10 Must-Follow Tips in Measuring New Product Launch Performance
.png)
Your vision is to be confident a new launch was a success.
You may or may not have a team to look at this, but either way, you want an easy way to get a process in place for measuring the success of launches or releases. This will allow you to make decisions in the future when it comes to launching like the type of product you develop, the price, and other variables. This article is going to go through the reasons Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are so important, the reasons launches fail, the top items to measure every time you launch a new product or service, and how often you need to do it.
The importance of measuring Key Performance Indicators after launch
According to Harvard Business School in 2019, around 30,000 new product launches each year and 95% of them fail. Whether yours is successful or not, you want to make sure you are measuring the results to learn and improve. If you look at several KPIs, you should start to see the specific areas that improvements can be made for future launches. By having multiple dimensions to look at, you can start to draw conclusions such as “We notice that product type X does well on launch day, and sales drop dramatically after one week”, or “Product type B doesn’t pick up revenue until it’s been in the market at least 30 days.”
Why do so many launches fail?
1. Lack of measurement of previous launches.
If you continually put out product that fails to meet sales or adoption expectations, what are you learning along the way if you aren’t analyzing all aspects?
2. Poor planning.
Can you say you did all you could in the last launch to ensure all teams were working together and were included where necessary to make it a success? Did you have a launch calendar in place?
3. Product doesn’t live up to expectations.
Was the product launched too soon before it was ready or was it more of an issue with marketing making promises that the product just can’t keep?
4. The product requires too much education or it’s too confusing.
This may be something that resembles something else people are familiar with but it doesn’t function like expected and so they don’t understand, or it could be it’s not easy enough to use for the purpose intended.
5. There is simply no market.
This may be because the price is too out of reach for what it does or people just don’t find they have a problem that needs to be solved. You have to understand the needs of the customer and tailor to what they are willing to buy to solve their problem. Not what you think is what they need. You can do things to get those insights like interview them.
The KPIs of a new launch to measure to learn from and avoid failure
Below is a list of areas to start looking at in order to get insights as to how to improve. However, this is a long list. If you started to look at something like revenue, price, and/or usage, you would be off to a good start. Depending on the type of business you have, some will apply more than others.
These are suggested KPIs to measure and track
How often do you need to measure launch KPIs?
This is another key piece to measuring success. The day you launch is day 1. It’s important to measure how your product is received and sales on this day. From there, it’s a good idea to choose timeframes that make sense for your business. You may want to measure again by day, or month, depending on your product or service. This is key to making this ongoing. Day 1 is quite different from a month out, and from 90 days out. Often, pricing falls after launch, or adoption slows down or picks up. These are all necessary things to study to guide your future success.
In summary, this article is a good place to start if you are looking for measure results of new launches, whether it’s in the retail sector, service, or software. If you start with one or two, and measure at an interval that makes sense for you such as day 1, 30, and 90, you will start finding patterns that will guide you in selling activity, types of products launched, and increasing sales.