 Good afternoon product con What a welcome. I don't think I need to do my intro do I so before I start actually it's good I can see the front row because you've got a very important job and if I if I get a bit too Scottish and a bit too fast Will you give me a wave so I can calm down a bit and everyone else can understand me? Yeah fantastic So I'm going to talk about launching new products and companies where it matters most As Mika said, I am Debbie I used to work at the BBC and on universal credit But currently I work at the Financial Times and all in all three of those environments and big established companies I've either worked on or launched new things and in all those environments. It really mattered those new products So the FT or the Financial Times We'd a new subscriptions business focused on Finance and business if you haven't seen us before go to a newsstand in any large business environment And we're the pink paper. We stand out definitely not quite this pink though The FT has been around for just over a hundred and thirty five years now was launched in 1888 and It intends to be around for another a hundred and thirty five years Which means its reputation really matters and hold that thought because I'll come back to that later So has anybody here ever launched a new product or tried to and has it felt like this? That Fridge is really heavy, isn't it even with a fantastic team around you those big American fridges are really huge and Really hard to get to the top of the hill Which is ultimately where you would be launching your product if you have felt like that Firstly, it's not just you It mostly always feels like that Many of you may work in small startups whose whole life blood is launching something new Others may be at the other end of the spectrum and work in a big tech company who's really set itself up to do new stuff That's not most of us most of us work somewhere between those two ends of the spectrum We work in companies with established product sets some as long as old as the FT that existed originally on paper And is now in digital form others in much newer guysies But still established products that are doing well Maybe even very well and in that context and in that environment a new thing can be quite scary to the company or just feel Very different and not how it's set up to deliver to So today I'm mostly gonna draw on my experiences of launching FT edit So that's a low-cost subscription product that we launched at the FT just under two years ago I meant to tell you that it was the FT's first consumer subscription product launched as a new product in just over 10 years Actually, don't tell anyone, but it's the FT's first product ever But I'll draw on my experiences of the edit and come back to it as we go through and tell you about lessons that I've learned and Ultimately mistakes that my team and I have made so hopefully you don't make the same ones The idea That's the thing isn't it it's getting the idea finding the idea finding the opportunity space finding the pain point Then you'll have cracked it won't you if you do that Not quite in My experience about 80% of the work in launching a new product or even just getting it to the point of launch It's not the idea or opportunity space I talked to people week after week who are frustrated and who have cycled through three four maybe even five ideas in their company Not quite getting traction Some of those ideas were probably great, but they've thrown them out thinking it was the idea itself that was the challenge It often is not it's everything around Launching the product not the idea itself that can be hard and could be scary to the company At a really basic level. What do you need to launch a new product? You do need to find an idea that the organization buys into If I wandered back to the office after product quantity and try to pitch launching a celebrity gossip product to the FT How do you think I would get on? Not amazingly. It's definitely not in our wheel in our wheelhouse even if it was a great idea So the idea does need to resonate with your company But it doesn't necessarily need to be the best idea in the world You secondly need to be able to build That idea in a way that does meet the original customer need that doesn't iterate away from that initial pain point Or the thing that you found that stays within the actual space where you've got some evidence if you can't do that. There is no point in moving on to the next stage and Then finally you do have to have a way to launch stuff to real customers When I joined one of my teams was doing loads and loads of fake-door testing and prototyping Which is all great and really important, but the things they were testing. We had no way as a company to launch So was that really that valuable not really some interesting learning? But it was never going to make its way through to market and to launch something new you really do need to launch it Why do companies find it hard? Why do companies with established products? Why why are they not set up well to do new things? Loads and loads of reasons Hopefully some of the ones on the screen will resonate with you. Maybe all of them Do I think you need to do a big existential deep dive into your company and find out its deepest fears and and the things That are really driving it in most cases not there may be some very specific things in your organization But you probably know those already in most cases It's because established companies are not super well set up to launch new things and they're not very practised at it And when you're not practised at something it becomes hard and it becomes scary and when you hit a point where it's really Difficult, it's easy to give up. That's ultimately what a lot of it comes back to So what have I learned Here are my three lessons Which are ultimately three sets of big mistakes that I've made Firstly not having a clear enough why Secondly not really listening and thirdly not nailing the team so Let me talk about each of these in turn First figure out the why Now here. I'm a step before your normal product strategy Lots of people will say I've got a great strategy for my product I've got a mission statement. I've got a vision It's I've worked it all out. I've got data. I've got evidence. I would ask you to go a step back one step before that To make sure you really have a clear why for the organization not just for yourself and your customers and the product Two questions to ask yourself Do you really understand why you or the organization need to launch something new and the word that's important there is need Launching a new thing is hard It's often different and requires different things to be done in a