AMA: MyFitnessPal Vice President Product Marketing, Katie Levinson on Product Launch Strategy

You should define the success of your launch BEFORE you actually launch, and even before you finalize your go-to-market (GTM) strategy. This should be done in partnership with your fellow marketing cross-functional teammates, who will be responsible for helping move KPIs, and with the product team, whose strategy and goals will play a major role in your GTM strategy and plan. With that out of the way, a successful product launch really depends on your goals. Are you trying to attract a ton of new users? Engage existing users on your platform? Upsell people from a free version of your app to a paid one? Depending on the goals, you can start defining what a successful launch looks like. Some options/factors are: * Meeting/exceeding your specific business goals and KPIs * Press/awareness/impressions * Smooth technical launch, i.e., minimal bugs and complaints * Sustained engagement after the initial launch i.e., long-term success (you need to define what that is depending on your product/sales cycle) Just as important as the results is the how. Internal alignment to the launch strategy and plan is also a key part of success metrics.

Building on defining a successful product launch, measurement is a key factor in figuring out whether the launch is successful and what potential pivots you may need to make. The success of a product launch is typically measured by how well it meets business objectives, customer needs, and market expectations. As an example, for a new mobile app launch, KPIs could include daily active users (DAU), app downloads, retention rate at 7, 30, and 90 days, and user ratings in app stores. KPIs vary depending on the business goals but often include: * New Customer Growth: How many customers are using the product within a set period. Track metrics like the number of sign-ups and activations. * Revenue Growth: Measure things like immediate sales (if applicable), subscription growth, or increases in average order value. * Engagement: Track things like DAU, WAU, or MAU, depending on your business. Partner with analytics teams to understand how your launch affects these key metrics. * Churn Rate: If the product affects current users (e.g., an upgrade), monitor how many users drop off or unsubscribe. * Market Growth: Track how your company is performing relative to competitors. You could look at how you rank and how you’re moving on Apple and Play stores, as an example. * Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): Do a pre/post survey to understand customer satisfaction post-launch and understand if they would recommend the product. You could also run an in-product 1 question survey to gauge how people like the new feature.

Yes! There are many reasons why you may want to hold off on launching a feature or product after it’s already been released. This often happens when you want to either bundle a bunch of features for a coherent narrative, or there’s a time in the market when it would be better to capitalize (for instance, if there’s a large tech event where you can unveil your new product or feature to maximize press). To get a bit more specific, here are some scenarios: * Align with Market Timing: A competing product launch, economic event, or company-related factor (like a major news cycle) may make the current timing suboptimal. Conversely, a major event related to your industry or even seasonality. For seasonality, perhaps waiting until the highest number of users are interested, for example at MyFitnessPal that would be January for New Years health resolutions, would help boost your product launch since more people would already be in the mindset of looking for a product like yours that helps them with their problems. * Additional Testing Needed: If user testing or beta feedback indicates critical bugs or negative user experiences, and you’re seeing the same at initial release, you may need to hold back on promoting the product until it's fixed. * Testing Product-Market Fit/Experimentation: Sometimes you don’t know if the product or feature will fully solve the problem or appeal to your target audience, and you may actually roll it back. Oftentimes, features that are released may actually be in experimentation mode and evolving a lot, so it may make sense to hold off on a full launch until there’s more confidence that the feature or product in its current iteration is there to stay. You can also soft-launch a product by making it available to a limited audience for additional feedback while delaying the broader public launch.

There are a few things you can do to ensure a product is ready for launch. Some of this comes way before launch as part of “inbound product marketing” - conducting the research you need to feel confident that you have the right messaging, value props and RTBs in place, and are meeting your target audience where they are and solving the right pain points for them. Some of this research involves: * Foundational research: Depending on the size/scope of the launch and if it’s the first of its kind at your organization (vs building on top of existing product features/suite), you should be doing foundational research in partnership with your market research and UX research counterparts to really understand the market dynamics, competitive landscape, and pain points and attitudes/beliefs that your audience has * Positioning and messaging research, both quantitative and qualitative * Pricing testing: if it’s a paid product, you can get pretty sophisticated in how you price and promote your product/feature Once the product is available there’s more you can do to get real world feedback, as sometimes there can be a disconnect between what people say and how they actually end up behaving: * Beta Testing: Have a group of customers (and prospective customers) use the product in its beta form. I like to get a wide range of loyal users and people who have not used your product before, so you don’t have a lot of bias from only getting feedback from people who already love you and are familiar with your product. Get qualitative and quantitative feedback to identify usability issues, unexpected pain points and way to improve. This helps with debugging, user experience refinement, and gauging market response. It can also help refine your messaging as you hear verbatims from users about how they’re using your product and what they love about it, specifically how it’s helping them in their lives. * Pilots: For more complex products, you can run a pilot with a limited number of customers or regions. This will help you identify any challenges before scaling, and also help set expectations for launch success. Make sure you have a process set up for regular feedback loops and reporting so you can understand what is and isn’t working. * Internal testing: Test the product internally (often called dogfooding at companies) to ensure that there aren’t bugs and people are enjoying the experience. 

Not all products require a full formal launch. Small feature updates or enhancements can be released quietly or with just an internal announcement. Lighter product updates that help drive forward a strategy could leverage just a one off email or notification, and something more substantial but not a big rock launch could be launched through just your owned channels like lifecycle and social media. Huge product launches and times when you’re entering a new market could call for a launch formal lunch that also has paid spend behind it. You can use a system like “bronze, silver, gold” to define launch sizes for teams, which should be dependent on how much of your audience it impacts and the expected “ROI” of the effort which is tied to anticipated movement in KPIs/business goals. Include a definition and examples of when something would be bronze vs silver vs gold, and what channels you would likely use in each. This can help set expectations cross-functionally. For formal launches, think about whether it will: * Have a Significant Market Impact: New products or features that differentiate the company from competitors or open new revenue streams. * Require User Education: Products that need user onboarding, guidance, or explanation benefit from a formal launch to ensure users understand and engage with them correctly and thus keep coming back. * Influence Branding: Launches that showcase innovation or solidify your market position. * Meet Milestones: A feature that marks a major technical or customer experience milestone.

Getting alignment early and checking in often is incredibly important for not only a successful launch but also ensuring that people are bought in and excited for it. Here’s how I approach it: * Collaborate with Key Stakeholders Early: Make sure you bring in product managers, customer support, engineering, design and marketing teams from the very beginning. Each group will have valuable insights about customer pain points and help you to develop the best possible messaging strategy. * Conduct Messaging Workshops: A way to get all these different groups together and aligned early on is through a messaging workshop. If you’re remote, you can use tools like Mural to brainstorm and whiteboard together. It’s a good idea to do some prep work in advance. I like to level set everyone on who our target audience is, relevant pain points, what we’re launching, and any research we’ve done to date that could help inform messaging. Having people actively contribute like this helps to ensure buy-in from all departments. * Test Messaging with Customers: Use focus groups or 1:1 user interviews, surveys, or even A/B testing with your customers to validate messaging. Share this feedback with your cross-functional team and stakeholders so they can see how direct customer feedback is helping to refine the messaging and ensure that it resonates. * Create a Messaging Framework: A messaging framework will help you more easily showcase, share and get feedback on the messaging strategy, helping you to get everyone on the same page. This also ensures that communications—whether from PR, lifecycle marketing, ads (any of your marketing channels) and in product —are aligned. Here’s what I include in my messaging framework (in addition to background info on the target audience and the objective of the launch): * Overall positioning * Value propositions (what are the core benefits) * Reasons to believe (what features in product support the value props)