When you have a new product on the way, prioritizing its features and capabilities can be pretty tough. A product launch matrix helps you navigate this complexity by organizing your approach and ensuring that every aspect of the launch is carefully planned. Learn more about the role of a product launch matrix and practical ways this framework helps PMs.
What is a product launch matrix?
The product launch matrix, also called a product process matrix, is a structured framework designed to guide product managers through the stages of taking a product from development to market. The matrix outlines essential phases like planning, execution, and post-launch evaluation. It helps ensure that every aspect is covered, from market research to marketing strategies, and from logistical preparations to post-launch support.
Product launch matrix vs. product decision matrix
A product launch matrix is often complemented by a product decision matrix. While the launch matrix focuses on the steps and strategies for a successful product introduction, the decision matrix helps evaluate and prioritize different product ideas and features.
The decision matrix is a table. It’s a series of values in columns and rows that lets you visually weigh several options and make the best possible decision. A product-specific matrix would consist of a set of viable solutions—the top features users really want—and criteria or variables that help you analyze each feature.
Why is a structured product launch important?
Launching a product without a plan can lead to chaos and missed opportunities. A structured product launch helps you maintain focus and clarity within your team. This organized approach helps reduce risks by proactively identifying and addressing challenges before they become major issues. Thorough preparation ensures your product is market-ready, meets customer needs, and is supported by a robust marketing plan.
A product decision matrix helps user researchers identify features that most users would find valuable if added to an existing product. It also helps you weigh these options against each other using a set of variables to determine the most relevant feature. With a matrix, you can eliminate guesswork from the decision-making process and help your team understand what is and isn’t a priority.
Planning phase of a product launch
Identifying target market and market trends
The planning phase is where you lay the groundwork for a successful product launch. It all starts with knowing who your ideal customers are, what they need, and how they behave. Here, you’ll dive into market research to identify key demographics, interests, and user pain points.
You also need to stay on top of market trends. Keeping an eye on these trends helps your product resonate with current demands and stand out in the marketplace.
Setting clear launch goals
With your target market in mind, it’s time to set concrete objectives for your launch. What do you want to achieve? This might involve hitting a specific sales target, gaining a certain number of new customers, or establishing a strong market presence. In any case, well-defined goals give your launch direction and purpose.
Assembling the launch team and defining roles
A successful product launch requires a team effort. You’ll need to assemble a group of key players who will be responsible for different aspects of the launch. This could include marketing, sales, product development, and customer support. Clearly define each team member’s role and responsibilities to avoid overlap and confusion. You should also establish regular check-ins to keep everyone on track.
Pre-launch preparation
Product readiness
Before you unveil your product to the world, there are several key steps to ensure everything goes smoothly. The product readiness phase involves finalizing development and conducting thorough testing.
Beta testing comes after initial internal testing, but before the official launch. During this phase, you release your product to a select group of external users. These users share their thoughts on functionality, ease of use, and overall satisfaction through feedback channels like surveys or focus groups. From there, you’ll iron out any issues and perform rigorous quality assurance checks to make sure your product meets required standards.
Marketing strategy
A strong marketing strategy creates buzz so your product gets the attention it deserves. The goal is to make sure that your product has a ready and eager audience when it hits the market. The strategy shoould include various channels such as social media, email marketing, and PR to spread the word and generate interest. Pre-launch activities, including teaser campaigns, sneak peeks, and engaging with influencers or media, help create a sense of excitement as well.
Sales enablement
Your sales team’s job is presenting your product to your target customers. A well-prepared sales team can significantly impact your product's initial success and help drive early adoption. Train your team on the product’s features, benefits, and key selling points so they’re fully equipped to talk about it. Prepare sales materials such as product datasheets, presentations, and demos your team can use in their pitches.
Product launch execution
Launch day activities
Executing a product launch is where all your hard work and planning come to life. On launch day, coordination is key, and the goal is making sure everything operates seamlessly.
Start by creating a detailed schedule. It should outline activities such as the timing of marketing campaigns, product availability updates, and any special events or announcements.
Having a central point of contact for any issues that arise can help streamline communication and resolve problems quickly. It’s also a good idea to have contingency plans in place for any unforeseen hiccups.
Effective communication with stakeholders and customers
Keep stakeholders updated with regular progress reports and any significant developments. This helps maintain their confidence in the launch and allows them to address any concerns promptly.
For customers, ensure that your messaging is clear and consistent. Provide timely information about product availability and communicate any promotions that may convince them to give it a try.
