What is a Product Launch? (Complete with Best Practices)

Originally Published on February 25, 2022

A product launch is a company’s coordinated effort to bring new or updated products to market. Well-planned and well-performed launches announce a product to the world after building substantial buzz. They also align members of a product team with other departments to ensure the entire business is unified in its approach to supporting the new product.

Planning a thorough product launch requires investing a great deal of labor and time. However, product-centric companies will find these commitments worth the effort. A successful launch can attract the right kind of customers to a new product. This increases the rate of product adoption and allows a company to see a quicker return in their investment in the product’s development.

What is a product launch?

A launch is more than just posting “We’re open!” on social media. It’s a cohesive effort to get the product workable, so your teams can appropriately market it across channels. It ensures the product serves the target audience's needs and promotes it to buyers. Product launches require extensive collaboration across teams and departments.

A launch can be divided into three stages:

1. Planning: In this phase, set goals, research your audience and competition, align expectations, and create your marketing strategy. The launch team collaborates with product developers to create a launch timeline and identify key marketable product components. Define the actionable metrics to measure success.
2. Execution: The product is formally released. This phase covers the release day and ongoing marketing efforts to maintain interest in the following weeks. Your team collects product and marketing data to evaluate the launch's success.
3. Analysis: Marketing efforts wind down as the product moves from the "launch" to the "growth" stage. Product teams compare data from the release window to determine if KPIs and other goals were met.

The best product launch plans are flexible. Development, collaboration, and testing are often iterative processes. Business leadership might change the marketing approach midway through the launch. Such changes can derail companies with rigid plans, so it's crucial to allow time for adjustments.

The launch process takes several months, and the formal release spans more than a single day. Launch teams focus on generating excitement before the launch and maintaining momentum in the weeks following the official release.

Tips for building a successful product launch strategy

Every product launch has its challenges. However, there are best practices that most companies follow to create a strong product launch strategy for their business.

1. Focus on the customer experience

Successful teams perform product discovery before brainstorming. This process helps companies understand why their product should exist and identify the problem it solves for customers.

To best serve your target audience, it’s helpful to know the answers to the following questions:

• Why do customers use the type of product you’re building?
• What are the specific pain points your product addresses?
• What does your product do better than any other?

Ask your customers directly about what features they’re most excited about or issues they’ve experienced with similar products in the past.

2. Use your product data to inform marketing strategy

Beta testing provides valuable data on customer engagement. A data analytics solution like Amplitude can help businesses analyze this data to craft an effective product marketing strategy for the product launch.

For instance, Beta testing data shows that the “recommendations” feature in your ecommerce product is widely used. Beta testers who use this feature are more engaged than those who don’t. Therefore, focusing your marketing messaging on the recommendations feature can attract more engaged customers.

3. Create a product launch checklist

Keep a running list of all essential product launch-related tasks so nothing falls through the cracks as launch day approaches. Check off launch activities and tasks as they’re completed, and group them by type or by the team responsible for performing each item.

Product launch checklist example

Checklists vary from business to business and launch to launch, but there are a few action items to include in yours:

• Research and define your target audience
• Create a product launch timetable
• Identify relevant KPIs
• Choose distribution channels
• Craft marketing messaging
• Align internal stakeholders, including sales, IT, customer support, and marketing teams
• Test and gather feedback
• After launch, review against key performance indicators (KPIs) and benchmarks to gauge success

4. Launch early and tweak as you go

Release your product as soon as its core features have been thoroughly tested. The sooner customers adopt your product, the sooner you can gather and analyze their valuable behavioral data to improve onboarding flows, identify churn points, and inform feature development.

How to measure product launch success

Your most recent product launch is unlikely to be your last. Analyzing what went well and what didn’t is essential for optimizing future launches. The following steps can help you achieve this:

1. Define relevant KPIs

Select KPIs that align with your end goals to track alongside a North Star Metric. These KPIs should be measurable, making it easy to monitor and evaluate success after your launch. Common KPIs for product launches include:

• Web traffic
• Revenue gained
• Leads generated
• Customer usage and retention
• Conversions (e.g., trial subscribers signed up or paid subscribers)

Calculating your KPIs will allow you to designate whether your campaign met or exceeded expectations.

