Product Launch

The commercial world is littered with the wreckage of international expansion plans gone awry, whether it’s the $2 billion that US discount retailer Target misguidedly spent thinking Americans and Canadians are the same, Tesco’s failure to understand US shopping habits with its Fresh & Easy brand or the failure of the HP digital magazine Pivot Read more »

This is a story about My Underwear. Not my underwear —  but “My Underwear” — the mobile game for children from my old game studio. More importantly, it’s about the hard work of building accessible products, about finding and fuelling previously unreachable audiences (niche markets on the internet), and ultimately about creating joy for people using our products Read more »

In this talk at ProductTank NYC I recounted five tactics I learned while helping relaunch dozens of digital products over the last decade, and then used to successfully relaunch ICv2.com. ICv2 is a popular trade website for the comic, graphic novel, board game and toy industries. The goal for the relaunch was a complete design and code Read more »

When you launch a product, you rarely ever run just a single customer test of the capabilities and features – it tends to be a series of tests that follow each other (much like Stage-Gate for the development of new products). This “gated” approach allows you to balance the risks of widening your audience against Read more »

One of the most important responsibilities of a product manager is planning the order of features that the dev team should work on. This need to prioritise comes from a very basic constraint – a lack of resource. In a fast-moving business environment – and especially in a start-up – product changes should deliver the most Read more »

There are few relationships as deep and passionate as that between a start-up founder and their product. Your product will dominate your thoughts all day and even through the night from time to time. You’ll ask yourself questions like how can I improve my product, how can I make people buy it, is it the Read more »

Getting to product/market fit is “the only thing that matters” to start-ups, according to Netscape co-founder and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. The principle is that a product should “fit” the needs of a market for the company to scale and be successful. But how can this be achieved if some signs point towards your firm Read more »

As a product manager I’m sure you will have found that prototypes can be hugely useful for visualising requirements and revealing hidden risks. Lengthy, 50-page requirements are not reliable ways of conveying all the subtleties of a digital product. In my experience, readers quickly get bored and even worse, misinterpret what is written. But prototypes expand Read more »

We often think of pricing as something to do right before launching a new product. Maybe it gets a little thought during development, but it isn’t urgent. Now that we’re approaching launch though, we need a price. Or, sometimes we schedule a pricing meeting to decide whether to change our existing price or, albeit rarely, Read more »

Anyone who wants to get a new product or service to market must be confident that what they’re selling will be successful. The process of building confidence involves work  – before the concept is decided through market research to identify the opportunity, during the build with research to gauge customer reaction and again once the product is Read more »