How do you ensure a product is ready for launch to customers? What kind of customer feedback, beta or pilots would you recommend?

Before launching a product, it's important to conduct thorough testing and validation. Gathering feedback from the target audience can reveal valuable insights that can be used to improve the product. When collecting feedback, focus on product functionality, overall experience, and perceived value.

• Closed alpha or beta tests with a select group of trusted customers or partners can uncover bugs, usability issues, or potential enhancements. It's important to include participants with a diverse range of user personas to capture different use cases.

• Conducting pilot programs or limited releases can provide insights into longer-term product use and value. This involves allowing potential customers to use the product in real-world scenarios, often at a reduced price or for free. It's important to gather feedback not only on technical aspects, but also on users' understanding and perception of the product's value proposition. This information can inform marketing and sales strategies.

Maintaining open communication channels with participants, acknowledging feedback, and demonstrating responsiveness can help build trust and transform early testers into product champions upon 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. 

Best case scenario - Beta customer/s are willing to do a named case study with video talking about the launch

Worst case - Beta customer/s quotes from the PM calls can be anonymized and shared on the website/launch blog

If it is a really significant launch, something that is going to affect in-consequential amount of revenue, then I'd like to work with the customers and try to get them to talk our press/analysts before/after the launch. Compensate them plenty with swag :) 

I don’t know that there’s a single answer to this question. The most successful launches I have been involved in had enough direct feedback to generate 6-10 customer references that included quantifiable metrics. However, market conditions and internal demands often set a much lower bar, especially in smaller companies.

At the ABSOLUTE minimum, your internal team should be comfortable with the product. I once stopped a launch in its final days (which required an escalation to the CEO) because I knew that the product’s usability issues would far outweigh the benefits of the new features. Thankfully, more software companies today build customer feedback into multiple stages of development and do formal beta programs.

Beyond product readiness, your launch goals should drive the timing of your launch. What are you trying to achieve? If your goal is to get press coverage, you’ll need compelling customer references. If your goal is to upsell existing customers, you may need some aggregate metrics you can put into your sales presentation along with a good user guide to support pilots.