How to get your product from idea to launch
Launching a software product is more than just bringing an idea to market; it’s about focussing on what will maximise your chance of success. In an ideal world we would approach the process in a linear fashion, starting with nothing and building to something through a series of steps designed to take as long as they take, but the path to success is often non-linear. You might have the weight of investment, be carrying a pre-existing team, have a loud early stage customer, be battling HiPPOs which are accelerating you towards a particular solution, or persona. That is fine, you can still create a product with potential for growth.
This guide delves into the key stages of launching a software product, offering practical advice on goal setting, research, managing risks, team building, investment, and creating an effective roadmap.
To be clear, this is not advocating any shortcuts or magic bullets, just helping you identify and close the gap between where you think your growth should be, and the reality of how good your product is, answering the question: why am I not growing at the rate I should be?
Setting your goals
The foundation of a successful software launch begins with clear identification and goal setting. At this stage, it's important to recognize that you're not just launching an idea; you're giving yourself the best possible chance to make your software succeed by generating the most confidence at the lowest cost. The more steps you complete in this stage, the closer you'll be to building confidence in your hypothesis for your chosen market.
Setting Clear and Measurable Goals
Success in software development is not just about building a product but about ensuring that it meets your business goals within a specified timeline. If you have a runway and investment, the first step is to define your timeline. What does success look like within that period from a revenue perspective? Mapping out your goals on an exponential curve, where product growth starts slow but eventually benefits from the network effect, will give you a clearer idea of where you need to be in 3, 6, and 9 months to achieve your initial goals.
In addition to revenue goals, don't forget to factor in operational costs such as development, research, and other overheads. These will significantly impact your financial planning and, ultimately, your success.
The Nonlinear Path to Success
While there’s an ideal order to complete the stages of a software launch, the path is rarely linear. And that’s okay. Flexibility is key in adapting to unforeseen challenges and opportunities. The important thing is to maintain focus on your goals while being adaptable in your approach.
Do these things:
Start with plotting your revenue goals with your timeline and end goal. Create an exponential curve as a guide to what you need to have achieved every month until you reach your goal. This is to create a structure to work from.
Translate that into an ideal user funnel: leads to free users to paying users to upsell conversion rates, churn etc. This is to break down revenue numbers into tangible, measurable goals.
Ask yourself; is it possible to speed this up if I increase my run rate? What is the cost to my overall strategy? This is to see if there are cost-effective shortcuts.
Make this strategy calculator flexible so that real numbers can feed into your forecast, then re-visits, adjust (with actual data) and re-forecast this every month. This is to make sure you do not have a gap between expectation and reality.
Make these numbers available to the whole team. This is to help everyone be more engaged.
Research & Measurement
Once you’ve set your goals, the next step is to conduct thorough research and measurement to validate your ideas and refine your approach. The objective here is to confirm your target market, understand their needs, and ensure that your solution effectively addresses their problems.
Understanding Your Target Market
The first step in the research phase is to confirm your persona, ideal customer profile (ICP), and target market. This involves validating the value potential of the Total Addressable Market (TAM) and ensuring that the problem you think your customers have is indeed their most valuable problem.
Testing and Feedback Loops
After identifying the problem, the next step is to test solutions with your target audience. This can be done through direct feedback mechanisms such as surveys, JTBD (Jobs to be Done) interviews, and usability testing. These methods are controllable and usually provide statistically significant results, but they can be prone to biases. On the other hand, organic or passive feedback, such as passive behaviour tracking and organic experiments like A/B testing, can help you gather unbiased insights, although separating correlation from causation can be challenging.
Synthesis and Iteration
The key to successful research is synthesis—combining all the feedback and data to uncover the underlying issues with your solution. This process is iterative; you'll need to rinse and repeat until you strike the right chord with your audience. The goal is to keep refining your product until both direct and indirect feedback indicate that you're on the right track.
Measurement Over Time
Research is not a one-time activity; it requires ongoing measurement to track progress and identify areas for improvement. Start by tracking user funnel conversion rates, which will give you insights into how many users you’re converting through each stage of the funnel. Additionally, monitor user satisfaction and behaviour inside the platform using tools like Hotjar, LogRocket, and FullStory. These tools provide detailed feedback on where users are succeeding or failing, helping you identify patterns of behaviour that can inform your product development.
Do these things:
Incentivise users in a target market to run in-depth Jobs To Be Done interviews with them. This is to prove that you have a valuable problem.
