 Today, I'm here to discuss a guide to launching a product, a land where art needs science. Hi, I'm Sarika Tyagi. I'm a product leader at Amazon. While I've been with Amazon for almost three years, I have over 18 years of experience building products in corporates as well as as an entrepreneur. I've co-founded two startups. My first startup is Scarlet Fresh Shoe, where I build instinctual repair and foot pain relief solutions for women's dress shoes, and it's still my side gig. My second startup was in healthcare space called My202BMI, where I build technology products and offer health consulting services for direct to customers as well as businesses. I've also worked in large organizations such as tech companies, such as the NC Square and Cisco Systems, where I work on internal infrastructure products, mostly products that get consumed internally by the employees. I also worked at Cameron, which is an oil and gas space, where I build large systems for oil processing for operators such as Shell and British Petroleum. And then I work for Capital One and currently at Amazon, where I work on digital products for direct to customers. I've really had the fortune of working across six industries, across different types of products and distribution segments. So, you know, bringing my experience together today, I'll walk you through my mental model around launching products, a framework to thinking about product launch strategy across the different distribution segments. So think about whether it's a business to customers directly, a business selling to business, or even when you think about infrastructure products, products that are internally consumed by other employees. And finally, having done both, I'll discuss my experience of launching products in large organization versus in startups. So what is launching a product really entail? You know, first of all, it's a very well coordinated effort with all your stakeholders in the company. Like engineering, your marketing, your research, product, your sales teams, all of these stakeholders together. Launching a new product is often looked as a sequential step to, you know, product development, which leads to increased failure potential of the product. If a product is not developed, keeping its launch strategy in mind, even the best design and develop products may fail. It's not just important to bring awareness about the product and its value. It is equally important to enable your customers to engage with your product. You know, think, give free trials to your customers, show demos, make the returns easy for your customers so that they can provide their desired feedback and they won't feel like once they've bought the product, they're logged into it. And above all, no launch is complete without the right success metrics. Is it engagement? Is it sales? Is it retention? Or is it, you know, you just want to try a pilot with a large organization. So where do you begin the launch journey for your product? You know, launching a product is as much of an art as it is a science. There are objective items on your checklist. As a product manager, you must fulfill before you launch a product, but no amount of preparation can guarantee the success of a product while it can certainly increase the probability of it. Building the right product for your target market or your target customers is a known table stake. I mean, if your product is not fulfilling your customer's needs for solving a customer problem, that product doesn't hold a chance. So that's table stakes in today's world. But articulating the value it brings to the customers is equally important if not more important. How else are your customers going to know that this product exists? Knowledge of your product and how it can help them is critical. It is also important to note that product launch journey doesn't start after the development is completed. Instead, it begins at the same time when you are designing and developing your product. You know, as a product manager or a product marketing manager, whoever is responsible for bringing this product to the customers, you know, in your product design phase is when you will start influencing those requirements. Because you know best what your customers are asking for at the end of that tunnel, at the point of consumption. So it becomes your responsibility to feed it back at the time when the product is being designed so that the product offers the right value to its customers. So really, how do you know what your customers want? Well, if it's a brand new product never launched in the market, then you can leverage your generative research that either your designer or your researcher may have conducted. And if it's a product which is an enhancement, then it's even easier because you can leverage your prior launch learnings and feedback from existing customers. Now, beauty about all these rules that we talked about is that respect to whether your product is a service, a physical product, a digital product, or, you know, just a product which is consumed internally by the employees, you know, all of these directly delivering either to customers, to businesses, or even in an infrastructure product. All these rules apply across the board. So how do you think about your launch strategy? How do you develop it? What components are important? And what does your launch strategy really look like? So there are eight different elements that, you know, based on my experience, I've put together here and I'll go through each one of them. First one is you need to identify your customer target and you need to be able to figure out where are you going to find them. So you start with an understanding of your customers, who are you going to target? What marketplace are you going to launch your product in? For example, if you're launching a product for pets, you'll want to target customers who currently own pets first. Depending on the launch goal, your target audience may be driven by, you know, you may start with your size of your market, you know, wherever your largest market is. Or you may start with the customers who have your biggest pain point. It may be a