Launching a product is not just about hitting the release button. It’s also about ensuring that your product is successfully adopted by your users.
This is critical to maximizing the impact you create. If you build it, they will not come, unless you tell people about what you’ve built in a compelling way.
As a product team, you need to plan for a successful launch to maximize user adoption of your feature from the early stages of product discovery and through the entire development cycle.
You can only get so far with in-product notifications and tutorials; for the best results you’ll need to use your full range of marketing channels (e.g. email, SEO and ads).
This requires working cross-functionally with your marketing team from the start to be really clear on the benefits you are creating for users, and increasing the chances of achieving your goals. Clear documentation really helps.
We’re providing three product launch plan templates that can serve as your blueprint to product launches:
- Overview template - Strategic source of truth helping you align your team’s efforts and define key objectives. Includes target audience, value prop, features and more. In Notion, Word & Docs.
- Task tracker: Breaks down the execution phases of your launch into manageable tasks and ensures nothing critical is missed in the run-up to your product going live.
- Communication strategy template: How you'll effectively engage with your target audience and where.
We're also providing a product launch prioritization matrix to help determine how much effort every product launch requires.
In addition in this article we'll cover practical advice to guide your product launch process, starting from the early planning stages to the point of successful user adoption.
Product Launch Plan Template available in Notion, Sheets & Excel What is Product Launch Planning?
Ultimately a product launch plan is about telling your users what you’ve built in a clear and compelling manner, so you get the best adoption and maximum impact for any new feature.
Defining your target audience and the benefits you are creating for them comes right at the start of the product development cycle, and tools like Amazon’s PR/FAQs, or a good problem definition in a PRD can help you articulate these clearly.
As you get closer to launch you’ll want to get precise about the language you’ll use to talk about these benefits, and the channels you can reach your users through, so you can execute effectively. Bringing that all together, a product launch plan helps you:
- Clarify your target audience: Who are you trying to tell about this new feature? Who can you reach by marketing through different channels? What are their needs and pain points?
- Position your product: How will you tell the target audience about your product? Which problems does it solve for them? What makes it unique and different from the competition? What tone and language resonates with them?
- Develop a channel strategy: How will you reach your target audience and generate interest in your product or service? What message will help you to close deals and drive revenue?
- Execute your plan effectively: What needs to happen when to make your launch plan come together and be really effective? Who is responsible for which elements, and how will you coordinate plans across everyone involved?
Why is Launch Planning Important?
Launch planning is important for a number of reasons:
- Cross-functional alignment - It ensures that all stakeholders, from product and marketing to customer support and sales, are on the same page, working towards a shared goal.
- Resource management - It helps teams anticipate the time, effort, and resources required to create the necessary content, collateral, tooling, or user flows to reach your audience. By understanding these needs early on, teams can effectively allocate resources and avoid last-minute scrambles. Just as building a new feature can take several weeks or months, so too can marketing take several weeks to deliver an effective communication plan.
- Efficient launch schedule - Launch planning pulls together the many moving pieces involved in a feature launch, ensuring teams aren’t scrambling around to get things finished and instead putting the focus on creating an impactful go-live date.
- User adoption - By coordinating the messaging, channels, and timing of your feature launch, a launch plan helps drive towards the goal of maximizing user awareness and understanding.
- Integration into lifecycle comms - Shipping a new feature changes the overall product experience for users, and a good launch plan is not just a one-off event, but also updates your existing lifecycle comms.
Justin Kan is the co-founder of Twitch Key Components of a Product Launch Plan
Launching a new product or feature can be a daunting task, with many things to consider, from market research to sales and marketing strategy. That's where a product launch plan comes in to align the many moving parts.
While your launch criteria should be unique to your product and business, there are still some common key elements to consider.
These elements can be tailored to your needs, but serve as a useful starting point for any successful product or feature launch.
- Audience - Having a clear view of your intended audience at the start of the development process will allow you to design the overall approach required to reach them.
- Value Proposition - Your value prop is the key intended benefits of your product or feature, and forms the foundation of your marketing message.
- Links and assets - Pulling together any relevant documentation, designs, or other information will support the cross-functional team in executing your launch plan.
- Timeline - Dividing bigger launches up into distinct phases helps break down the work to be done, and assigning success metrics to each of these allows you to measure objectively how well each phase has gone.
- Tasks - A detailed task list outlining everything that needs to get done as part of the launch helps ensure that all tasks are completed on schedule, and everyone involved knows what needs to happen when.
- Channels - Identifying the right channels to communicate your message is key, and not all feature launches should use the same comms channels. This includes sales in B2B businesses.
- Learnings - Throughout the process of launching your feature, you'll learn a lot about what works and what doesn't. It's important to document these learnings so that you can iterate on your product launch strategy in the future.
Who is responsible for what will depend on the stage your business is at, and how your organization is set up.
- In very small start ups (<30 people) then product managers often end up doing a lot of the launch planning and delivery themselves
- In medium sized businesses (<300 people) product managers collaborate with the marketing department to coordinate launch plans
- In larger businesses (>300 people) and B2B focused companies, then there may well be a product marketing manager with product launch plans falling under their remit
If it’s not immediately clear who is doing what, then the first thing you should do is meet with your marketing counterparts and agree who is doing what by agreeing roles and responsibilities.
