Can you please outline a "Launch Framework" and go through an example of implementing such a framework for one of the companies for which you have worked?

Question

Julia Szatar · Accepted Answer

Product announcements are a growth lever, and everything the product team ships is a marketing opportunity. But, not all opportunities should be treated equally, especially if your product team is shipping at a high velocity (like we do at Loom).

We use a tiering system from 1-4, 1 being the most important type of launch. To determine what tier a product or feature launch is in, we ask ourselves two questions.

1. Will this retain customers or attract customers?
 2. Is this a new invention or is it a table-stakes feature?

It's best to visualize it, there is a good blog post on this by Matt Hodges: https://www.intercom.com/blog/prioritizing-product-announcements-saas-world/.

We used this approach when determining the scale of our loomSDK launch back in June this year. So we asked ourselves the above questions. The answer was yes, the loomSDK will attract a new audience for us – Partners & Developers. And, yes, it's a new invention - the ability to integrate async video into your application.

Yes + Yes = Tier 1 launch! (See the 2 by 2 in via the link for clarity).

Tier 1 launch meant that we used all channels available to us at the time: Press, Social, Email, Product Hunt, Paid Advertising, etc.

Marcus Andrews · Answer

This is a bit hard without writing a novel but luckily I wrote that novel not too long ago - check out this post.

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/elements-flawless-product-launch-li

It's pretty easy to find a good framework that you like - the trick is tailoring it for your busienss and executing it. The right answer here is that you will develop something customer for your biz based on something like what I shared here.

Dave Daniels · Answer

Check out the BrainKraft Product Launch Framework. It could be helpful in your journey. A launch framework differs from a launch checklist in how prescriptive each are. Frameworks provide structure and direction, often where there are many unknowns that need to be identified and addressed. Checklists are great when there are few unknowns.

Here's a link to the Launch Framework.

Chase Wilson · Answer

Launch frameworks vary wildly depending on some fundamental questions:

* Is your company well-known or resource-rich?
 * Are you B2C or B2B?
 * Do you have a Freemium offering?
 * How long do you expect the sales cycle to be?

Once you establish answers to these questions you can more effectively choose:

* Which channels are viable
 * Which channels are likely to be successful
 * What channels you need to put the most effort towards
 * Which tactics will best drive engagement through those channels

When you've created a plan you can start to work backwards. At that point you would find the hard dependencies within your organization and plot out dates to make sure everything is set up correctly for the launch.

Here is an example of a (basic) launch roadmap and a channel prioritization matrix.

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