Monitoring and responding to initial feedback
Gathering and analyzing feedback from customers and stakeholders offers insights into how well the launch is performing and highlights areas for improvement. Monitor social media, review sites, and customer support channels for comments and issues. Quickly responding to feedback shows that you value your customers' opinions and are committed to addressing their concerns. If you encounter common issues or questions, be prepared to provide quick solutions or updates.
Post-launch analysis
Collecting and analyzing launch metrics
The first step in the post-launch phase is analyzing launch metrics, including sales performance data, website traffic, conversion rates, and other KPIs These numbers give you a clear picture of how well your product is doing in the market.
AI tools are especially useful for this analysis. When you use Sprig, you can instantly transform feedback and behavior data into actionable insights about your product experience. Sprig’s AI Analysis feature consolidates the most impactful product opportunities into one centralized feed. This feature’s automatic summaries highlight the top takeaways so you can make informed decisions and quickly act on user feedback.
Gathering customer feedback and reviews
Reach out to your customers directly through surveys, focus groups, or feedback forms. You should also comb through online reviews, social media platforms, and forums to see what people are saying about your product.
Sprig’s in-product surveys allow you to capture user feedback while they’re actively engaging with your product. You can ask targeted questions, gather real-time insights, and understand the user experience as it happens.
Identifying areas for improvement
Look for patterns or recurring issues in the feedback data to identify the best ways to improve your product. Are there common complaints or suggestions for features? Are there parts of the product that aren’t performing as expected?
Once you’ve gathered customer feedback from surveys, Sprig AI automatically analyzes the data to identify key trends and actionable insights. This helps you quickly interpret feedback and make informed product enhancement decisions. This might involve tweaking product features, refining your marketing strategies, or addressing operational challenges.
Product launch tools
Project management
A product launch is only as successful as the plans behind it. Project management tools help you keep your product development and launch on track. Some project management tools are:
- Asana. This versatile tool helps teams coordinate and manage their work effectively. Asana’s intuitive interface allows you to create projects, assign tasks, set deadlines, and track progress all in one place.
- Confluence. Confluence allows teams to create, share, and manage content and documents, making it easier to maintain consistency and alignment on projects. It serves as a central knowledge base where you can store project documentation, meeting notes, and team updates.
- Jira. This tool has become a staple among software development teams. Jira is designed for agile project management, offering features like customizable workflows, sprint planning, and backlog prioritization.
Designing and prototyping
Create and test your product’s look and functionality before launch. Tools such as the ones below help you visualize your product and make necessary adjustments.
- Figma. This powerful design tool is a cloud-based platform that allows multiple designers to work on the same project at the same time. With features like vector editing, prototyping, and design systems management, Figma is great for designing interfaces and creating interactive prototypes you can test with users.
- Mockflow. Mockflow is a suite of tools for planning and designing user interfaces. It offers wireframing, site mapping, and prototyping features, making it easy to visualize and refine your product design.
- ProtoPie. This tool makes it easy to create high-fidelity interactive prototypes. It offers advanced features like sensors and conditions to simulate real-world interactions and user experiences.
Tracking user engagement
To successfully launch a new product, you need the right tools and resources to understand your users. Below are some tools to help you track user behavior in real time and gather valuable feedback.
- Heatmaps. Analyze user interactions without digging through tons of raw data. Sprig’s Heatmaps offers visual representations of where users click, scroll, or spend the most time on your product. This tool helps you identify which features are most engaging and where users might be encountering issues. By visualizing user behavior, heatmaps provide valuable insights into user preferences and potential problem areas that need attention.
- Session Replays. One of the simplest ways to understand user behavior is by actually watching how they interact with your product. Sprig’s Session Replay Software allows you to view recorded clips of user sessions. What’s even better is that Sprig AI can analyze all your Heatmaps and Replays data to identify patterns and provide actionable insights for improving your product.
- Amplitude. This analytics platform helps you track user behavior and measure the effectiveness of your product features. It delivers detailed reports and visualizations to analyze how users interact with your product over time.
- Heap. Heap offers an automated approach to capturing user interactions with your product. It records every user interaction, such as clicks, form submissions, and page views, without the need for manual setup. After capturing data, Heap lets you easily define and analyze custom events.
- Google Analytics. One of the most widely-used web analytics services, Google Analytics tracks metrics on audience demographics, traffic sources, and conversion rates. Review this information to better understand how users are interacting with your product.
