What are the key things to consider post-launch? What standard metrics are important to track to measure success and what teams (and at what cadence) are important to connect with post-launch?
Can really vary product to product — but I'd separately track product metrics you're able to drive and marketing channel performance. If you have the tech stack for it, ideally you can measure how much product adoption was driven your marketing efforts to keep yourself accountability and prove incrementality. For your marketing channels, you'll want to maintain a rigorous internal dashboard of engagement rates, open rates, performance metrics, etc. for all your launches, so you can develop accurate benchmarks.
This certainly will vary launch by launch to some degree, however every feature you launch you'll want to track some element of activation and utilization of the feature.
Are customers trying the new feature, and are they growing in how they use it? These are also the metrics that you as a product marketer can have a direct impact on.
There's always excitement right after a launch where everyone is glued to the dashboards watching the metrics minute by minute! And in those early days after a launch it's healthy to do a 1 week post-launch read out, however it's defintely more important to check in on the metrics on a monthly basis - after the excitement of the launch dies down, to ensure you have the right tactics in place to continue activation and growing usage.
The key stakeholders include product marketing to represent the marketing lense, product management, product analytics, and sales.
I've seen this vary from top-of-funnel metrics down to MRR depending on the goal of the product. Aspects that I believe impact the KPI you ultimately choose are:
- What does this product mean for your company?
- Is it awareness of your company in the market?
- Is immediate revenue important or can it be pushed down the road?
- How well do you understand user pathways from signup to product usage?
- How well do you understand your funnel?
- Do you have historic data to base assumptions on or is this a green-field launch?
- Are you confident in the amount of traffic you'll be driving from specific channels?
- Do you have a captive audience anywhere that you can take advantage of?
You'll choose very different KPIs depending on how you answer the above questions. For the most recent launch we focued on in-product usage (MAU, engagement rate) instead of revenue. For bootstrapped, single-product companies, revenue was my KPI. For startups with money it might be signups to show growth. Understanding what marketing should do for your company will help to create impactful KPIs that don't focus on vanity metrics.
It's important to define metrics and KPIs pre-launch typically as part of the marketing brief or GTM plan. Based on the goals you’ve set you’ll want to work with XFN teams like product/marketing analytics to set up a measurement plan or dashboard to track progress against these goals. It can be beneficial to track progress early on, a few days post launch and/or 1-2 weeks post launch so that you can adjust your marketing tactics if needed to accelerate or decelerate adoption. Exact metrics will vary for each product/business but a few standard metrics to keep in mind are: 1) product adoption 2) channel performance - open rates/ctrs 3) product retention.
Landing is everything, but can oddly become an afterthought in the eyes of an organization. It just doesn't have the same sizzle as a launch, right? But landing is where you get the business impact and that is, after all, our goal.
"Standard" metrics are a bit challenging to identify because they really are dependent on your business - what was the goal of the launch, what can be measured, and what larger business objective does this launch ladder into?
Here are some standard metrics I've used, and why they matter:
Usage: how much is this product being used?
Revenue: how much value are we driving for the business?
Adoption: is the product resonating with a wide audience or just a few?
Sales close rate: is there a pretty clear product-market fit?
Sales cycle time: is the product addressing an urgent need, or is it a nice-to-have?
Support ticket volume and trends: is there something that is making it hard for customers to adopt the product?
Against each of these, I look at the trend lines over time and try to understand if each marketing intervention drives incremental improvements in the metrics. I often look at a month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year out but this is going to change a lot depending on how long your products typically take to adopt.
Your key stakeholders start with Product and Sales but could be as wide as your leadership team or any partners you work with to sell.
This is a great question that often goes overlooked. In high-velocity roadmap organizations, the focus tends to be on getting a product to market and then moving on to the next launch, without pausing to assess how the product actually performed.
To evaluate the success of your launch, there are several fundamental metrics to consider:
Awareness: Determine whether your target audience is aware of your product. This can be evaluated by analyzing the effectiveness of your awareness generation campaign. Metrics such as email open rates, completed sales calls, and ad impressions can provide insights. It's advisable to track this within the first month post-launch.
Usage: Assess whether your audience is actively using the product via your own data, utilizing metrics like Daily Active Users (DAU) or Monthly Active Users (MAU). Look for any spikes in usage pre and post-launch. This is a metric to track for at least three months post-launch.
Satisfaction: Understand whether your customers actually like the product. Get feedback from the sales team, customer support interactions, or conduct customer interviews. Track for about three to six months post-launch, depending on the product's complexity.