If you can’t talk to your potential users directly, consider indirect methods; proxy users, passive behaviour tracking, guerilla research, etc. This is to overcome the “they don’t want to talk to us” problem.
Buy, run or pull together market research about the size of your TAM. This is to prove that you are solving the problem for enough people to help meet your revenue needs (see your strategy model above).
Run extensive competitor research; both looking at offerings, pricing structure and feedback from their existing customers. This is to prove that your persona is not already being served by adequate solutions.
Invest in passive monitoring tools in the product from the beginning. This is to capture the history of how user behaviour changes or improves over time.
Pay attention to your findings, and be critical where you are trying to bend research to fit your worldview, not the other way around. This is to ensure you remove your own bias in the research process.
Hiring/Team
Building the right team is essential for a successful software launch. Your team should be just large enough to minimise communication overheads while being capable of executing your go-to-market (GTM) strategy.
Team Size and Communication
A small, agile team is often more effective in the early stages of product development. Keeping your team size manageable helps reduce communication overheads, ensuring that everyone is aligned and focused on the task at hand.
Cost-Effective GTM Strategy
Your GTM strategy shouldn’t cost more than your build investment. Focus on cost-effective tactics that maximise impact without draining your resources. This might involve leveraging digital marketing, social media, and partnerships to reach your target audience without breaking the bank.
Do these things:
If you have inherited a larger team than you need, do everything you can to minimise the amount of people in that team. This is to ensure you don’t accidentally slow down your progress because you’re trying to organise too many team members.
Find multi-skilled mid to senior people to start off with, people with core problem solving and building skills, but also extensible skills to unblock things that might not have seemed essential initially, e.g. marketing, design, BI, etc. This is to make sure you create the least amount of external blockers which will slow your progress.
Organic GTM (especially content, SEO and growth marketing) takes time to work, so start asap. This is to ensure that you have momentum when you need it.
Engage with every potential customer. Decide if you want to add them to your research, nurture for future partnerships or engage them for usability, and use automation to channel them where you need to. This is to make sure you maximise engagement with a small team.
Roadmap
A well-defined roadmap is crucial for guiding your software launch from idea to market. While your roadmap and tactics should remain agile, your goals must be strict to ensure that you stay on track.
Planning in Stages
Breaking down your launch into stages helps manage complexity and allows for focused execution at each step. Here’s a suggested approach:
Problem to Validation: Can you prove on paper that this idea is worth investing in? This stage involves research and hypothesis testing to validate that your idea has potential.
Validation to POC: What is the lowest cost way to test your hypothesis organically with your market? The proof of concept (POC) is a simple version of your product that demonstrates its feasibility.
POC to MVP: What’s the fastest way to build a usable point solution? The MVP should be a basic, functional version of your product that can be tested with real users.
MVP to Beta: What else do you need for this to be a self-serve point solution? The beta version should include additional features and be ready for broader testing.
Beta to Launch: Once you start onboarding users, this is a great time to experiment with features that might solve the same or related problems in a better way. Prioritise changes based on feedback that are most likely to set you up for success.
Keeping Costs Low
Throughout the roadmap, aim to keep costs as low as possible, especially during the POC and MVP stages. Focus on validating your hypothesis and building a functional product before investing heavily in additional features or marketing.
Do these things:
Make your roadmap your problem solving roadmap, not your feature roadmap
Align your roadmap with your goals, and show the previous progress against your actions, and your forecast progress against your proposed actions
If you have to share your roadmap widely, keep a single source of truth (SSOT) of all the data and create appropriate UIs for the intended audience (e.g. a slide in a presentation, data that filters into BI/Finance, a customer facing roadmap that GTM teams can access and display)
Methodologies and Process
At this stage, assuming you have a small team, your focus should be on keeping everyone on track and within budget. The process you implement should be lightweight, flexible, and geared towards generating traction rather than relying on rigid methodologies.
Do these things:
Accessibility of Data and Research: Make all raw data and research accessible to your team, but discuss it in terms of problems to solve. This includes user research, roadmaps, financial progress, etc.
Visual Communication: Make things as visual as possible to enhance understanding and alignment across the team.
Open Communication Lines: Keep communication lines open, whether in person, remote, synchronous, or asynchronous. There are many ways to achieve this, and it’s important to find what works best for your team.
