Never fail a product launch again (+ free template)

Grab my free battle-tested GTM launch template and learn how to make product launches easy, effortless, and exciting!

👋 Heya! It’s Alicia. Welcome to Customer Focus - a newsletter to help you accelerate growth by putting your customers at the heart of your business.

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We've all trudged through messy launches. 

Resigned to launch dates getting kicked down the road in perpetuity. 

Witnessed upset colleagues who felt left in the dark. 

Dealt with frontline teams who discover new features from the customers themselves.

Been confronted with disappointed customers noticing that the brands they love are unraveling at the seams.

Yeesh. Painful. 🤯

From marketing campaigns to product announcements and beyond, launching things is hard work. They require planning, organization, and most importantly, highly collaborative working. 

So with teams commonly reporting that their work feels siloed away from the business, then no wonder launches can easily feel chaotic, disjointed, and sometimes downright sloppy. 

You’re wasting time, accepting pain, and hurting your customer experience

A few little truth bombs from HCM's Technology Report: 

• Teams, on average, waste >20 hours per month due to poor collaboration and communication - equating to 6 weeks per year.

• In North America, collaboration and communication silos cost even more: 7 hours per week totaling more than 350 hours per year. 

And this pain isn't just felt internally. It affects the customer experience, too:

• 54% of organizations report their customer experience operations are managed in silos.

• The overall impact of bad customer experiences in the US alone is $537B (Source: Dimension Data).

So how do we overcome this, and take all of the thinking out of crafting smooth, effortless, and consistently successful product launches?

You need a launch template that works harder for you

I’d like to share my battle-tested GTM launch template that I built during my time at Deliveroo, and still use to manage launches for my early-stage work building Lune.

In fact, this template has served me so well over the past 4 years, I also give it to Lune’s customers to ensure they’re GTM-ready to launch a quality climate offering.

Get your new GTM Product Launch Tracker

This can serve as a basis for your new product launch template; please see this as a starting point for your own iteration and creative improvements. 

In the template, there are eight sections. You may find it helpful to hide some of these sections or add additional ones - depending on the needs of your business and your internal team dynamics. 

The eight sections are: 

1. Building the product

2. Finding product market fit 

3. Beta testing & feedback loops

4. Stakeholder alignment 

5. GTM strategy building

6. Channel execution

7. Going live

8. Scaling adoption

In the coming weeks, we'll dive into each one of these sections to understand what it means, why it matters, and how to ensure that everything you build, ship, and measure is rooted in customer focus.

‘Launch Day’ is a milestone, not a destination

One of my key principles of good Product Marketing is embedding customer focus throughout the product development lifecycle.

In fact, I do not know how you can be a successful product marketer without embedding equally within the tech world, the commercial landscape, and the reality of customer experiences.

Launches are only a ‘failure’ when there are inappropriate expectations of immediate results, or ‘success’ at the point of launch.

This is impossible and frankly stupid to expect of a team, of your product, and of your customer to immediate understand a) what’s been shipped, b) why it matters to them, and c) to immediately change their behaviour and adopt the new feature/product.

Launch Day is an important milestone. Go out and get team drinks, celebrate, but the next morning, I want you laser focused on answering these questions:

1. What are customers actually saying about it? Do they actually know it’s out?

2. What are our frontline teams saying about it? Is it difficult to sell? What objections are they hearing from prospects/customers?

3. Can we see any critical gaps in value / jobs to be done (JTBD) that our customers expect from this new experience?

When you shift your mindset around launches being a process of iteration towards success, all of the customer feedback loops that I’ve written about in earlier content now becomes critical.

Understanding the purpose and importance of different GTM launch stages

When you adopt the mindset of product launches as an iterative process that’s rooted in customer focus, and you get your whole cross-functional team rallying behind the shared goal of scaling better customer experiences, you really start to feel like this:

As opposed to the all too common reality of siloed work, finger-pointing blame (Commercial can’t sell! Tech can’t ship anything worth selling!), and mountains of pressure piled onto everyone’s shoulders to hit a superfluous commercial target that’s imposed onto an all-too-short amount of time to make it happen:

Over the next few weeks, on top of the deep dives into each different GTM launch stages, I’d also like to share with you a bit about the different milestone goals to attribute to different phases of a launch process - from alpha, beta, 100% global launch, and iterating towards success in the weeks/months thereafter.

Here’s to growth,

Alicia

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