What Is a Launch Strategy?

Your product launch strategy delineates the approach you plan to take in getting your product to market. You can start ruminating over what to include in your launch strategy as early as the conception phase. However, what you initially plan must evolve as a more details emerge in the later stages of product development.

Ultimately, your strategy needs to cover all assumptions about sales and marketing for the product launch. It should lead to creation of a solid estimate of the scope, resources needed, and budget required to give the product a strong start. When a new product is involved, launch costs can occasionally exceed the cost of product development.

When your strategy is complete, you should have a clear idea of all activities to pursue in launching the product, their costs, and the initial timeline for deployment.

Four Key Points to Include

1 – Who are your top priority audiences for the product?

2 – What are the main ways you will try to reach these priority audiences?

3 – What are the key messages you need to communicate?

4 – What are your objectives? What do you plan to achieve?

What Are the Specifics to Include in Your Launch Strategy?

• Targeted sales channels – Will you use TV, radio, word-of-mouth, demonstrations, Internet or something else?

• Marketing Collateral – What support materials will be needed?

• Sales tools, demos, and training requirements – How will you equip your sales force to clearly communicate your product’s value and uses?

• Advertising and demand generation activities – What will you use to create a desire to buy?

• Sales promotions – What initiatives will you launch to get the word out?

• Public relations, industry, and social media initiatives – What can you do to build buzz through press releases, industry buzz, and social media posts?

You’ll also want to consider tradeshow and event needs; your field testing strategy; your sales forecast by the various channels; your measurable launch objectives; and high-level timeline, milestones, and budget.

The Completed Launch Strategy

Please remember: your initial ideas aren’t cast in stone. Your assumptions and plans will morph through various stages. When you finally get to the point of crafting a solid launch strategy your document should have eight characteristics:

1 – It must identify the audience(s) and competitive targets

2 – Your messaging must be solidly developed

3 – Your launch plans must align with the overall product strategy and development plan

4 – You must prioritize go-to-market activities to focus on the most important

5 – Develop measureable short and long-term criteria for assessing the success of the launch

6 – Earmark any emerging activities or capabilities that must be sourced or developed

7 – Align your plan with your company’s marketing and distributions strengths

8 – Make sure the plan provides for input and support from targeted channels

A lot goes into creating a launch strategy that really delivers. Follow these ideas and you’ll be ready to make a strong start.

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Defining a Product Vision Document

The Product Vision document looks into the future. It presents a 30,000-foot view of what you plan for the product to be in the future and its anticipated value.

The Role of the Product Strategy Document

Your Product Strategy document explains what high-level actions will need to take place in order for your product to live up to the anticipated deliverables in the Product Vision document. Just as important, the Product Strategy document sets boundaries for activities that should not be pursued.

It’s easy to understand why these two vital documents are often presented together.

Three Things Product Vision and Strategy Should Provide

A well conceived Product Vision and Strategy will:

• Present a statement about what you envision the product will be in the future and how it will benefit its market.
• Cover high-level actions that must be taken in order to fulfill the promise presented in your document.
• Outline measurable objectives that include both short and long-term goals as they relate to the product.

Characteristics Specific to a Well Developed Product Vision

• Present a clear view of where you see the product in one year or perhaps many years, depending on the product lifecycle.
• Define your target customers and how the product will help them solve challenges. Clarify the value to be derived from the product.
• Set a high bar that pushes product team innovation.
• Make sure that the level you set is high enough that it won’t change every time there’s a shift in market dynamics.

Characteristics of an Excellent Product Strategy

A well thought out product strategy can set the stage for your product roadmap. Your Product Strategy needs to offer clearly defined phases that lead up to meeting the Product Vision. It should include the key activities your product team will undertake toward meeting the Product Vision. Your Product Vision acts as your north star guiding your decisions. However, your Product Strategy will evolve over time in response to changing market conditions.

Your Product Strategy should also be centered on objective time lines associated to business metrics related to customers, the competition, the market, or financials. You also need to include shorter-term milestones with specific deliverables. Make it clear all along the way what the next steps should be.

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Recently we’ve discussed the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis. Today, we’re going to consider a tool that drills down to the product feature level and allows the product team to compare competitors’ products to your solution. This tool is the Competitive Analysis Matrix. A Competitive Analysis Matrix is usually presented in a spreadsheet format. However, many such charts include 8 or more features. Complex products can include twice that many feature comparisons.

How the Competitive Analysis Matrix Works

The purpose of the Competitive Analysis Matrix is to identify gaps in your competitors’ offerings. Your matrix should include a row for each feature to be considered. It should also include a column for each competitor with qualitative rankings of each feature in the competitors’ products. This means a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ ranking won’t cut it. Your team needs to become as familiar with the competitive products as possible so you’ll feel comfortable evaluating each.