2. Tracking and analyzing data

A successful launch generates a significant amount of data. To assess how well your efforts met KPI goals, track both marketing data from your website and behavioral data from your product. Leading companies monitor this data in the post-launch phase to pinpoint launch-specific results.

3. Gathering feedback

While many product metrics focus on quantity, understanding how your product and messaging were received requires direct customer feedback. Gather feedback through:

• Customer interviews
• Focus groups
• Surveys

Additionally, evaluate the launch within your company. Other teams might identify friction points in internal processes that you weren't aware of. Departments like IT or customer service may offer unique insights based on help tickets or direct customer requests.

Product launch template

A product launch template provides a comprehensive plan (which can inform the checklist mentioned above) to guide your product launch planning. It ensures you cover all essential tasks and understand the entire scope of the launch.

Pre-launch

• Launch plan and timeline: Create a detailed plan with a launch date, tasks, deadlines, and responsible team members.
• Market research and analysis: Conduct market research to understand trends, emerging technologies, customer needs, preferences, and competitor landscape.
• Product positioning statement and messaging: Define the product’s unique value proposition and positioning and create compelling messaging that speaks to your target audience and their needs.
• Launch goals and objectives: Set specific, measurable goals for the launch and identify KPIs to measure success.
• Resources and tools: Establish which tools, software, or resources you’ll need during the launch process (e.g., product and project management tools and an analytics platform).

Product development and testing

• Development milestones: Outline key milestones for product development leading up to the launch and assign responsibilities and deadlines for each milestone.
• Quality assurance and testing: Ensure the product is thoroughly tested for functionality, usability, and compatibility. Conduct beta testing with a select group of users to gather feedback.

Marketing and promotion

• Marketing strategy: Develop a comprehensive product marketing strategy for the pre-launch, launch, and post-launch phases. Identify channels and tactics to reach the target audience effectively.
• Content creation: Create engaging content assets such as videos, landing pages, social media posts, and email campaigns. Develop product demos, tutorials, or case studies to showcase key features and benefits.

Launch planning

• Customer support and feedback: Prepare customer support resources to handle inquiries, feedback, and technical issues. Monitor user feedback channels and respond promptly to user inquiries or concerns.

Post-launch

• Performance analysis: Evaluate launch performance against predefined KPIs and objectives. Analyze sales data, user feedback, and engagement metrics to identify areas for improvement.
• Iterative improvement: Iterate the product based on user feedback and performance insights.

Tools for a successful new product launch

It’s hard to build anything useful with the wrong tools, and product launches are no different. Luckily, there are many digital products to help you manage and fine-tune even the most complex product launch campaign.

Amplitude

Teams often use different tools for data management, leading to siloed data that is inaccessible across departments—a significant issue for extensive projects like product launches. Amplitude unifies data from various sources into a single, user-friendly platform, even for the least data-savvy employees.

Amplitude can help you:

• Unify data from your product, website, and other sources under a single umbrella
• Review beta testing data to see what features customers enjoy
• A/B test onboarding workflows to increase the likelihood of product adoption

Productboard

Productboard is a customer-driven product management system that helps teams bring the right products to market faster. It creates compelling roadmaps, prioritizes features dynamically, and centralizes market feedback.

Amplitude integrates with Productboard, allowing you to filter customer feedback based on Amplitude-created cohorts and categorize insights. This helps product managers make informed decisions about new features and their impact.

Learn more about the Productboard integration.

Product Hunt

Product Hunt is designed to facilitate product launches. Companies post their new products to build buzz before launch. Users upvote helpful or interesting products, boosting their rankings.

The Product Hunt audience includes promoters, product managers, and investors who can advocate for your product. Successful Product Hunt launches—like those of Hotjar, Slack, and Trello—require careful planning but can significantly boost visibility.

Trello

Trello is an app that enables teams to create Kanban-style boards for projects. Collaborators can create cards for specific tasks and organize them into categories such as “Pre-Launch,” “Launch,” and “Post-Launch.” These tasks can be assigned to members of the Trello board, who, in turn, can mark each card as “completed” once the task is finished.

References

• A 4-step Product Hunt launch guide to help you become “Product of the Day.” Appcues.
• The case for product discovery: A 4-step guide to saving time and money. Appcues.
• The Kanban Way: How to Visualize Progress and Data in Trello. Trello.