Greg Geracie, Actuation Consulting, Take Charge Product Management

Product Launch – Five Things Product Team Members Would Change

In 2013, 2014, Agile, Product Management, Product Marketing, Product Owner, Product Teams, Project Management, The Study of Product Team Performance, Uncategorized, User Experience by [email protected]

As discussed in last week’s post, product launch continues to a be a consistent pain point for many organizations. Based upon the responses from our 2013 Study of Product Team Performance there appears to be five areas in particular that product teams would fix – IF they were empowered to do so. 

When we asked the question “If you were responsible for fixing the product launch process what would you do to correct the situation? (Write in your answer.)” we got the following responses in order of priority. Here are the top five…

  1. Improved Ownership and Communication – in other words, a singular person accountable for the launch and responsible for effective cross-functional communication.
  2. Hire the “Right” Resources – many product teams feel that they lack the specialized knowledge, specifically marketing expertise, to get the job done right the first time.
  3. Better Launch Planning – far too often the product launch planning process is compressed at the end of the product development activities without sufficient time to develop a coherent plan in order to align objectives, strategies and tactics.
  4. Increased Budget – many respondents cite a lack of sufficient resources to achieve the launch objectives.
  5. More Clarity on Roles and Responsibilities – there is often a lack of understanding of who is doing what which impacts the effectiveness of the product launch.

While all of these are significant issues, many product team members indicate that their teams suffer from more than one of these problems. In addition to the top five listed here, there are five more issues cited by product team members as frequent pain points and areas they would like to change. These include:

  • More Frequent Cross-Functional Meetings to Enable Real-Time Changes to the Plan
  • Upfront Development of Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s)
  • Executives Fully Vested in the Outcomes of the Product Launch
  • More Centralized Decision-Making
  • Better Launch Strategy

Clearly there is no lack of problems with product launch. Product team members understand the issues that are impeding success. The question is – what are organizational leaders doing to change this paradigm?