Launch Management

ProductPlan is a product management tool that helps teams assess opportunities, build strategy, and deliver - all in one platform. Launch Management is a product area within ProductPlan that provides a central place to plan, track and communicate upcoming launches that live alongside your roadmaps.

My role

UX Researcher

  • Desk research competitive analysis

  • Define interview questions and script

  • Survey and interview users

  • Usability testing

  • Synthesize user research and business data

  • Ensure objectives, goals, and requirements are clear and led by user research

 

UX Designer

  • Visual design (marketing materials)

  • UX and UI design (wireframing, prototyping)

  • Shape the product roadmap, designs, and future research activities

  • Review user stories within design sprints

Our mission

  • How might we revolutionize how enterprises deliver products to market? This means more than roadmaps. What are roadmap adjacent problems we could solve for product teams?

Goals

  • Discover opportunities that ProductPlan can support customers (new and existing) in their go-to-market process. This could be better supporting what is working as our customers’ GTM or solving problems for things that aren't working well.

  • Our company is growing and go-to-market is getting more challenging for us (more people, shipping more often). What can we learn from customers that will help us in our go-to-market?

 

Research timeline

 

Initial customer interview insights

 
 

Product launch flow of information

 

Area for opportunity

“As a product operations manager, I want to see features across my products through to launch.”
 

Problem statement

How might we design a way for product operations managers to effectively see features through to launch?

 
 

Initial designs and customer feedback

Call goals:

  • Show designs and find out if go-to-market/feature launch functionality would be valuable in ProductPlan.


  • Gather information that will help us determine what's the most pressing or valuable problem we could solve for product/feature launches today. In other words if we build this iteratively, what's first?


  • Learn more about how product operations and product managers are driving product launches today.

 

Customer feedback

Filtering:

  • Users want to see where they are at to launch and how important that feature is compared to other features launching around that time

  • People don’t want to think about each feature separately

  • Users want to have the ability to group features into one release

  • People want to see buckets of releases that relate to one another (Which features are launching together?)

  • Users want to view features/releases by launch date, not by products

  • Users want to view readiness across teams, not by features

  • Need to be able to see what kind of launch it is. Is it an internal release, sales release, or public launch

Customization/Flexibility:

  • People want to be able to add their own lists and customize fields

  • Include “increase in revenue expected” column (or allow columns to be customizable)

  • Include Security and Compliance in the list of teams (or make teams customizable)

 
 

Templates:

  • People don’t want to generate the same lists over and over

  • People want a GTM plan to follow (for folks who are new to ProductOps)

  • Users want templated lists depending on the kind of feature launch it falls under (tier 1, 2, 3, or 4)

Tiers:

  • Need to show where a feature is at to launch AND the level of importance it is in comparison to other features happening simultaneously. It’s great to see how all the features are doing, but people also want to quickly see if it’s a bug fix or a major sit redesign.

  • Users want a separate tier category &/or the ability to filter by tiers so that they can view a features level of importance compared to other features

  • Need to be able to categorize major releases vs. minor releases, or small, medium, and large releases

Scope and timeline:

  • Customers need to know what's in an upcoming launch and if the launch is on target or at risk. Currently teams are creating manual reports which requires a duplication of data that is in ProductPlan. If customers can create these reports more easily and efficiently they will free up time for key product management functions.

What we want to learn from alpha?

  • We want to use alpha to manage upcoming launches at ProductPlan, because this is a problem we are facing as well. Using early versions will help with internal enablement across the company. Early internal experiences will help us develop customer enablement.

What we want to learn from beta?

  • What additional scope is needed to support our customers?

  • What do we need to build to meet the needs of customers in the dashboard?

  • Do we need to build checklists before we are able to deliver something valuable (sellable) to customers?

  • What is the right level of roles and permissions that would provide people with information but wouldn't add risk of insider trading or a competitive intel leak.

 

Internal alpha

Features that were built:

  • Choose a target date for a launch

  • Assign bars and containers to a release with a launch date

  • Display all features by release

  • Manually specify the status for the feature

Feedback:

  • Need a more detailed view for each launch

  • Need to be able to view a checklist for each launch

  • Need to be able to add/remove features from launches

  • Need to be able to add features from roadmaps

 
 

External beta

Features that were built:

  • Detailed (checklist) view for each launch

  • Task statuses (Done and To Do)

  • Add/remove bars and containers from launches

  • Add bars and containers to launches from the roadmap view (bar details)

Feedback:

  • Issues with adding a launch by selecting roadmaps and selecting bars

  • Confusion about what priority means

  • Confusion about where status comes from (need to indicate that there is a checklist that indicates the status of the launch somewhere in the table)

  • Need to make bars/containers clickable on the dropdown

  • Create a way to edit and or delete

  • Launch checklist templates are confusing (checklist type- high, med, low)

  • Potentially restructure the ‘add a launch’ flow

 
 
 

General availability

Features that were built:

  • Adding checklist sections

  • Moving tasks and sections

  • Filtering checklist tasks

  • Launch owner visibility

  • UI improvements

  • Accessing launch management from the roadmap view

  • Launch checklist templates

  • Launch Management email notifications

Feedback:

  • Ongoing~

 

Why build Launch Management?

Ask any product manager about their launch process, and you will likely hear something like this: “It’s a nightmare. There’s no standard process for go-to-market. It’s confusing for everyone.”

What challenges does Launch Management solve?

  1. Lack of visibility across teams

  2. Building manual, time-intensive reports to access launch progress

  3. Inconsistent and disorganized launch processes

Measuring success

  1. 30% of Enterprise Plans use Launch Management within 2 months of GA 

  2. Increased Enterprise sales over Professional plans (new customers)