Fitness Product Manager on Launch Strategy (Part 3)
During the early stages of launch planning, a product manager should identify clear KPIs for new features. Furthermore, this is where you define the value that you are delivering to your customers. This is not easy to do, as you’re trying to pre-determine the impact of a specific feature. That said, the feature don’t exist yet or you don’t know the results that it will produce.
One way to assign priority for new features is threshold analysis in order to forecast the potential impact for a given feature. For example, let’s say your new feature is designed to drive user engagement. With this, your KPI for measuring success could be open rate through A/B testing.
First, you should create a scale based on extreme results (100% boost in engagement vs. 1% boost). From this scale, you can determine the minimum threshold for launch (i.e., 10% boost) and analyze the investment required to launch it. This gets back to thinking like an economist, as a product manager determines how to get the most value out of available resources.
Building a cross-functional team to drive your launch planning is a great way to maximize your resources. For example, product teams need input from every function of the company that is connected to the product. This includes data analytics, customer support, engineers and operations.
Instead of product people running our meetings, the analytics team would take the lead. I loved it because that group was agnostic about the whole process. Every piece of data they provided gave us a clear picture of reality. As a result, our team would identify action items within their core function to keep the project on track.
This became known as our “pulse meeting,” and we would hold it every day before launch and every day after the launch. By taking this approach, we were able to quickly resolve issues within 24 hours and ensure that each launch yielded long-term success for our products.
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About the speaker
Tim Roberts has led product teams at innovative tech companies for over 25 years. Starting out as FitBit’s eighth employee, Tim ascended to become EVP of Product and Design - overseeing all product functions and taking the company from startup to IPO. Tim currently works with several tech fitness companies as a strategic advisor.
About the host
Randhir Vieira is the VP of Product at Headspace - leading the product team to achieve the organization’s mission of improving health and happiness around the world. Prior to Headspace, Randhir was the Chief Customer Officer at Mindflash, a leading cloud-based Learning Management System. He was also the VP of Product and Customer Care at Eyefi - and Senior Product Director at Yahoo.