insights from open-ended questions.
Capturing the authentic voice of the customer not only informs further iterations but also shows you how users talk about your product. So you can tweak your product messaging to better resonate with your target audience.
Just like in-app announcements, creating surveys requires no coding, so all product launch team members can launch them regardless of their technical skills.
Also, don’t forget about the feedback widget, which allows users to submit passive feedback and requests whenever they feel like sharing them.
When you already have a product in place and are launching a new feature or a complementary product, recruit your beta testers from the existing user base.
With Product Fruits segmentation, you can pick the right candidates for the test to ensure a representative sample.
Once you define the ideal tester criteria, you send a targeted beta test invite to all users who meet them via an in-app message. And collect their details via a survey.
Further reading: Dark Launch: How to Release Features Safely 101
A product launch strategy is essential for coordinating the efforts of cross-functional product teams before, during, and after the launch.
To pull off a successful product launch, you need tools that will allow you to gather user insights to inform your product development and messaging strategy and communicate with them throughout the process.
Book the Product Fruits demo to learn how it can support your next product or feature launch.
