 Biggest mistake is you assign a task that's vital to the product to someone who sees it as sort of an extra credit assignment. For a big launch, if you want to make the $100 million product, you better have enough time. People don't put enough time into this. That is a bad way of doing things. Guys, this is Dr. Nancy Lee, a director product on Future Inforbs. I've helped 100 people land a dream PM job offer in fan companies in Unicorn Startup and continue to get promoted as a product leader. In this channel, we cover tech trends of free product management training like and subscribe and check out our new video every Tuesday. Let's talk regarding bigger companies first. So what's the process of launching a 100 million product and why launching a product is the hardest product management life cycle? It's from the top first, the larger ones. So at a larger company, usually it's a team that is jointly owned by the product manager who faces inward mostly and the product marketer who faces outward. They will be the heads of the team and then they'll bring together sort of a smattering of people from different groups, sales, service, documentation, legal, finance, all those sort of things. And for a big launch, if you want to make the $100 million product, you better have enough time. That's really an issue. People don't put enough time into this. They think that the day the code ships is the day that we launch. So that's just not, that is a bad way of doing things. You need time. That's far, far away from real launches. I think it really depends on who you talk to. The talk to engineers, I'm done, ship my code. Then talk to marketers like, yeah, there's no sales. So marketers doesn't, doesn't count the launch. Yeah. Right. So for a big launch, maybe two months, maybe three months in advance, you're really working on this. It could be longer in different industries. If you have regulatory requirements or if you have a lot of enterprise customers that need an adoption cycle, maybe it's even longer. And you're, and you're working that whole time and you're figuring out what documents need to be created, training, communications, approvals, you know, you can't just write a press release at a big company, it needs to go through 20 different levels of approval, translations for different markets. And that, that workflow is cross functional, which makes it difficult. It's undefined. And some of it's quite hard, right? It's not, not easy to figure out, you know, why is this feature or this product actually important to the target consumer? And how do you communicate it in such a way that really brings them to the table? Let's, let's, let's work a soft comms issue, but it's all part of the same effort, right? Yeah, especially when you mentioned this different company had different process and different people involved. And actually I speak to my own pain point. And two years ago, I helped Verizon to launch the first 5G edge computing product in collaboration with AWS and Azure. And at the time, not only internally, we need to launch it. And externally, we need to work with smart for different companies. And you're right, all the legal standpoint. And also, who do you talk to? The messaging is different. And when you talk to customers, do you prioritize certain segment or you want to make it broad to make it to everybody? Right? So very different. So yeah, please continue. So we talk about the people involved and messaging is different. Yeah. What are the process involved in launching like hard and big product? Yeah. Well, so I've spoken to maybe 30, 40 companies at this point in in-depth interviews to find out how they do it. And so step one is triage. It's we have to all agree. Is this a big release or not? There's actually a big problem where sometimes the every product manager is ambitious and they want to they want their product to be the one that people talk about in the Wall Street Journal and get excited. And that's not the case. So there has to be alignment because sometimes marketing will say to product management, this thing that you're dedicating your life to, it's not that important. We're not spending money on it. Sorry. You know, that's that's a tough one. So which means everyone has to be on page. Cool. So which means that company had different priorities in in terms of how much marketing budget they put on different product. So some like small ones, you don't you don't get enough support when you launch a product. Exactly. And so the best practice is that at an executive level, you agree on sort of a tiering system. What does large mean? What does medium mean? What does small mean? How much effort do each of those take? And let's look at the roadmap for the next 12 months with product management and put a little LM or S next to each one of those things so that we don't we're not disconnected. So that's step one. Step two, create the team. I already talked about that. It's always cross functional and you need people who have the time and effort to do things. The biggest mistake, especially at more of a small medium sized company is you assign a task that's vital to the product launch to someone who sees it as sort of an extra credit assignment. Like some support guy, some support guy or girl is given the job of writing, writing the release notes for the documentation center and they have a real job. They're just doing it because like, hey, that's fun. I'll do that. That's no, it's not the time. Well, because sometimes you don't have a dedicated person. Maybe there isn't like sales training would be another example. Not every company has a dedicated L and D learning and development team. And so you need to train the sales force. Who's going to do it? Right. So very often someone will raise their hands. Some ambitious younger person will say, oh, I'm in sales. I'll do the sales training. No, they need to have the resources necessary to do the job. Exactly. This reminds me so funny. So when I launched the 5G edge computing product and as well as the Smart Cities product for Verizon years ago, I was one day training. And I thought there is learning and development center, even in Verizon, I thought it's like they're going to take it over. But when they, but it's not, it's not, they took it over after it's really mature. After it's very, very mature. They know everything about messaging, but at very beginning when we need to sell to, let's say a few beta customers and I train myself guys. It, yes, I need training. I see, and then nobody teach me how to train sales guys and to figure out myself. Yeah, that's right. That's right. And that's sales is actually a big problem, pain point in this whole process. Because sales has its own momentum. You know, salespeople are also ambitious. They want to make their number. They want to sell things and you have it's very easy to have misalignment where they try to sell things that are not the right things to sell like wrong customer type for the product, but they want to make money. So they try to fit it in or the opposite. They don't realize where the opportunities are. So the go to market process needs to really work through some of these nuances. And unfortunately, it very often is that either product market or person or product manager who has to do the legwork to figure out what the mechanisms are that will make sales successful, because sales leadership may not really be staffed or operate that way.