Consistently report your findings on a monthly basis and advocate for decisions to optimize if any of the metrics are underperforming. This approach ensures that your product launch isn't just about getting to market but also about making it successful and continually improving it.
Launching a product or feature is only the beginning of the journey. To maximize its impact and ensure continuous improvement, tracking feedback and outcomes is crucial, capturing valuable learnings for your cross-functional teams.
As a PMM, you can champion three key areas in this post-launch phase:
1. Listening to Your Customers:
Proactive Feedback Gathering: Monitor user feedback across product surfaces, support channels, and third-party review sites. This helps identify areas for tweaks, fixes, or potential feature enhancements after launch.
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Unveiling the "Why": When necessary, conduct user interviews to delve deeper into the "why" behind identified issues. This qualitative data provides invaluable context for improvement efforts.
2. Tracking Product Usage:
Identifying Early Adopters: Track feature usage post-launch and pinpoint key user segments who have embraced your new offering.
Understanding Motivations: Interview these early adopters to understand their reasons for adopting your product feature. These insights can help equip sales and customer-facing teams with compelling narratives that can be leveraged when selling the “value” of your product to prospects and existing customers.
3. Evaluating Campaign Effectiveness:
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Measuring Campaign Success: Analyze the performance of your launch campaign, including conversion rates and customer acquisition costs.
Recommended Meeting Cadence
As a PMM, fostering regular communication with your cross-functional teams is vital to ensure launch learnings and strategies permeate the company. I recommend you align with cross-functional partners on cadence of meetings - a potential cadence is as follows:
Weekly or Biweekly Meetings:
Product Team: Collaborate with your product team to discuss user feedback, prioritize enhancements, and regularly plan roadmap updates based on gathered insights.
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Customer Support Teams: Work closely with support teams (e.g., CX, account management, training, implementation) to understand common user issues and refine support resources to address them effectively.
Monthly or Quarterly Meetings:
Analytics Team: Collaborate with the analytics team to review key business and product metrics, identifying key drivers of success and potential issues that may require further attention.
Marketing Team: Share insights from user feedback and performance metrics to inform ongoing marketing and promotional campaigns, ensuring they continue to resonate with your target audience.
Sales Team: Equip sellers with user feedback and competitor analysis to refine their sales pitch and confidently address customer concerns.
Key considerations include tracking important metrics, maintaining regular communication with relevant teams, and optimizing for adoption/impact.
Market response: Evaluate the market’s response to the launch. Monitor social media, press coverage, and industry reviews to gauge overall sentiment and public perception. If it’s negative, understand why — and create a GTM strategy to change that perception.
Customer feedback: Collect and analyze feedback from customers to understand their experiences, identify any issues, and gather suggestions for improvement. Use surveys, user interviews, and support ticket analysis to gather insights.
User adoption monitoring: Focus on user adoption and engagement. Ensure customers are utilizing the new features and derive value from the product. Provide additional training, resources, or support if needed.
Customer satisfaction (CSAT) and net promoter score (NPS): Track customer satisfaction and loyalty to gauge overall product reception.
Pipeline and revenue impact: While not the sole focus, track any immediate revenue impact, including new sales, upsells, and cross-sells driven by the launch.
So, you’ve launched your shiny new product—congrats 🥂 But, as any good Product Marketing Manager knows, the journey doesn’t stop there. Launching a product is like sending your kid off to college: the "invisible work" begins after they’ve left the nest! Post-launch success hinges on continuous tracking, feedback, and collaboration.
WHO Matters: Stay closely aligned with Sales (eyes & ears on the ground), Customer Success (customer whisperers), Product (your favorite band), Marketing (your hype squad) and Analytics (your data detectives) to make sure it is all coming together as it should!
Here’s your post-launch playbook to ensure your product thrives in the wild:
Key Considerations Post-Launch
Customer Feedback Loops: Actively collect and analyze customer feedback through surveys, interviews, and social media monitoring. This helps in understanding customer satisfaction and areas for improvement. Think of it as product “aftercare”—like checking in to see how they’re liking their new toy and what tweaks might make it even better.
Product Performance: Monitor product performance to ensure it meets the expectations set during the launch. Address any bugs or issues quickly to maintain customer trust and satisfaction.
Adoption and Usage: Track how customers are adopting and using the product. Identify any barriers to adoption and address them promptly.
Market Response: Assess the market’s response to the product launch. This includes competitor reactions, market share changes, and overall industry feedback. It’s like reading the room at a party—knowing when to turn up the music or change the vibe.