Product launch matrix case study: virtual interview platform at Indeed
If you stumble on Nissim Lehyani’s LinkedIn bio, you’ll notice that he wears many hats. Since graduating college, Lehyani has co-founded two companies, worked as a developer, and held senior product management roles at three other companies.
For about four years, Lihyani was a Senior Director of Product Management at Indeed. While there, he helped the company adapt to the shifting needs of the many millions of job seekers who visited the platform every month.
In conversation with Sprig CEO Ryan Glasgow, Lehyani describes product management as the act of enabling a better path that reduces friction between people and a valuable outcome. Lehyani is driven by one goal: creating frictionless products that delight users. His commitment helped Indeed build and launch products that users love during his time there.
For example, in 2020, the team launched a video interview platform to make hiring quicker and easier in the social distancing era. More than 20,000 U.S. job seekers were hired thanks to this feature. Lehyani attributes much of the success of his strategy to an equation that prioritizes a user-centric approach alongside requirements for a high-value product.
The product maximization equation
At Indeed, Lehyani used a product decision matrix he called a “Product Maximization Equation.” This matrix includes the following three variables that helped Lehyani identify a product’s ideal features:
- Amount of value to be delivered
- Size of the audience
- Length of time to ship
To describe the importance of this equation, he said, “Having the ability to prioritize and scope is crucial. You need to systematically identify the ideas that will deliver as much value as possible to the largest audience as possible, and as fast as possible.”
Lehyani used this exact decision matrix to create frictionless products at Indeed, and he’s done it at other organizations as well. When describing this methodology he emphasized that “one of the best things you can do is throw a lot of ideas and stack rank them based on key variables.”
How the product maximization equation works
It starts with defining the goal of your product—the problem your product solves. Say you run a burger joint, for instance. Your goal, of course, is to give people something delicious to snack on — a fast-food everyone would typically enjoy. However, to achieve this goal, you’ll need to constantly listen to your customers to learn about their preferences so you can better serve them.
That’s where the second step comes in: Finding out what most of your customers consider valuable. If you conducted some industry research, you might learn that similar burger shops are offering more variety. Perhaps you learn from the industry that there’s an appetite for three things: burgers with pineapple, burgers with bacon, and a new 100% vegan burger. The next step would be to use data to note the amount of value to be delivered, the size of your audience, and the length of time to ship.
Using these three variables to determine the best burger option, you can lay out your options and variables on a matrix, with the former arranged on a row and the latter on a column, and assign a multiplier to weigh the variables that you view as most important.
Assigning values to the product maximization equation
Lehyani says that PMs should assign values based on the highest priority variables when analyzing and comparing features with one another. For example, longer speed to market would equal one and the shortest possible speed would equal 10. A low number of likely users equals one, and a high number of users equals 10. These values are assigned based on the importance of the variable.
For instance, if most people who took a survey found bacon to be the best option, you can assign a nine based on their feedback. And if it takes a longer time to create and serve vegan burgers quickly, you can assign a two or less based on the assessed speed to market.
In our chat with Lehyani, he talked about how Indeed used the Product Maximization Equation. With it, his team determined that the Virtual Interview Platform would be a feature that users would find the most valuable amid the pandemic.
To identify the problems users were facing, the Indeed team reached out to users to gather feedback firsthand. They found the main challenge that users faced were interviews. People could still apply for jobs, but interviewing was a problem. Restrictions and health risks made securing jobs almost impossible. Employers could no longer hold physical interviews, and job seekers couldn’t commute miles for physical interviews.
Lehyani and his team had other potential features they could build for their audience. However, using the maximization equation, they found that the Virtual Interview Platform was what job seekers around the world valued the most during the pandemic. Indeed considered the speed to delivery, size of the audience, and perceived value to determine that this was the feature that would maximize value.
To fully grasp the impact of this approach, let’s break down the Product Maximization Equation variables. They’re the steps Lehyani and his team used to prioritize features. You can apply them to identify and develop the most impactful solutions for your users.
Step 1: Measure the amount of value to be delivered
It’s important to measure how valuable different potential product features would be to existing and potential users. That way, you can identify opportunities to make your product more useful, increase traction and customer success, reduce churn, and increase your customers’ lifetime value.
Step 2: Measure the size of the audience
The next step is to identify how many people will benefit from using the feature. Lehyani says that the size of the audience is important. You want to deliver the maximum amount of value to the largest group of people.
Start by gathering intel. You want to collect two types of data:
- Quantitative data: This data is numerical and gives you a clear picture of user trends and patterns. For example, do you have clear numbers outlining total market share for a new feature? Have you conducted research amongst your existing users? Are there third party reports validating a new or existing market? Is there data that exists surrounding the market within other industries?