Market Importance

The market importance column is particularly significant. It is likely that your competitors have added some features to their products to meet the needs of a particularly important customer. These will not necessarily have overall appeal in the marketplace. By assigning a high, medium, or low ranking to each feature, you will be able to identify those features which you can probably cut from your product. This can help you save valuable resources and money. Every feature adds cost. The Competitive Analysis Matrix will help you hone in on the features that are most important. Once these are covered in your budget, you can start adding on other items that will appeal to the market as resources permit. Features should be added according to their ability to help your customers meet their goals.

Four Things a Basic Competitive Analysis Matrix Will Include:

1 – High-level Feature Sets – Group the features that are related together to simplify the matrix. It is easy for your team to get bogged down if huge individual features are considered separately.

2 – End-to-End Customer View – Don’t get off track by including just characteristics of the physical product. Include attributes that impact the entire user experience. This can cover such things as how the product is purchase, delivered, installed, supported, and maintained. By evaluating these items you may open avenues for product differentiation.

3 – Measure How Well Features Perform – Don’t allow yes or no answers. Remember this is a qualitative comparison.

4 – Measure of the Market’s Importance – Most likely your competitors have included features that are not highly valued by most customers. There is no need to match competitors feature for feature. Build the product the market wants no matter what you see competitors doing.

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In case you didn’t immediately see it, TOWS stands for Threats, Opportunities, Weaknesses, and Strengths. To show how the SWOT and TOWS matrices complement each other, I’ve included both below.

Consider Possible Strategies

The left column of the TOWS chart identifies possible strategies you can leverage to take advantage of opportunities and avert threats identified in SWOT. For example, if your organization is particularly strong in its development processes, you should consider how you could use this strength to make the most of newly opened opportunities.

Strategic Options

The right column in the TOWS matrix reveals strategic options your team can take to neutralize threats and maximize your opportunities. For example, if you can seize a growth opportunity by utilizing your product line, you may offset a weakness in a declining market.

Your product team has a full set of options for addressing threats and opportunities.  The ones you pursue first should make the most of your strengths and reduce weaknesses.

Four Things A Good TOWS Analysis Has

1. A full view of your external environment, major factors that impact your business, and projected threats and opportunities.
2. A realistic assessment of your internal strengths and weakness in relation to the threats and opportunities identified.
3. Strategy options that leverage strengths and diminish weaknesses for each identified threat and opportunity.
4. A prioritized roll-up of the strategy options into initiatives. These will drive project selection going forward.

When all this has been done, you need to be prepared to defend what you’ve developed. Be aware that some people may be not align to your thoughts and plans. You can back up your plans by gathering relevant data and customer quotes to ensure you are on the right course and prepared to address any concerns.

Looking Ahead

Next week, we’ll consider the development of the Product Concept.

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SWOT is a way for you to assess the current situation of your company, a product, or even a competitor. Armed with this analysis, you will be able to formulate a strategy for moving forward.

Through the use of SWOT, you can gain a full view of what you face internally and externally, including both positives and negatives of your situation. Let’s take a closer look.

SWOT Matrix

A SWOT matrix is a four by four illustration. The top row lists strengths and weaknesses of the product or organization under consideration. These listings are based on your current view. The listings under the bold headings are common areas to consider when assessing the internal view.  These include things such as:

• Product Capabilities
• Company Competencies
• Market Position
• Key Resources
• Strong Processes or Quality
• Key Partnerships

Opportunities and Threats

The lower half of the SWOT Matrix is concerned with Opportunities and Threats. These concern elements external to your company. They cover trends or events that may impact your company’s situation later on.

Opportunities refer to factors that may positively affect your product or company. Threats are those forces that may negatively impact the situation. The analysis focuses on a fluid situation that can be impacted by:

• Movement in the Market
• Competition
• Technology
• Processes
• Resources
• Your partners

A Key Factor

As you are considering your SWOT matrix, remember that the upper tier (Strengths and Weaknesses) concerns your product and company in a competitive landscape. The lower tier, Opportunities and Threats, deals with trends and situations in markets outside your company.

Here’s an example:

If you may not get the parts you need to build the product, that is a weakness, not a threat. If your market is becoming more tech-saavy, that’s an opportunity.

The SWOT Matrix won’t tell your team what to do. It will prepare you to take the next step, which is to consider your options strategically. You’ll explore how to seize opportunities and reduce threats. All the while, you’ll have a clear idea of your company’s or product’s strengths and weaknesses so you can factor them into your strategic decisions.

Looking Ahead

Now that we’ve looked at the SWOT Matrix, my next post will present the TOWS Matrix, which is SWOT spelled backwards. A look at your situation from this view presents new insights that can be valuable to your team.

