What are the most important KPIs to measure the success of new product launches? How do you track and adjust your strategies based on this data?

Some of the key launch metrics worth tracking:

• Pipeline and bookings generated

• Win rates

• Adoption rates 

• Customer activation milestones

• Sales team confidence

The important part is not just collecting metrics, but actually using them to understand performance and adjust your strategy as you go. For example, are you noticing deals getting stalled in the early stages? Are customers getting stuck during onboarding? Does it seem like your messaging is targeting the wrong segments?

Then you can make targeted adjustments: updating your sales process, simplifying onboarding flows, or refining your ICP. You want to have analytics in place and respond quickly to what the data tells you, rather than waiting for a bigger, one-off report or a quarterly review to change course. I’ve also found that having fewer, more actionable metrics is better than drowning in data you can’t act on.

Each company, depending on their growth stage, will want to use product launches to drive different aspects of the business. Having said that, consider the following:

• New product signups;

• New revenue coming from the specific features or product launched;

• Expansion revenue coming from the launch;

• Competitive win rates;

• Placement in analyst reports;

• Churn rate.

Not an exhaustive list by any means, and as I mentioned before, it all depends on what the launch is about (new product, new features, etc.) and the impact you expect it to have on customers, competitors, and market in general. For example, if launching a product feature that has been requested by customers in a certain industry, you will want to measure product signups, revenue, and expansion for customers in that same industry. If you are launching a brand new product to expand your offerings to unlock revenue in a certain market or type of company, your success metrics will have to be tied to that particular GTM motion. There's no KPI list for product launches that applies to all your launches, so you will have to work with other GTM stakeholders (product, sales, channel, etc.) to align on success criteria and weigh the pros and cons of each.

At AssemblyAI, where we're launching new AI model capabilities like automatic language detection (ALD), we focus on measuring launch success through clear adoption signals and usage patterns.

Our launch measurement framework has three key phases:

Immediate Launch Success (First 30 Days):

• Number of customers using ALD

• Volume/usage of API calls using the new language detection parameter

• Distribution of languages being detected (helps us understand market reach)

• Initial use case patterns (are developers using it as expected?)

• Support ticket volumes related to the feature

Sustained Adoption (60-90 Days):

• Weekly active users of ALD

• Growth in minutes processed with language detection

• Language detection patterns by region and customer segment

• Usage patterns (standalone vs. combined with other features like speaker diarization)

• Conversion of existing customers to using the new capability

Long-term Impact:

• Revenue impact from increased API usage

• Most commonly detected languages and their growth trends

• Competitive win rates where language detection was a key requirement

• New market segments unlocked by specific language support

• Impact on overall platform usage (did ALD drive increased use of other features?)

We use this data to make GTM adjustments. For instance, if we see high usage for certain languages, we might prioritize optimizations for those specific models. Or if we notice regional patterns in language detection, we could adjust our go-to-market strategy to better serve those markets.

The key is having clear benchmarks based on previous model launches while recognizing that each capability is unique. We maintain a launch retrospective document comparing metrics across our various model releases, helping us better predict and optimize future launches.

I find the most important KPIs relative to the launch of a new product to be:

• Product Adoption (how many existing and new customers start using/adopting the new product)

• Pipeline Creation/Contribution (how much pipeline did the new product launch generate in both $s and # of opportunities)

There may be some additional KPIs that are important depending on the type of product and your go-to-market strategy as well. For instance if you're launching a product that users can sign up for directly or a product with a pilot or 'try before you buy' motion, some of the KPIs that may be more important are things like:

• Activation Rate - how many customers sign up for the new product or trial/pilot

• Retention/Churn Rate - how many customers are you able to retain post trial/pilot

For more established companies, KPIs like product adoption and pipeline creation may be the most important as it shows how both existing and new customers are using the product while also quantifying how many new sales opportunities are created as a result.

For some companies the most important KPI may be activation rate as they just want users to start trialing their product before they try to upsell or cross-sell more premium features or offers.