What are the biggest mistakes companies make when launching a new product, and how can they be avoided?

Unfortunately, I’ve seen many well-intentioned launches stall or underperform due to a handful of common pitfalls:

• Skipping Real Customer Validation: A common pitfall is to go straight from ideation to launch without rigorous beta or pilot testing. Instead, companies should aim to engage actual customers or prospects during development and test new features in a controlled environment. Early feedback helps you refine usability and positioning before the full launch. The gold standard to aim for here is to have referenceable customers from the beginning who can voice for the value and quality of the product.
  

• Failing to Differentiate: Sometimes companies offer a product that’s just another “me-too” feature set or not emphasizing how it stands apart from existing solutions. Here, product marketers in particular can contribute by crafting clear, compelling messaging that highlights exactly why your product is unique, whether that’s capabilities, pricing, service, or another angle. To do so, PMM needs to work closely with product to ensure that the product is positioned for success from the get-go.
  

• Misaligned Internal Teams: Sometimes, Product, Sales, and Marketing all have different understandings of the launch plan, so they end up sending mixed signals to customers and the market. To avoid this, make sure to bring everyone into one unified launch group, including sharing a plan with the same timeline, goals, and messaging. Remember to kick off the project with the right stakeholders, drive buy-in throughout the launch, and conduct internal launch briefings or workshops as needed to ensure alignment.
  

• Overlooking Training & Enablement: Sometimes marketing teams jump the gun by launching externally but leaving sales or customer success teams in the dark on how to pitch and support the new offering. To address this, remember to provide training well before the external announcement. Arm teams with FAQs, competitive battlecards, a clear elevator pitch, and anything else they need to avoid confusion and ensure a clear message from everyone across all external-facing teams.
  

• Neglecting Post-Launch Follow-Through: Another mistake is treating launch day as the finish line and not following up with ongoing content, support, or product improvements. This sometimes means that momentum quickly fizzles out. When planning for the launch, remember to also plan a 30/60/90-day post-launch cycle. Continue releasing new case studies, hosting webinars, collecting user feedback, and refining your product roadmap to keep up the momentum.

By avoiding these missteps—validating your solution, clearly articulating differentiation, aligning internally, enabling your teams, and sustaining momentum—you stand a much better chance at a successful launch that truly resonates with your market. Hopefully this helps!

Some of the "mistakes" I've experienced across a few different companies that can cause friction both internally as well as externally are:

1. Not truly understanding your customers problem before you build:

• You build off of your own echo chamber/vibes/or an internal edge case without really talking with customers before launching. Or potentially not aligning internally. It typically makes it so you waste cycles and or worse— deprecate or phase out a product, which can cause low morale for the team that worked on it and frustrated users (for the few using it).

• How to Avoid: While this can happen even with the most well researched product, it helps to do the work to avoid as much thrash as possible. I think this is a no brainer, but I'm going to say it anyway, work with the product team and talk with customers, make sure you all are clear on and understand their pains, the existing players solving those pains, and the gaps/opportunities you can fill.

2. Holding back on talking about the product until its GA-ready:

• I've been at lots of companies where they hold back on talking about the product/are extra secretive, but unless you are Apple or maybe OpenAI/Anthropic right now no one cares. Waiting until everything is "perfect" to talk to your customers about what you're building means you miss out on tons of valuable early feedback and the chance to build some buzz.

• How to Avoid: Be more open earlier in the process. Consider a beta program and actively create channels for users to give you their thoughts – and make sure there are clear paths for those issues to get escalated and addressed. This not only helps you refine the product but also makes early users feel invested and gives you some time to make noise in a potentially already crowded market.

3. Trying to tie product launch with GTM launch:

• For many product or feature launches, we've found it helpful to separate the actual product rollout from the main marketing push by about a week. This "simmering" period, even after extensive betas, allows us to address any unexpected issues and deploy fixes before our broader announcement. While a perfectly aligned launch day can be exciting, it also significantly increases the risk of delays if product issues surface. This can create some issues potentially requiring you to ask press and partners to hold off, which not only impacts communication plans but also makes it so you potentially lose credibility for future asks.

• How to Avoid: Don't feel like the product and marketing announcements have to be joined at the hip. Giving the product a little breathing room after an initial release (even to a limited audience) allows you to catch any last-minute bugs and ensure a smoother experience before you really ramp up the marketing efforts.

Here are a few common mistakes:

• The launch lacks clarity on product availability. You need to know what the product does and does not do and set those expectations clearly with sales teams via your ICP and target use cases. I am not saying don't launch a half baked product, but if you do, be clear about what the gaps are and the use cases to target

• The sales team doesn't have a play or CTA. Product launches should not be an FYI for the sales team. Building an actionable sales play with a target list, assets and a CTA will accelerate the launch far more than a good press release.

• You don't have a single source of truth for messaging. Larger launches involve a huge bill of materials that span several marketing teams. All of those teams are creating content and it is very easy to get off messaging or be inconsistent as you add on more assets. Publish a clear source of truth for messaging, whether that is a messaging matrix, the press release or a pitch deck that everyone can use. This needs to be completed early to avoid excess revisions

Not grounding the launch in clear value positioning and stakeholder alignment leads to failure.

From an operational standpoint, if you haven't established the value proposition and positioning with alignment across stakeholders upfront, you'll either have a bad launch or just check boxes without seeing real impact. This alignment requires significant effort with executives to ensure everyone is on the same page. I recommend using a launch brief framework to document what you're doing and why, especially for major launches. While you can revisit and adjust if you learn new information, having this foundation is essential for launch success.

If your strategy is poor, your launch will fail no matter how well you execute.

While project management is important, having a bad strategy means you're solving the wrong problem, and everything will fall apart. For example, if you're trying to drive more subscriptions from existing customers who already use your product extensively, but you decide to run a huge outdoor campaign, your strategy isn't aligned with your business objective. This misalignment will eventually surface when the launch isn't successful. It sounds simple, but it starts at the top: have a good strategy and know the problem you're solving. This should be caught during brief reviews and checkpoints, but it's the first place where things can go wrong.

The biggest mistake is focusing too heavily on the immediate launch moment without thinking about ongoing feature discoverability.

When launches don't land effectively or achieve long-term success, it's often because teams concentrate solely on the launch day and then quickly move on to the next quarter's launch. Your launch plan should incorporate always-on methods for driving awareness and usage of key features, especially those that lead to stickier customers or upgrades. A recent example from our team was not having deep linking available for a new integrations hub we launched. This meant we couldn't immediately implement our always-on emails to guide users back to that part of the flow. We had to wait for this strategy to come to life before going back to implement lifecycle and email work. The lesson is to think beyond the launch day and plan for long-term adoption from the beginning.