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The GE-McKinsey Matrix

The GE-McKinsey Matrix simply gives your organization more nuanced options for how products are categorized. Instead of just four boxes, the grid now includes nine. By replacing Market Growth (used on the BCG Growth-Share Matrix) with Industry Attractiveness, you have the option of weighting your decision based on such factors as:

• Size of the Market
  • Intensity of the Competition
  • Market Growth

The result often is a clearer view at your product mix and opportunities.

The GE-McKinsey Matrix Horizontal Axis

As with the vertical axis, the relabeling of the horizontal axis from Market Share to Competitive Position opens up new ways to examine your market. Now, you can factor in other corporate strengths such as:

• Brand Equity
• Your Company’s Core Competencies
• Distribution Strength

Nine Boxes Vs Four

With the GE-McKinsey grid, you have nine possible options of how to view products. Your alternatives now range from clear winners to invest and grow to products you need to phase out and cut loose.

Elements of a Good Product Portfolio Management Process

No matter which analysis method you choose, you need to be sure it includes the following:

• Allocation of resources that aligns with your corporate goals across multiple product activities
• A balance of product activities with diversity across products you currently have and what you’ll need to develop as tomorrow’s winners; current and future markets; and short-term versus long-term revenue sources

Upcoming Post

Next week my post will take a look at the SWOT Analysis and how it will help you gain a clearer view of your product’s current and prospective standing.

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Managing the Product Portfolio

Your product portfolio links your specific product strategy to the overall company strategy. Within the product portfolio you should find the complete suite of products, including those that currently exist and those that are planned for the future. By actively managing the product portfolio, you help ensure that your company meets its goals.

The product portfolio management process links your company’s high-level resource/budget allocation to the strategic initiatives or the product roadmap(s). The process of managing the product portfolio is also linked to what is a more tactical project portfolio management regimen. This discipline manages the approval and tracking of specific projects tagged as being supportive of the overall product portfolio initiatives.

Analyzing the Product Suite

Successful product leaders know not only where to invest, but just as important, where not to put their resources.

Boston Consulting Group (BCG) devised a simple way to communicate how to handle market analysis. It revolves around a dog, a cow, a star, and a question mark.

BCG’s Growth-Share Matrix

Using this approach, market growth rate is shown on the vertical axis and relative market share on the horizontal. Products that fall in the lower right box are those with low growth potential and low market share in your company. In other words, these are the dogs. Anything that falls in this quadrant is definitely on its way out. By pulling investment from the dogs, you free up resources to use in more productive quadrants.

The upper right quadrant displays a question mark. This represents products that usually will require your company to invest in order to improve your share of the market. However, since the prospect for market growth is high, the products represented here have high potential for the future.

Now let’s move to the upper left quadrant where you find the star products. These are the products where your company has a high share of the market and there is high potential for growth.

Finally, in the lower left quadrant are the cows – the CASH Cows. These are successful mature products. Your company has a high share of the market, but growth potential is pretty low. These are the products that produce profit you can invest in your stars and question marks hopefully to turn them into stars.

Looking at the Matrix Over Time

As time passes, things change. You will see your cash cows gradually morph into dogs as new and better products come into the market. You’ll also see today’s question marks evolve into tomorrow’s stars as the current stars replace the cash cows or rotate out of the 2-by-2 matrix entirely.

This visual clearly shows the importance of keeping a pipeline full of emerging products you can grow into robust winners for your company.

Next Week

Through my next post we’ll take a look at other product management tools starting with the GE-McKinsey Matrix, another tool that can be very helpful in your product portfolio management.

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Question: How do you track, review, and develop ideas from your employees, customers, and suppliers? (Check one.)

What Responses Tell Us

Nearly half of all respondents (48.2%) indicated that their organizations have no formal system for tracking, developing, and managing ideas. Other responses were more equally distributed including use of a CRM tool (14.2%), reliance on an in-house solution (15.4%), and use of an off-the shelf cloud or premises-based system.

Question: What criteria do you use to prioritize requirements? (Check all that apply.)

Criteria to Prioritize Requirements

A Closer Look at Responses

Nearly 60% of respondents indicated that the size/influence of a customer is a primary way their organizations prioritize requirements. Respondents also highly rated development cost (54.0%), revenue (50%), technical criteria (46.8%), risk (44.4%), profitability (42.1%), and key internal stakeholder influence (38.9%). It is reassuring that thumb in the wind and treating everything as a priority ranked much lower as criteria for prioritizing requirements. These two earned just 11.5% and 10.7% responses respectively.

Coming Up

Next week we’ll take a closer look at team product backlog. We’ll also consider which product development requirement format makes on-boarding new employees easier.