niche market, but those customers are most impacted by this current problem. But third, you can actually target customers who are very easy to access. And you can at least do a quick product market fit with those customers. Second step is to define your value proposition by understanding your customers' pain points and their journey. The goal of launching any new product is to solve a customer's problem by delivering either better, faster, or cheaper solution to them. For example, Amazon ourselves clothes. Our customers can easily go to a store, try the clothes on, choose what they want, and pay for them. So Amazon created a similar experience via the buy with prime wardrobe, where customers can buy the clothes and not pay for the first seven days. They receive the clothes, they try them on, they keep what they want, and they only pay or they only get charged for the clothes they keep. And whatever they return in the next seven days, they don't get charged for it. Think about Amazon understanding the customer's journey and then solving this problem even in a better way, because now customers get saves time for them, they don't need to go to a store and try on. And it gives customers flexibility of easy returns. And then essentially shopping when they actually have time, not when the stores are open. So think about the customer's journey and bring that flexibility to either deliver it faster, better, or in a cheaper way. The third is driving awareness and education to your customers. Now that we know who we are going to sell to and what value it is going to bring to your customers, how do we make them aware of our products? How do we educate them of the value that these products or this product would bring to them? I would run pre-marketing campaigns, launch a press release, host pre-ordered sales events, conduct roadshows, run social media campaigns, create value-related content that customers can understand and associate, which describes a problem, how this product actually solves this problem, and how can customers enhance their lives with this product. Drive specific advertising, run Kickstarter. So there are many such mechanisms in which, through which you can actually bring awareness on what your product is actually capable of. Fourth is define your success metrics. How do you know your launch was successful? If you look at the top of your funnel, you think about, are you trying to maximize the number of customers who use your product once? Are you looking to drive acquisition or sales on your product? Or are you OK with limited acquisition, but you're driving retention? You want the customers who are coming to your product or using your product once? You want them to use again and again. That's customer stickiness and repeated use of your product. Are you looking to increase your customer satisfaction, your net promoter score, which means your customers are going to become proponents of your product? Or are you trying to find a company that will launch or associate with you to launch a pilot with you as a test ground for your product? It's very important to understand how you're going to determine the success of your product because that's going to determine some of your aspects of your launch strategy. Number five, you finalize your pricing, your placement and your branding. So think, this is where you actually build your financial model to define your pricing. You want to understand what is the right price point at which you're not overpricing yourself and you're also not leaving anything on the table. What channels are you going to sell it through? Are they going to be, if it's direct to customers, then Instagram or Facebook and some of these search engine optimization, some of these would be better channels than going on roadshows or driving demos and so forth. How do you want your customers to associate this product back with your brand? So it's important to kind of think about what does a customer think about when they think about your product? How are the customers anticipating this product is going to help them? Once again, going back to the basics, make their lives better, faster or get them something in a cheaper fashion. Up until this point, during the pre-launch phase, you can try multiple price points as a testing ground. You can offer your product for free to just get that customer feedback. You can even test multiple versions of your branding or product pricing or placements and so forth. Number six is prepare a product launch roadmap. This is more of a tactical execution step. Now here you would work very closely with your design, your engineering and or manufacturing teams to know the milestones of developing your product. You'll define your testing plan. You'll set up your standard operating procedures for customer service calls. After you've launched, what if a customer calls a certain problem? What should be the response of your customer service? Your press release communication, if you're anticipating any controversies upon launch, your marketing to work on promotional content, any early positive customer feedback you may have received and your launch plan. But in respect of whether it's an existing product or a new product, I will always launch in small iterations. Like something, for example, we do at, you know, at Amazon with millions of customers, we always go with web labs for experimentation as we're launching the first part, either it's a new product or just an existing, a feature on an existing product. Take a small sample, launch it, similarly on both of my startups, you know, where we were launching new product. I first launched my product, you know, in a small sample very locally before launching it broadly, either on Amazon to all customers or even when I think about, you know, my 22 BMI, when we launched our app to a more niche, localized market, where we offered the app, the consulting services, in a more focused single market space. Finally, last two steps, one is you're conducting a go-no-go right before launch. Now, what does this mean? Like you've built the product, you've done all these launch steps and are you going to now decide