The Art of the Launch

Intro

In the foundations of a successful product launch, the rule is simple: prioritize your customers. This blog, delves into three important phases – Customer Validation, Prototype & Build, and Measure. Join us as we explore the importance of early customer validation, rapid prototyping, and continuous measurement, unraveling why it is extremely critical to have a foundational structure for any launch.

1. Customer Validation

This is crucial, as the fate of the business lies in whether an idea is valid enough to pursue or not. This may be thought of as something that can be discarded and put off for later, but it is absolutely top priority. When our product, bloc, first launched we did not put customers first. As developers, we tend to have a bias for building first and everything else comes later, and that's exactly what we did. What we should have done was, first, get real validation from customers of whether the problem was indeed real and if it was intense and frequent. Only after receiving feedback, should we have began building. This prevents spending precious time on building pointless features that no one may want.

The ultimate goal is to see if an idea has potential or not as soon as possible. This can be achieved by getting an understanding of the customers landscape. Ask yourself what other problems maybe lurking around the customers processes? Like mines in a minefield, each small problem adds to the total size of the original problem. This is considered finding implications, asking "What other problems do these small problems cause?"

All of this will be used to organize and structure the next phase: Prototype & Build

2. Prototype & Build

After an achieving an initial grasp of the customers stated needs, build a prototype immediately. During this phase, the focus is on improving the customers situation 10x.

Whether the prototype is faster or more convenient, detail to the user experience is pinnacle. This doesn't mean overly design, simplicity is the way to a customers heart.

From a technical point of view, software architecture should be a topic on the radar. To ensure a speedy development and deployment, a monolithic architecture approach is most commonly used. This is where the prototype contains the frontend and backend code all in the same source code. There is nothing wrong with this approach but, there are tradeoffs in the long run. While a microservice architecture is noteworthy depending on the use case, it's crucial to understand that the costs of such an architecture can escalate significantly when scaling becomes necessary.

This phase should be completed within the week to immediately start collecting user feedback. Feedback will be used in the next phase Measure.

3. Measure

Put the prototype in the potential customers hands and watch them use the product. Pay attention to what they do and what they don’t do. There will be signs of where to add improvements based off how the customer interacts with the prototype.

For technical teams, it is worth having an analytics tool to help you assess what your customers are doing. Companies like Amplitude or Mixpanel provide easy to use analytics tools that can be easily setup by using their docs. These tools provide deeper insights into what your customer is experiencing when they use the prototype.

All of this puts you directly in the mind of your customer. It places you in a greater position to understand and solve their problem all the way through. There are no substitutes for this, it is absolutely necessary that you gather these insights to spark new and innovative ideas that could contribute to the customer experience and even the overall vision of your company.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this repeatable structured approach—starting with customer validation, transitioning to prototyping, and culminating in continuous measurement—forms the The Art of the Launch. Placing customers at the core of each decision, understanding their needs, and iterating based on real interactions ensures not just a product but a resonant and evolving solution that stands the test of time.