Speaking of failed product launches... here's a story about my own (AMA ft. videos!)

James and I joined the Launch Awesome community for an AMA on everything we learned from our failed launch.

Aug 17, 2022

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James and I recently joined Steve Klein from Launch Awesome (powered by LaunchNotes) for a live AMA on how we turned around a failed product launch.

We covered everything from how our horror story unfolded, to how we openly share ‘#Gong-Gold’ (gonna trademark this) to build customer empathy.

Below are some of the top snippets. Find the full video on LaunchNotes here.

But first, what is Launch Awesome?

Launch Awesome is a premium Slack community with +300 members where the world’s best Product Managers and Marketers discuss strategy, tactics, and pro tips used to successfully launch new features and products. Find out more and request your invite here.

In this post, you’ll learn:

Finding the courage to speak up and address problems
Maintaining trust when things get tough
Discovering (not building) your buyer personas
The sales deck is the ideal home for your narrative
What’s the best approach to launching things?
Sharing customer insights across the business

1. Finding the courage to speak up and address problems

Nobody wants to be the first person to say ‘uhh… this isn’t working’. But sometimes that needs to be said, acknowledging the tension that might exist, and getting ahead of what could be a car crash in slow motion.

Transcript:
James: "Even though we had the core concept we knew was valid, we knew it was a thing, we knew it should be working, we just weren't seeing that come through in the results at all."
Alicia: "I try to limit these at least per day, but I want to give James some props, because everyone knows that feeling of business as usual, everyone's cheery, this culture of positivity, which is good, but James was the first person who took that tension that we were all feeling where we were seeing flatline numbers, and he created space for that conversation, was like, okay, something's not good here, and really shifted the whole company's focus towards triaging and figuring out how do we actually go into problem solving mode.
And I think that's a really important thing, because I've seen that at several startups now where numbers and performance of a business are flatlining or the NPS is in the toilet, but no one really knows how to sound the alarm. So it takes a lot of courage to do that, especially in small teams, disrupt the status quo.
But I think that's pretty much what gave us the opportunity to turn things around."

2. Maintaining trust when things get tough

When we set about fixing multiple problems with our product launch – from poor pricing decisions to overly-complicated onboarding flows – we couldn’t do it alone. We used transparency as a tool, sharing what we had found and bringing our marketing, sales, product, engineering, and CS teams on the journey too.

Transcript:
Question: How did you build confidence with your team that the next decisions were the right ones in the wake of a failed launch?
Alicia: I think, and not because this was my work, but the transparency that we tried to bring, it was a bit unprecedented. We were really, really trying to own okay, look, hands up, this is not working. Giving all of the information that we had to everyone, it got people bought in to feeling that we were all fighting this one problem as a team versus trying to point blame. But also, yeah, I think that would probably be the main thing, is just consistent accountability and transparency. Leading with voice customer. James?"
James: "We weren't just fixing things and moving on to the next problem. We were iterating on these.
So we worked really closely with the engineering team, the website engineers and stuff like that. We're like, we don't know where our pricing is going to end up, we don't know what our onboarding is going to end up. But we think this is the right direction based on the evidence that we've heard so far. Let's give it a try. We just kept iterating towards that. I mean, it was a journey of at least probably four to six months in total. Getting to a point of satisfaction."
Steve: "Yeah, I'm probably butchering this. There's a saying that goes something like trust dies in darkness, or something like that. And yeah, I've found just kind of showing your work along the way and just constant updates around here's how things are going, here's what we're doing - goes so far in terms of just garnering that trust and respect."

3. Discovering (not building) your buyer personas

We can’t say it enough: don’t move ahead with your own biased assumptions of the people you sell to and what they care about.

Instead, look to your market and discover the buyer personas that actually exist.

Transcript:
Question: What launch strategy would you recommend and why? A "rolling thunder season of launching" or one big flash in the pan launch moment?‍
James: "I guess my opinion on that would be it really comes back to objectives that you're trying to have. I don't really use launch tiers. I'm more thinking about what's the outcome that we want to drive? What's the experience that we want customers to have and work from there. At Kayako we definitely focused on this Big Bang launch. It was all in one day, where we sunset the old product, we rolled out the new one. Definitely should have rolled that out a bit more slowly and done more of an evolution of the product or something like that. But the goal was like, look, we're going to cut this.
We want to get rid of the old world. We want to embrace the new world. That's the goal. Other companies, the principle is more about let's learn, let's validate, let's iterate our way towards where we want to get to. And the launch is less about making big noise, but about building a relationship with customers and the experience that we want to offer and things like that."
Alicia: "Before you hate on my launch tiers, they're organized by outcome that you want to drive!
But we really do agree on this mindset of iterating towards success. And I always say that you can never fail a launch if you don't put all of your eggs in one day basket.
If you launch with the mindset of, the first thing I want to do and measure success with this launch is to get feedback and feed that back into the business. That's a success. And if that can improve the quality and the traction of an MVP product or hitting certain commercial metrics or seeing a few points increase on an NPS measurement, better customer experience, that's success. And iterating towards this higher level vision, that's the way to go.
So I guess to answer your question, the Thunder one, but always to take the mindset of iterate and focus on customer feedback, and that will draw you towards the right direction of success. Yeah."
Steve: "My non answer for this is I feel like there's actually room for both, even if you're working towards, hey, we're going to throw this big customer summit in six months, and these are the major things we're going to launch. You can actually talk about them in bits and pieces, like, here's a work in progress update on what we're building and what we're thinking, and you can kind of do those along the way and still have your, hey, this is our big marketing moment for it."