Sales and Revenue: Evaluate the initial sales figures and revenue generated from the launch. Compare these against projections and adjust strategies as needed. Proof of traction is in the “proverbial pudding”!
Standard Metrics to Track Post-Launch
Customer Metrics:
Net Promoter Score (NPS): Measures customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): Gauges customer contentment with the product.
Customer Retention Rate: Tracks the percentage of customers who continue using the product over time.
Usage Metrics:
Daily/Monthly Active Users (DAU/MAU): Indicates user engagement.
Feature Usage & Engagement: Tracks how often key features are used, providing insight into what is most valuable to customers.
Churn Rate: Measures the rate at which customers stop using the product.
Financial Metrics:
Revenue and Sales Metrics: Includes total revenue, average revenue per user (ARPU), and revenue growth.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): The cost associated with acquiring a new customer.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV): The predicted revenue a customer will generate over their relationship with the product.
Marketing Metrics:
Conversion Rate: The percentage of users who take a desired action, such as making a purchase.
Return on Investment (ROI): Measures the profitability of marketing campaigns.
Website, In-app, Social Traffic and Engagement: Tracks visits, bounce rate, and time spent on the site, engagement with social posts.
Support Metrics:
Ticket Volume: Number of support tickets generated, indicating potential issues.
Resolution Time: The average time taken to resolve support tickets.
Customer Effort Score (CES): Measures how much effort customers need to exert to resolve issues.
To wrap up, the post-launch phase is all about staying connected, being responsive, and continuously improving. By keeping an eye on key metrics and maintaining regular touchpoints with essential teams, you ensure your product not only survives but thrives.
I will continue to beat the drum that your goals for launching a new product should be grounded in impact: Why did you build this? Open up new TAM? Improve win rates? Reduce churn? The launch is a mechanism to get visibility for your product/feature on its journey -- but it's really just an early point toward that north star goal.
The most effective launches I've been a part of have a xfunctional team that then meets regularly pre/post-launch to check in on how we're tracking against that north star. One product I launched was intended to help reduce churn, so we focused on an Adoption metric. Each month, we'd host "Product & Friends" where PMM would provide an update on customer acquisition and marketing activities (major new logos, customer stories, upcoming events/campaigns, etc.), PM would provide an update on new features, Support would share updates on net promoter and common pains in support tickets, etc. We'd usually tackle those quickly and then pick a special topic to focus on a big(ger) idea to help us move the needle on adoption more significantly.
This is something many people forget about - you have to keep measuring impact after a launch! Especially if your sales cycles are longer. Yes there is the set of metrics you can track on or close to launch day like blog and/or press release views, social post engagement, click throughs on emails or ads you've launched etc etc. But then there are the longer tail metrics like pipeline/opportunity creation and product usage/adoption. For a big launch, I typically ask to see a dashboard of those things weekly at least for the quarter following the launch. The timeframe will likely depend on your sales cycle.
I like to measure things like open pipeline, opportunities created, opportunities closed (won and lost), average selling price and total ARR, win rate, active vs inactive customers (if it takes some time to turn on), number of users (and customers/accounts) using the product/feature, retention rate of those users (number that continue using it vs dropping off). You could also measure things like support cases and open tickets. Plus I also measure some internal things like who has completed enablement, how many people have used the content we created, who is talking about the feature in Gong calls, etc.
Post-launch measurement is so important. Team-wise, it's obviously important to the sellers for driving revenue but also especially to the product and customer support teams so they can improve and expand the product post-launch!
Once a launch happens, it’s tempting to move on to the next big thing. However, the launch is really just the beginning. Post-launch, I focus on tracking whether our strategies are hitting the target goals. I keep an eye on key metrics like conversion rates, customer adoption, and revenue growth. Monitoring product usage metrics, such as active users and feature adoption rates, helps me understand how well the product meets user needs. Sales metrics such as pipeline creation, new opportunities, and cross-sell/up-sell rates show the product's market traction and our sales and customer success teams' effectiveness in articulating the value of the new offering.
Staying connected with key teams like marketing, sales, customer success, and product management is essential. After a launch, I conduct a retrospective with various stakeholders to discuss what worked and where we can improve. Around week six, I send an update on launch metrics to the leadership team. Depending on the launch size, I then set up bi-weekly or monthly meetings with the launch team to monitor key metrics, share insights, and adjust strategies as needed. The meetings ensure we remain aligned and can quickly respond to issues or opportunities that arise post-launch.
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