FOR MANY BUSINESSES, THE LAUNCH PROCESS hasn’t changed as they’ve implemented agile or gone to the cloud.
It still looks something like this: Overhead and activity dictate arbitrary milestones and dates that center on delivering content and features, which, of course, the market will embrace and users will adopt. It’s the old, “The product is done; it’s time to launch.” No one asks if the business is ready, the channel is enabled or if the market even cares about the release.
The result is a cycle of constant launches that fail to generate real impact or deliver meaningful value to the market. Customers are bombarded with new updates and features. Market noise becomes overwhelming, and it becomes difficult to differentiate between what’s important and what’s not.
It’s time to break the cycle and reevaluate the traditional launch process.
By carefully considering the difference between a release and a launch, organizations can ensure that they are creating significant and impactful market events, rather than just pushing out updates that may go unnoticed by customers.
Releases Aren’t Launches
As companies streamline their engineering and build processes, the number of new features and content they deliver increases. However, just because there is a constant flow of new updates doesn’t necessarily mean that each one is significant enough to warrant a “market event” launch.
Market events must make your product more competitive, deliver increased satisfaction and improve profitability.
For a product launch to be considered a market event, it must have clear, meaningful goals that improve the product’s competitiveness, increase customer satisfaction, and drive profitability. These goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) to guide the launch process.
A successful launch requires a well-planned strategy that includes thorough research and analysis, marketing and communications planning, and rigorous testing and quality assurance. If it doesn’t meet this standard for a market event, you have yourself a release, not a launch—plain and simple.
Releases, on the other hand, have more modest objectives, such as fixing bugs, enhancing performance, or adding new features. Releases may also involve a smaller team, limited resources and a more straightforward rollout. The distinction between a launch and a release lies in the level of impact they have on the target audience. While releases are essential for updating functionality and fixing issues, launches are the events that can truly make a difference for the organization.
In Summary: Release vs. Launch
As an organization’s ability to execute release plans continues to improve and accelerate, it is increasingly important to differentiate between a release and a launch.
A release is a viable set of content and features that deliver new functionality or improvements to the users. Releases are essential for maintaining the product’s quality and functionality, but they are not necessarily celebrated or heavily promoted events.
But a launch—with its full set of activities, organizational impact and market noise—needs to be more. It must be used only when a collection of features and capabilities can increase awareness, strengthen or extend positioning and create momentum in the channels and market that will help the business achieve its goals.
For example, when Hubspot launched its CMS in 2020, it built hype around its functionality with press releases, training, social media campaigns, and announcements at its annual conference. In contrast, when they added the ability to share stories on their social media management platform, the rollout was smaller, with announcements on social media and a blog post explaining the new feature.
When a Release Becomes a Launch
Teams involved in high-frequency development environments often get stuck in the repetitive and rigid go-to-market activities they’ve always done. A launch job comes in; they run the playbook, and voilà, another successful launch, right?
But if no one stops to think whether this will be of value to anyone or if the right amount of noise is being made for the right release, customers will perceive everything as being of the same value. Whoops.
The problem is a major market event can easily be mistaken for a routine security update. Or worse, customers may stop paying attention to launch announcements due to the constant flow of updates.
Here’s the secret: Even though you’ve finished a feature, you don’t need to tell anyone. Put the solutions in production and allow yourself to observe usage, engage users who organically adopted the feature, and interview them to validate messaging. Maybe even recruit some users to aid in creating awareness when you do go to launch. This is sometimes referred to as canary testing. You put a set of production-viable codes in place for a subset of your users—or even your whole user base—and wait and observe the results.
Learn More in Launch
In Pragmatic’s Launch course, students gain a deep understanding of concepts related to product launch and sales enablement. Topics such as market research, customer segmentation, customer journey mapping, building an effective messaging framework and more are covered in this course. Through hands-on activities and exercises, participants will gain the skills they need to create a successful launch plan for their product. With these tools, students can ensure that when they go public with their new feature or product.