Time for Ideation: If you want to ideate, you need to give people time to think. Not everyone can ideate on the spot, and not everyone can easily switch contexts. Allocating dedicated time for brainstorming and problem-solving is crucial for fostering creativity and innovation within your team. This ensures that ideas are well thought out and not rushed, leading to more effective solutions.
Fast Feedback Loops: Provide feedback quickly and stay focused on the goals and the problem you’re trying to solve. Relating everything back to your objectives helps keep the team aligned and ensures that the work being done is directly contributing to the overall success of the project.
Letting Go of Perfection: In the pursuit of problem-solving, it’s important to let go of perfection. The user defines what perfection looks like, not you. Focus on solving the core problems first, and remember that you’ll have time to polish the user interface and other details later on.
Simplicity in Design: Keep your designs simple and user-friendly. Overcomplicating the product can lead to usability issues and a steep learning curve for users. A simple design helps users focus on the core functionalities of the product without unnecessary distractions.
Adapting Methodologies: Don’t commit to one methodology; instead, borrow the lightest-weight parts of various methodologies that suit your team and project needs. For example:
Daily Check-ins: Use stand-ups, but be strict on time. This keeps the team aligned without dragging out meetings.
Weekly Deep Dives: Schedule meetings where the agenda is a list of problems to solve, aiming to unblock any challenges that prevent achieving your weekly or monthly goals.
Async Demos: Consider asynchronous demos to accommodate different time zones and working hours, allowing everyone to stay informed without the need for real-time meetings.
Kanban Boards: Utilise Kanban boards to prioritise tasks effectively, with the top ticket being the top priority.
Living Documents: Keep functional requirements documents on a whiteboard, which should be dynamic and easily accessible rather than static walls of text.
Public (to your team) To-Do Lists: Create visible to-do lists so team members know when someone is planning to unblock them, fostering transparency and accountability.
Process Implementation: A good litmus test for your process is whether it can be implemented and executed within an hour. The focus should be on making the process simple and effective, avoiding reliance on processes to solve issues, and instead concentrating on generating traction and momentum.
Risks and Rewards
Launching a software product involves navigating various risks and rewards. Understanding these can help you avoid common pitfalls and make more informed decisions.
Acknowledging False Accelerants
False accelerants can be anything from early investment, a pre-existing team, having a loud early stage customer, or opinionated HiPPOs. These factors may give the illusion of rapid progress but can actually be misleading (especially with assumptions and biases), especially if you don’t have the basic research to prove that the product solves a valuable problem. It’s crucial to remain grounded in reality and rely on data-driven insights rather than gut feelings.
Beware of the Single Customer Voice (SCV)
Another risk is the SCV or Single Customer Voice, where a single customer's feedback disproportionately influences your product decisions. While customer feedback is valuable, it's important to balance it with a broader perspective to ensure that your product appeals to a wider audience.
Understanding the Timeline
There is no fixed timeframe for the research and validation stage. With less investment, it may take longer—sometimes up to 18 months. Many startups push towards the growth stage prematurely, while this foundational stage remains incomplete. It’s important to resist the temptation to move too quickly and ensure that your product is truly capable of growth.
The Sunk Cost Fallacy
Lastly, beware of the sunk cost fallacy—the tendency to continue investing in a project because of the time or money already spent, even when it’s clear that it’s not working. Recognizing when to pivot or abandon a project is crucial for long-term success.
Conclusion
Launching a software product is a complex and multifaceted endeavour, but with careful planning, research, and execution, you can significantly increase your chances of success. By setting clear goals, conducting thorough research, managing risks, building the right team, and creating an agile roadmap, you can navigate the challenges of bringing your product to market. Remember, flexibility and adaptability are key—stay focused on your goals, but be prepared to pivot when necessary. Keep your processes lightweight and centred around problem-solving, and most importantly, don’t be afraid to iterate and improve as you learn from your experiences.
For more insights or personalised advice, feel free to reach out. You can also explore the Lifecycle packages to find tailored solutions that can help bolster your business in the short term and guide you through the critical stages of your software launch.
TL;DR
Confidence is directly correlates to the size and accuracy of your sample size
Don’t analyse, synthesise
Keep your goals strict, but your approach flexible
What is a product?
A product is a solution to a problem
A good product is a creative solution to solve a user problem, and many underlying issues
A great product is a radical solution to a user problem, its underlying issues that can scale organically
And finally; if your product doesn’t resonate with your market, it doesn’t matter what processes you implement, what business model and go-to-market strategy you deploy, or how much investment you inject, you will not find your potential growth.