- Qualitative data: This data is descriptive and provides insights into the reasons behind user preferences. Have some of your users communicated that they want something different or have an interest in trying a new feature? Is there a new competitor or feature in the industry that is generating buzz? Are the forums in your community filled with dialog about a certain problem?
Once you’ve gathered this data, you can analyze it to determine the feature with the largest number of people that can be served (addressable market).
Step 3: Estimate time to ship
After measuring the size of the audience that will benefit from your potential new features, you need to also estimate and compare the time it would take to build and ship each potential feature. You can estimate the amount of work a team member can do within the shortest time possible. The time is measured in weeks and months.
To make accurate estimations that are grounded in reality, it's best to collaborate with the engineers and team leads with the knowledge you need. A simple way to do this is asking everyone on a feature or product team how much time it will take to build a certain feature. From there, you can calculate the average of those estimates to identify the value you’ll place in your decision matrix.
Best practices for using the product decision matrix
Ask open-ended questions
Lehyani explained that using blank text boxes when asking for user feedback allows product teams to get unadulterated feedback through open-ended questions. You might ask users, “What was your experience like doing XYZ?” or “What feature do you think is missing from [Product Name]?”
Most PMs avoid using this feedback method because sorting through tons of feedback can be boring and time-consuming. Solutions like Sprig AI make it easier for you to analyze each user’s feedback and understand what features users would find most valuable.
Share concepts with users pre-launch
Modern-day concept and prototype testing is a PM dream. You no longer need to get all of your users in a room and in front of a computer screen with your prototype. With Sprig, you can show users designs and mock-ups with embedded Figma prototypes, along with video recordings explaining the concept in more detail.
As users go through this prototype demo, you can get feedback through open-ended questions via text or video responses. Then, you can quantify the rich qualitative feedback you receive to identify a score for your product maximization matrix. Our Measure Product Value template, which asks users to rank the product’s value on a scale of 1 to 5, is a great starting point for gathering this type of information.
Track user behavior in real time
A common way to get insight into what users find valuable is tracking behavior in real-time and targeting them with experiments at critical moments in their journey. This could involve continuously observing how customers use a new feature, tracking interactions with a new button, or running an A/B test. These data-driven experiments help teams better understand what features resonate most.
For example, the Indeed team could have introduced a “conduct your interview online” button throughout their product to gauge user interest before launching the virtual interview platform. This is a common practice amongst many startups to conduct A/B tests amongst a small portion of their users.
Use various methods to gauge interest in your product
The qualitative and quantitative data you gather can give you a good idea of how well your product will address user needs and the overall market demand. Using a combination of surveys, concept tests, and user behavior assessments helps you validate assumptions, identify key pain points, and estimate the potential impact of new features.
You can also track industry trends and forecasts to discover new audiences for your product. These critical insights will help you make more accurate estimations on the number of people interested in a particular feature and ensure that your product aligns with current market demands.
Choose a specific method for calculating time to ship
When estimating time to ship, there are two primary metrics you can use:
- Person-weeks/person-months. This technique involves estimating the total number of weeks or months team members will spend working on a feature. For instance, if it takes four team members to develop a specific feature within a week, you can estimate that the project will be completed and ready to be shipped in four person-weeks. When you quantify each feature this way, it's easier to compare each feature option to determine which one will take the least time and resources.
- Dev weeks. Alternatively, you can use dev weeks. One dev week is equal to 40 hours (eight hours a day, five days a week, one developer). So, if a feature takes two dev weeks to ship, this means it would take 80 hours to ship if one developer is assigned to build that feature.
Whichever metric you choose, make sure everyone on your team is on the same page about the one you’ll be using. Clear communication and agreement on how you’ll measure time creates consistency in planning and expectations.
Make faster, more informed product decisions with Sprig
When you’re dealing with thousands of users daily as Indeed does, you realize that having a solid prioritization framework is the best way to launch products people want. A product launch matrix outlines the steps for a successful product introduction, while a product decision matrix, like the maximization equation, helps you identify and evaluate the strongest ideas for a successful product launch.
Make these matrices a central product of your product planning phases, and you too will build products people get excited to use. For enhanced insights and actionable feedback, Sprig’s user research tools can streamline your decision-making process along the way. Sign up today to get the user insights you need to build better products quickly and confidently, and stay ahead in the competitive market with Sprig.