whether you're going to launch it or not? Yes or no? The answer at this point is not necessarily, is most likely, I would say, is going to be, are we ready for a launch? Not necessarily, is this the right product to launch or not? Because that stuff should have happened more so at the defined and ideation phase of your product design and development. At this point, you're basically testing for, am I ready to make this launch? Have I prepared everything I needed to prepare? Do I have the right customer feedback? Have I done the product market fit at a very preliminary level to understand that this product is indeed doing what it was designed for? So really, how do you make that decision? You've tested your product, you've viewed your demos, you've received only customer feedback, and you've checked for your product readiness. For digital products, this is something that's also done as part of iterative launch that I was defining earlier in the execution step. When you may launch a product and you may say, hey, I'm going to start with just 10%, launching with 10% of my population for a few days, going into 50% after that. And then I will look at my mid-launch analysis to say, are my customers really complaining about something that this product was supposed to do, but I have is not doing? Are there any bugs when I've actually brought it to production that I'm experiencing that we were not expected to? And then finally, I would test my data against the North Star that I had defined in step four to assess if it is safe to go or no go at this point. Finally, my last step would be launching and measuring my success. Now, this is where I go back and compare with what my North Star metric was as I had defined in step four. I continue to get that customer feedback and measure against my success metrics. So now that I have executed my eight steps and what defined what my launch strategy would look like, I wanted to share a proposed strategy, launch strategy framework that really applies to all kinds of products, whether it's a physical product, a digital product, whether it's a feature, small feature in an existing product, whether it's an experience, or more so along with services. This framework discusses how to work through a launch strategy for each of these product types. Irrespective of whatever your distribution segment looks like, whether you are selling it directly to customers or directly to businesses, or you're building them just for your internal consumption. Okay, so we'll walk through each of these eight steps from our launch strategy and compare them against the product launch products when they're launched to each of these different distribution segments. The first one is targeting your customers. The customers you want to first launch your product. So when you think about the B2C setup, your target customers are going to be individual customers where you would actually look for their buying patterns or their demographics or their true pain points that the customers are experiencing throughout their current journey of executing this task or using your complementary products that are available. On the other hand, when you think about a B2B product, we specifically look for your company profile. Which company are you going to sell to? What is the size of that company? What is their investment potential? What are the strategic plans? Does your product fit into what their goals and objectives are for next year? On the other hand, when you think about infrastructure products, you're really thinking about within the large organization that you have, which teams have strategic goals and objectives that align with the consumption of the product that you're going to deliver to that org. And if the top buying, the management leadership buying is not there for your product consumption, then you know that that particular org or team may not be the right team to begin launching your product. The second one is defining your value proposition. Now, irrespective of the distribution segment, whether you're selling to customers directly or to businesses or within your organization, in this phase you will evaluate your customers pain points. You always think about in terms of whoever is going to use my product. Do I understand their pain points? Do I understand my competitor landscape? Who else is selling a product in this phase today? Whether it's a direct competition or it's a substitute product that my customers may be using today. And you would articulate how your product delivers this once again, better, faster or cheaper to the customers. Third step here is how are you educating your customers? It's going to be different as well, depending on whether you're selling it directly to your customers. Because when you think about bringing awareness to your customers in a B2C setup, you may drive social media campaigns. You may write blogs. You may do search engine optimization. But when you think about bringing awareness to your businesses, you will probably access those conferences where you actually expect to see some of those businesses come and contribute or participate in. In some industry journals, you may actually do road shows. You may do demos for companies to come and see what your product can do or help your customers with or their businesses with. Versus for an infrastructure product, it will be mainly driven by stakeholder and leadership alignment for those teams that you anticipate would use your product. Fourth one is in terms of your business metrics, your not star metric, irrespective of who your customer is going to be, you always need to have that not star metric. You define what does your success really look like? Sixth step here is the marketing attributes. So think about pricing. Irrespective of whether the product is going directly to customers or to businesses, it must be priced. You need to have some pricing associated with it. Whereas for infrastructure products, it may, there may or may not be any pricing associated, more so if there would be associated value that you would have to define in terms of how it's going to be for customers. The sixth step is placement. Whether