It doesn’t matter what product a team is building. When launch day comes, it’s impossible not to feel a little giddy — and a little nervous. For all the research, cross-collaboration, testing and iterating that goes into making a product, the launch day marks a big moment of truth: Will this product actually work as intended? Will users like it?
Instead of crossing their fingers and hoping for the best, good product leaders know that there are several best practices teams can utilize to avoid a bumpy rollout. Take Kyle Boston, product lead at Rippling. On his team, he said a lot of up-front testing and time spent anticipating users’ needs can save big headaches down the line.
“We consider how the product experience could be different for different personas, on different devices and with differing account configurations and data sets,” Boston said. “Although this takes valuable time before the product release, it helps prevent unexpected issues discovered by your customers, which is worse.”
Kevin Weil, president of product and business at Planet, agrees. For larger projects, his team will kick-off a brainstorming session far in advance of a launch to flag potential issues that could arise and come up with solutions for if something does go awry.
“Sometimes, these plans help you prevent a bad outcome,” Weil said. “Other times, they are simply a plan for how to act if the unexpected happens so the team can respond gracefully to the situation.”
While both Weil and Boston emphasize the need to lay careful groundwork prior to a launch, they had no shortage of additional insights. Built In SF connected with the two professionals to learn more about how their teams work together to ensure successful product rollouts and are able breathe easy on launch day.
What Planet is building: Planet designs, builds and launches Earth-imaging satellites. This data allows those back on the ground to learn more about global events, manage risk and predict change. To Weil, one of the most important rules in product launches is to keep things simple. Yes, even when launching satellites into space.
What’s one key step you take early on in the product development process to set your team up for a smooth and successful launch?
The most important part of the product development process is aligning on the problem to be solved: What is the problem and why is it a problem? And don’t just consider the problem on a superficial level, but in detail. If you can do that, then you have a team of people with a single goal, from product, engineering and design, to legal, marketing, sales and more.
This kind of shared context helps the team work quickly and autonomously and makes the launch and associated messaging sing. But most importantly, it creates a customer-focused mindset where the team is accountable to solving a problem, rather than building a feature.
How do you balance the desire to build the “perfect” product with the need to hit deadlines and get a product to market as quickly as possible?
When I was at Instagram, one of our values was “do the simple thing first,” which has always stuck with me. Don’t build for 100 million users off the bat; it’ll take you forever and you might be building the wrong thing without realizing it. Instead, build for 100 or 1,000 users, track metrics to determine whether it’s working, iterate until it is, then scale it.
But you can’t just launch anything — remember that the “v” in MVP stands for “viable”! That means that the product has to fulfill the essence of its promise. So you start with a problem to solve, build a solution that fulfills the essence of it, try it out with real customers, iterate rapidly and scale what works.
Don’t build for 100 million users off the bat; it’ll take you forever and you might be building the wrong thing without realizing it.”
Anything can happen when a new product is released. How does your team prepare for the unknown and ensure unexpected issues don’t derail the success of a product launch?
We prepare for the unknown with a launch in at least two ways: One is we ensure great communication and collaboration, so that everyone has full context and knows how to work well together in a crisis.
The second is to do a pre-mortem, where you brainstorm together what could go wrong in advance and then design mitigation plans. Sometimes, these plans help you prevent a bad outcome; other times they are simply a plan for how to act if the unexpected happens so the team can respond gracefully to the situation. These pre-mortems are a lot of work and so only make sense for larger launches, but they can be invaluable when done right!
What Rippling is building: Hiring new people is exciting. What’s less exciting is all of the work that goes into setting up their payroll, health insurance, personal computers and work tools, like Slack. Unless the company uses Rippling’s platform. The team specializes in building tech that can streamline HR and IT processes to get new hires up and running — in about a minute.
What’s one key step you take early on in the product development process to set your team up for a smooth and successful launch?
Articulate the user journeys. Regardless of whether this takes the form of a flow or a set of user stories, this step can build shared high-level understanding across the team on the desired user experience. Who are these users? What events may have led to them discovering your product? What are they trying to accomplish? What should their experience be once they arrive?
Outlining the experience from a user’s point of view can provide context behind the product requirements and can be referenced later when discussing trade-offs during development. This step can also be very useful for coordinating go-to-market efforts with the product marketing team when you’re preparing for launch.
How do you balance the desire to build the “perfect” product with the need to hit deadlines and get a product to market as quickly as possible?
There’s a never-ending list of features you could build, so it’s really important to be thoughtful around scoping decisions while recognizing that many features that don’t make it into “v1” may never make it into the product.
It’s important to understand the underlying customer needs your product is trying to solve and what alternatives they have. When determining what’s in scope for the first release of your product, make sure that it can sufficiently satisfy those needs.
Another important consideration is whether there are assumptions or hypotheses that you can validate before building the full feature set of a “perfect product.” The ability to test and learn — through research or releasing non-feature-complete products — can help inform future product decisions and can be less costly than getting to the goal line only to discover one of your key hypotheses was wrong.
There’s a never-ending list of features you could build, so it’s really important to be thoughtful around scoping decisions.”
Anything can happen when a new product is released. How does your team prepare for the unknown and ensure unexpected issues don”t derail the success of a product launch?
Tests, tests, and more tests.
Make sure there are robust tests of the code, while extensively testing the user experience, including the unhappy paths. Our team enumerates the test scenarios and expected outcomes, seeking to automate whatever tests we can and manually testing what we can’t. We try to dog food our own products whenever possible. The user flows we defined at the beginning of the project can be a good starting point for these tests, but also anticipate and test the edge cases that may be non-obvious ways that your product could break for users.
For example, we consider how the product experience could be different for different personas, on different devices and with differing account configurations and data sets. Although this takes valuable time before the product release, it helps prevent unexpected issues discovered by your customers, which is worse.