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Make Use of Existing Training Regimes

You don’t need to create a separate meeting to disperse competitive information.  Depending on teams’ geographic distribution, you can make use of planned on-site meetings, conference calls, or other formats favored by your organization.

Small organizations typically rely on face-to-face meetings to cover the competitive landscapes. Large organizations often must rely on other more removed formats. No matter how the information is initially shared, it should be posted behind a firewall protected marketing intranet site.  Or, use of another secure central repository. This allows the ongoing training of new team members.

Legal Considerations

Before anything is shared with employees, have your legal team review the competitive information to minimize legal risk. The truth is, no matter how you guard the information inevitably it will make its way into the market.

Be sure to reinforce to employees that the information shared is for internal use only. It should not be shared with anyone outside the company.

Presenting the Information

It’s wise to co-present competitive information to teams with a cross-functional team member. This person can enhance understanding by sharing anecdotes that give the information value and context.

A Final Word about the Competitive Information

If you are sharing only a point-in-time competitive analysis, make sure this information in your analysis is updated at least annually.

Capturing Near Real-Time Market Info

It is virtually impossible to capture competitive information in real time. However, it is possible to acquire information in near real-time. To do this, you’ll need to develop a cross-functional market intelligence system.

Contact leaders in all company teams that interact with clients directly. Have these individuals agree to a format for sharing intelligence with product management. The format should be short and easy to use by both the team leader and product management.

As information flows in, product management needs to analyze it and share updates with all parties involved. By sharing the information to the group, you reinforce the value of the system. Ultimately, it helps customer-facing teams gain fresh knowledge that can improve results in the field.

Talk to your senior management about establishing an incentive system that will encourage leaders to share information. Once sharing information becomes expected practice, you will be well on your way to gaining a near real-time view of your market.

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Build a Competitive Analysis Specifically for Customer-Facing Teams

Those who deal directly with customers need competitive profiles created specifically for their needs. Knowing about competitors helps your sales staff deal most effectively with objections in the sales process. A point-in-time competitor profile can fulfill this need. Competitive profiles can be used to quickly get new team members up to speed and ready for the field.

Elements of a Useful Point-in-Time Competitive Profile

There are 12 elements in a point-in-time competitive analysis profile:

• Competitor’s name
• History of the organization
• Business model and revenues
• Mission
• Vision
• Strategy
• Estimated client levels (overall and by product)
• Partnerships
• Positioning
• Detailed analysis of product/service offerings and stated benefits
• Prices
• Recent developments

Sure, it takes time to build such an analysis of each competitor. However, the help it provides is well worth the effort. Plus you’ll be surprised at the information you can gather rather easily. Be sure to check these resources first:

• Competitors’ annual reports
• Company websites
• Press releases
• Articles
• Social media
• Win/loss analyses

Also be sure to check out Hoovers, a source of information on industries, companies, and corporate executives.

What to Include in the Organizational History

Pay close attention to how the competitor describes itself on its website and in literature. When was it founded? What changes has the company experienced since  inception? You’ll probably find these answers in the annual report and on the company’s website.

What to Learn About the Competitor’s Business Model

Is the company privately or publicly held? Is the competitor solely focused on your market or is it part of a larger organization? Can you determine the annual revenue? Revenue figures will be easier to locate if the company is publicly held.

Finding the Mission and Vision

The company mission should be presented on the company website. Regarding the vision, consider what it is focused on, how far it reaches, and what it implies. How does the company stack up to its vision at the current time? Are steps described that will help them fulfill their vision? Is the vision for three, five or 10 years?

Identifying the Competitive Strategy and the Client Numbers

To find your competitor’s strategy, try to review investor presentations. Information can also be found on the website and even in press releases. To find what your competitor says about their client numbers, check out information available in the public domain. Be aware that methods used to calculate these numbers can lead to inflated estimations. Pay special attention to who’s listed as key customers.

Partnership, Positioning, Products, and Pricing

What partnerships do your competitors flaunt? Are these partners strategic, channel, marketing relationships, or something else? It helps if you can determine what needs these partners meet. This information also gives you a view of what the company sees as its weak areas.

Next consider how the competitor positions itself and its products. Succinctly describe each product. What are the products’ capabilities?  What does your competitor highlight? How do your own products compare to the competition’s? What have you discovered that will help your sales team in the sales process?

To discover your competitor’s pricing, listen closely to your own customers. You may get hints about the pricing from them. You may also find pricing information in the public domain. Tread lightly if using information not found in the public domain. To do otherwise could lead to a lawsuit.

Lastly, note any recent developments with the competition. Is there a new CEO, a refreshed strategy, or a new product?

In my next post, I’ll discuss how to use the information you’ve gathered to best help your customer-facing team members.

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