Pieter van Noordennen

Bringing a New Product to Market

Much of product management training is about the product development process, but not as much time is spent on the fundamentals of actually launching that product successfully. For new PMs, here's what you need to know about launching your first product successfully.

Pieter van Noordennen |

Bringing a New Product to Market

One of my favorite things in product and growth is “0 to 1” development of a new product. There’s nothing quite as exciting as taking a blank page — a simple user or business problem — and crafting a new set of features to solve it.

Back in 2010 when I began my product management career, and still to this day, its easy to find books, blog posts, and tutorials about the product development process. Loads of people have opinions and advice on frameworks, methodology, and product strategy. But when I went to launch my first products, it was hard to find good information on taking the product to market effectively, and much of what I learned was through trial and error.

Perhaps this is because aspects of GTM are often seen as gauche by hardcore PMs, or because we’d rather leave those icky bits of actually selling a product to our colleagues in Marketing and Sales. Both of these attitudes are limiting as a product manager: You’re abdicating responsibility for the actual business outcomes of your product. While I love a good RACI matrix, I’ve come to see these types of silos in the launch process as a hallmark of unhealthy product culture (rant on that in another blog post soon, I promise).

There are three key aspects of Go-To Market that I like to focus on when launching a new product: User Research, Competitive Strategy, and Pricing. Here’s how to leverage them when bringing a new product to market.

Defining the MVPs (Yes, there’s more than one)

These days, pretty much everyone is aware of Lean Development principles and the notion that you need an MVP. Where I often see teams go wrong is in the assumption that you need just one MVP. Said another way: We spend a lot of time defining and building a singular MVP — what are the right features for the “V1” (Version 1)? How long will those take to build? How do we launch the MVP?

But anything with a “launch” isn’t an MVP. It’s the product.

Minimal Viable Learning is a more apt mindset. At each stage of the product development process, what’s minimum amount of work you can do to learn whether your product is viable? This could be a simple landing page, a survey, or a set of user interviews. These learnings should build until you understand the core set of features that drive value for users, and be able to articulate those features that don’t matter. That is your first Product MVP. And it gets a launch.

Identifying Early Growth Mechanisms

Building a full-scale growth model before you have a product, customers, or any notion of product-market fit can be quixotic. You’ll spend a lot of time prematurely optimizing loops that may or may not exist.

However, you need a Theory of Growth to focus your team and drive early experimentation. Build a singular simple core loop (refer to the Reforge Growth Series to identify archetypical loops). It should align with your company and product strategy, and should lead to a series of hypotheses that you want to test.

For example, if your product is a B2B SaaS business that seeks to help companies with HR business practices, your core growth loop might be a Company-Generated Content (CGC) loop, and your first set of experiments would be to develop and distribute content that describe the pain points your product hopes to solve. However, if your product is a B2C Travel Reviews business, a CGC wouldn’t scale and you’d want to focus on a User Generated Content loop, with your first set of experiments testing whether users would leave reviews on your site.

User Research

Like the product development process, your launch strategy should be rooted in User Research. Hopefully, you’ve been talking to users all along the way, and getting ready to go to market is no different.

Your users will tell you which features resonate and why, helping your team craft marketing copy, pitch decks, and press releases. Beta tests and surveys can also help you monetize the right features in the right way, especially if you are crafting a freemium or PLG sales motion.

Most importantly, users can tell you when you aren’t ready to go to market and the product needs more time to bake. You’ll always hear the desire for more features and capabilities, but pay extra close attention to feedback like “I don’t need this” or “I wouldn’t pay for this unless…” While it sucks to move launch dates — trust me on this one — it sucks worse when your big bang launch fizzles in the first weeks of sales.

The thing I always need to remind myself is that User Research is always directional and rarely prescriptive. If you are interviewing six people in the style of “Rocket Surgery Made Easy”, you shouldn’t feel compelled to do everything each of them asks for, but rather look for common themes and take that to heart. Also remember that those aggregating and presenting the data have their own internal biases and agendas, so be a savvy consumer of user research when it is being presented by a third-party.

Competitive Strategy

You don’t launch products in a vacuum and being aware of what your competitors are doing is critical to a successful launch. While this subject warrants an entire semester, or even career, competitive strategy need not be as complex as some management consultants would have you believe.

The first step is in identifying competitors. If you are in an established market — say, travel — your competitive set may already be known. Even so, it pays to understand what products your potential customers are using to solve this pain point today: Do they dominate the market? Are they new? Is the CEO talking about them on earnings calls, or are they on life support?

If you are attempting to create a new market or expand a nascent one, it may be tempting to say “We have no competitors.” This is rarely the case. First, no startup wants to be in an empty room. No competition can just as easily be a sign of “no market for your product.” And your potential customer’s status quo, even if that is “do nothing”, is always a competitor.

I’ll get more into competitive strategy frameworks in future blog posts — its one of my favorite topics for 0 to 1 product development — but SWOT analysis is a great starting point. Too much has been written on it for me to add more value, but I’ll just remind you to also run a healthy and objective-as-you-can-make-it analysis on your own team as well.

Pricing

Eventually you’ll have to price your product. While this often lands in the hands of a cross-functional stakeholder in marketing, sales, or strategy, as the PM, you’ll have some of the best knowledge of which features have the highest “willingness to pay” (WTP) and which pain points the product solves that the person writing checks is most desirous of making go away. You need to be part of the pricing conversation.

I’ve written in detail about how I like to do pricing research. But research is just one part of finding the right way to monetize.

You’ll also want to build a strategy that answers the following questions:

Conclusion

Devising a go-to-market strategy for a new product can be daunting. But each individual piece in the process is relatively straight-forward if you break it down, treat it as a learning process, and iterate through each experiment to increase your learnings.

Be sure to show your work as you go, and engage stakeholders across the business, from sales to marketing to operations to customer success. You’ll find plenty of knowledgable people willing to help shine light on the results and share in your victory when the product meets the market and sales start rolling in.