when a product is directly sold to the customers, it may be presented or be available on e-commerce sites or offline stores. Whereas when it's going directly to businesses, it may still be an off e-commerce site. Think about Wayfair or Amazon itself. They sell both to individuals as well as to businesses. But in a B2B setup, you may also have like purchasing groups or sales teams that are driving some of those sales. And an infrastructure product would be available through a company platform or a cloud or cloud services. Finally, the last two of the seventh is product launch checklist and post-launch checklist. Now, irrespective of again, how you are selling or who you are selling your product to, all products will have a checklist. There will be a strategically high-level, aid steps that we talked about. And then there'll be more company-specific items that you may have to do or more product-specific items you may have to do. For example, if this is a more controversial product or something that you anticipate may have PR situations arise, you will make sure that there is more thorough PR and legal privacy and legal alignment done on the product versus one which does not may not need that much of a legal approval or alignment. So those will be some very product and company-specific items that you put on your launch checklist. Similarly for post-launch, every product requires customer feedback, no matter who you are launching. And every product requires that measurement against the success metrics to make sure that you did accomplish, your product did accomplish what it was set out to do. So finally, one of the questions I have personally asked and experienced myself as well is how is launching a product different in large organization versus in a startup? It is what you see up here, it is a work in progress framework and I'm happy to hear more comments on aspects that I may not have compared here. Now, having done both, like having worked in large organizations as well as co-founded startups and world-ed startups, I've launched bootstrap initiatives with my entrepreneurial ventures and I've launched even in large organizations like I would say with Amazon, I've launched pilots, I've launched Greenfield products which is you start from scratch and then you scale it within the Amazon ecosystem. I've measured these two across like four pillars. The first one is funding, expertise of resources that supplement the design, development and delivery of your product. Third is how success is viewed to consider how the next level of funding should be done or whether the product should, a project or initiative should be killed or should it continue. And fourth one is the professional impact. How does it help you in your career professionally as well as even personally from that growth standpoint? So thinking about securing funds, securing funds or requesting additional funds in a large organization can be relatively easier as compared to in startups. Why? Because the bar for investment may be much higher in startup in terms of has the prototype been tested with the customers? In large organizations, you always have these funds that are available and in general, there is more stability and more appetite for the company funds to be directed into a certain space versus in a startup, you're essentially starting from scratch. You may not even have a product or credibility to show from a company standpoint what are the founders of a founder standpoint as a team, what your team is capable of delivering. So securing funds is certainly harder for a startup. Thinking about finding expertise from a, you may have design resources, your researchers from a finance standpoint, how can you help understand the financial modeling of your product? Testing across a large organization is all of these elements, they are more feasible than a startup because even if you don't have dedicated resources and you're starting or launching a pilot or just doing a bootstrap initiative within the large organization, you still have broader resources you can leverage for one-to-one consulting internally through office hours or just as informal consulting where these resources have context of what this company does, what the product may, how the product connects with the larger ecosystem within the large company. So bringing that expertise and context becomes much easier. Whereas in a startup, it's a more often a one-man show, one woman show where a product manager may be driving some of the design, may be conducting some of the research, working one-to-one with engineers to also launch the product themselves. So there is this, and in a startup world, there may be more dependence or reliance on third-party consulting services who may or may not have the context of the product in the industry or just about the company. Success measurement is also interesting. Like in large organization, if there is even some traction, even some directional success, it might be easier to get that extra funding because then there's some conviction that is built, there's a level of risk appetite. But in a startup, this is also what happened with us at my 22 BMI where we had a small prototype to where we had launched with a small group of niche customers, but it was not enough to build that strong conviction to raise the next level of funding that we needed. And we had to fold the business even when there was some directional traction that we had generated. Finally, from a professional impact standpoint, high risk, high reward. When you are in a startup world, you're obviously more likely to see, if you see success, there's a much higher reward. You get to really drive your vision, you get to really make the calls in which direction your product is going, what value you will continue to offer you to your customers versus in a large organization. There's lower risk, but also there's a lower reward, like the maximum money that you can make or maximum impact that you can have on your product would also be limited. With that, I am happy to take questions. I look forward to meeting you all in the Q&A session on the 23rd of January. Thank you.