4. The sales deck as the ideal home for your narrative

Your sales deck is the best place to build your narrative – but don’t miss the opportunity to use it as a conversation tool.

Transcript:
Question: "David PMM at Filevine asks -- How does narrative design ideally take shape in a company? Do you have certain assets and documents that are created and maintained over time to ensure distribution and consistency of the narrative?"
James: "For me is the Sales deck is the basis for adapting that narrative and that messaging and that positioning into all the other documents and deliverables and stuff like that. Narrative isn't just us telling a story, it's about us taking a prospect on that journey with us. So it has to be a conversation or something that you walk through, you have a conversation through, you have prompts that you're asking all the way through and bringing that on that journey.
Yeah. I think Narrative design is really interesting, and Marcus Andrews has done a lot of stuff about it and Andy Raskin and I think it's really interesting to see how different people approach it."
Steve: "Definitely. I love that it's grounded in your Sales deck. I feel like sales calls is like the number one place for you to go out and actually battle test this narrative. So having that be the home for it, I think, makes perfect sense."
Alicia: "It's also a more cost efficient way of testing new messaging, is developing a new deck, asking one salesperson go out and see how this performs. If it gets much traction, you have faster sales cycles, then maybe it's something you want to roll out further."

5. What’s the best approach to launching things?

Transcript:
Question: What launch strategy would you recommend and why? A "rolling thunder season of launching" or one big flash in the pan launch moment?‍
James: "I guess my opinion on that would be it really comes back to objectives that you're trying to have. I don't really use launch tiers. I'm more thinking about what's the outcome that we want to drive? What's the experience that we want customers to have and work from there. At Kayako we definitely focused on this Big Bang launch. It was all in one day, where we sunset the old product, we rolled out the new one. Definitely should have rolled that out a bit more slowly and done more of an evolution of the product or something like that. But the goal was like, look, we're going to cut this.
We want to get rid of the old world. We want to embrace the new world. That's the goal. Other companies, the principle is more about let's learn, let's validate, let's iterate our way towards where we want to get to. And the launch is less about making big noise, but about building a relationship with customers and the experience that we want to offer and things like that."
Alicia: "Before you hate on my launch tiers, they're organized by outcome that you want to drive!
But we really do agree on this mindset of iterating towards success. And I always say that you can never fail a launch if you don't put all of your eggs in one day basket.
If you launch with the mindset of, the first thing I want to do and measure success with this launch is to get feedback and feed that back into the business. That's a success. And if that can improve the quality and the traction of an MVP product or hitting certain commercial metrics or seeing a few points increase on an NPS measurement, better customer experience, that's success. And iterating towards this higher level vision, that's the way to go.
So I guess to answer your question, the Thunder one, but always to take the mindset of iterate and focus on customer feedback, and that will draw you towards the right direction of success. Yeah."
Steve: "My non answer for this is I feel like there's actually room for both, even if you're working towards, hey, we're going to throw this big customer summit in six months, and these are the major things we're going to launch. You can actually talk about them in bits and pieces, like, here's a work in progress update on what we're building and what we're thinking, and you can kind of do those along the way and still have your, hey, this is our big marketing moment for it."

6. Sharing customer insights across the business

At Lune, I created a #Gong-Gold channel to share insights and celebrate when customers repeat their value messaging without prompt. After sharing the concept more widely, it feels like this idea resonates with a lot of folks so I hope you do the same!

Transcript:
Alicia: "The only other thing I would add is that I try to do almost micro education and enablement across the whole business. I create a channel called like, Gong Gold where I go back and listen to Gong calls, and then I'll take a snippet and push it into a Slack channel and I encourage everyone else in the business to do the same, where we hear our unique value being communicated back to us. It's one of my favorite kind of qualitative proof metrics of messaging resonating. If someone can recall it and think it's their own words, it is their own words. When you hear that messaging reflected back to you is huge. So for us at Lune we have very particular messaging. That climate is not a cost center, it's a growth driver.
So whenever I hear that, I share it with the team, and then I draw a bunch of attention to it and be like, look, they're doing it, and get everyone really hyped up. What we're doing is working. And treating your internal stakeholders as internal customers is something that James and I talk about a lot. And you're trying to get them to feel that their work has this bigger purpose of the problems you're solving for real people. And so I find that really helpful in accelerating enablement or confidence speaking to that messaging outside of sales conversations. If I know this is working, it really sticks."

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