How to measure product success post-launch | Sopheon

So you’ve done your market research, you’ve developed your genius new product and you’ve just launched it for all the world to experience.

Congratulations!

The launch of a new product is an exciting time for any business. But the hard work isn’t over yet.

Everything you’ve done up to this point has created a successful liftoff, but you’ll still need to navigate a few more key milestones before you arrive at your final goal successfully.

After launch, you’ve entered into the “New-to-Market” phase of your product lifecycle. This phase really sets the stage for your product’s longer-term success, its future growth and its journey through the rest of the product cycle. 

And while you probably won’t start to see the high sales volumes you want just yet, this is the stage to invest in your marketing efforts, build product awareness and measure initial customer interactions, feedback and early indicators to get a handle on market acceptance. 

You tested your hypothesis on market acceptance during the in-development stage—this is where you get to truly validate it. As well as make any changes if you’re not quite seeing the engagement you expect—whether that’s tweaking features, adjusting pricing or refining marketing messages.

This article runs through three tips to measure and boost product success after launch. So you can validate market acceptance and make necessary changes to improve product success.

Note: This is the second article in our new series on the five stages of the product lifecycle, spanning from the in-development, new-to-market and market growth stages to market maturity and decline. Keep your eyes peeled for our upcoming blogs.

1. Metrics and success measurement

During the early adoption phase, you need a good understanding of who’s using your product, which features they like or dislike and how you can make changes to improve success. 

To do that, metrics are key.

Here are just some of the key metrics to track during the new-to-market phase of your lifecycle:

• Feature adoption: How quickly and widely are users adopting specific features? Low adoption could be a sign that users aren’t interested in or have no need for a specific feature. Or it could indicate that they’re experiencing issues or high levels of friction when using the feature, which is putting them off from using it.
• Product activation: How successfully are users integrating your product into their routines or workflows? Low activation might indicate onboarding issues or a lack of perceived value.
• Customer acquisition cost: What’s the total cost of acquiring a new customer? If your spending isn’t delivering a reasonable return on investment, you might want to consider experimenting with new channels and campaigns to find the most cost-effective ways to acquire new customers.
• Revenue: What’s the total income generated from your product sales? Evaluate which customer segments are contributing most to your revenue and adjust your marketing and sales strategies accordingly.
• Product health score: Your product health score is a composition of a series of different metrics that, together, indicate the well-being of your product and its success in an easily digestible way. It typically takes into account various key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics related to the product's performance, but can vary depending on which metrics you want to include or the program you use to track it. 

At this stage, it’s also worth gathering customer feedback on how they’re using the product, the benefits they’re realizing from it and any features they wish your product had or that frustrate them. You can do this via workshops, one-to-one interviews or simple online surveys.

This is an invaluable resource for identifying any pain points or friction that customers experience while using your product and how you can improve them to increase adoption.

2. Persona development

While you would’ve thoroughly researched your users and created personas during the in-development stage of your product lifecycle, your user personas are never set in stone.

In fact, they’re likely to shift and change as you start to gather early usage data from the real customers who are now using your product.

And regularly updating your personas is key to gaining a deeper understanding of who your customers are, what they want and how you can make improvements to drive your product toward product-market fit.

You might even see the emergence of new personas that you hadn’t thought of or included previously, as your product perhaps fits a use case that you hadn’t considered during the ideation phase.

In that case, creating new personas will help you understand how to maximize on that new use case and whether you can take it further in future with new features and developments.

3. Make necessary adjustments

Now that you have concrete data on what your customers value about your product, what they use it for and what they wish could be improved—coupled with your up-to-date personas—you can start making adjustments to increase adoption and sales.

Start by creating a list of areas that need improvement, and start ideating around how you can improve them.

You’ll need to go through your usual process of validating, testing and analyzing ideas before taking them forward into development, but at the end, you should have a list of key activities you need to complete to improve your product.

Next comes prioritization. There are lots of great prioritization techniques out there, but we tend to use the value-effort matrix. This helps you prioritize activities based on their perceived value or impact in relation to the effort required to carry them out.

Activities that are high-value but low-effort are your low-hanging fruit, while your high-value and high-effort activities are your major projects. On the flip side, your low-value but low-effort activities are your “fill-ins” that you can work on during downtime, while your low-value and high-effort activities are often what you should completely deprioritize.

Using the value-effort matrix, you can ensure you’re always working on the activities that will bring in the most value for your users and in the quickest possible timeframe. So you can drive your product into its market growth phase.