company Then iterating out of something you already have or or rebranding or redesigning or changing something that already exists And if you have not really explained to people why you need a new thing and people haven't really bought into it That's a really big hurdle that you will struggle to overcome and you have to be honest with yourself A lot of us would like to launch new things But do you really need to it's that really the right call in this case and Secondly, what is the wider strategy for the organization that your new product will be part of? Occasionally companies do a bit of a left turn and do something that's very deliberately not attached to the strategy of the rest of the company If that's happening with you fantastic, you will know that you've got a free pass That that bit solved for you in most cases that isn't the case You need to convince people why this is the thing that you and your team should be spending your time on how does it relate? What will it drive? What will it achieve? What is the overall outcome that is going to happen if you do this and do it successfully and why this and not something else? The why can be as important as to why not as well as the more affirmative version of why Because ultimately if you don't have those two things nailed before you've got your strategy for your individual product You don't really have a strategy and remember that fridge and how heavy it was as soon as you hit a roadblock You're gonna go sliding back down the hill. I'm afraid And you will hit roadblocks money time another team that you need help from Having an urgent thing that they need to do and your roadmaps not lining up or something changing in the market Something will happen and you will hit it and if the why was not clear enough Your product essentially becomes a nice to have It's not essential. You will end up back at square one, which is not much fun So how did this manifest for us in the edit? So as I said the edit a low-cost subscriptions product Same content as our existing much higher price packages, but a much smaller volume of them launched as a standalone app Did we have a why? Yes, we did Here it is This is called the martini glass funnel. You can tell I like cocktails This essentially told us that the same as almost any subscriptions business the vast majority of individuals who we offered a chance to buy Something didn't buy it But what we also had was very clear evidence and data and research that told us that there was a decent pool of people Who were interested in buying something from the FT? But just not at the price point with the amount of content that our existing much higher price premium packages offered So they were warm prospects who were up for going through a buying journey with us But just not with what we had at the moment Pretty clear. Yeah So where did we go wrong? Very quickly we forgot about this and stopped talking about it and Talked to everyone in the company about the product. We got them excited about The edit itself about how it would look who it was for what its price was going to be You know who the customers were whether we were gonna literally swipe or scroll and And we did get people excited But they forgot about this our fault. We didn't tell them about it We just we went. Oh, we're clear and moved on So of course what happened the product became the strategy And when that happens you're in trouble Because then all the hopes and fears of the organization are resting on this one product It's not a test or an experiment to learn if your strategy is solid. It is the strategy It's the only thing people know it must be successful And if it must be successful, it's really really hard to get out the door Particularly when it's very different to what you have already Big learning on our part. We didn't tell the story right. We did tell the story, but just the wrong one We didn't tell it in a way that worked for the organization. So what did we do? I worked with the new chief product officer It's very handy that we had new one of those who could help reset the nadir for us Reminded people what we were trying to do across the whole company Not just in the consumer space and that we were trying to differentiate between our B2B and B2C customers And that we had multiple potential only potential gaps in our product offering that we were looking to fill And that the edit was just one of those tests in one of those potential gaps Did this fix everything overnight? No, of course not, but it definitely helped and one of the things that really did do was remind us of what we hadn't quite got right this time and Spoiler alert we've launched a couple of new products post the edit and we didn't make those mistakes again And it was much clearer those in those subsequent times The story we needed to tell how we needed to tell it and how we should relate it back to the actual strategy for the company And what we were trying to achieve So the so the I think the thing I'd like to you to leave you with here Is that the why starts before the why of this particular product? Don't shy away from getting people bought into it and Really really think about what story your company needs to understand and how your product fits with that Listen to listen Again two questions. Firstly, are you really listening? I don't mean are you answering questions that you're asked? Are you considering things that people have commented in documents and responding to them? I mean, are you really hearing where your organization is at? What people are worried about? Where their focus is what is underlying the question they're asking you is that really what they're asking or is it something else? Really dig into that Don't assume that the things that are on the surface and that what you know and what other people in the company nor the same They inevitably will not be and Secondly, who haven't you spoken to in many companies launching a new product requires teams who maybe don't normally deal with Product teams to work with them or work with them in a different way even if there is a relationship If you miss out on some of those key things it can cause you all ended problems Did one of my teams in a subsequent product launch realize? quite early on that a part of our finance team were going to have to do something different and Quite annoying for a while whom we launched on your product and did they leave it until two weeks before we launched to tell them? Yes, they did and Was that a total mess? Yes, it was Don't do that Recognize that you won't necessarily know everything you need to dig deeper than you've probably dug before You need to reach out across the organization and figure out who needs to help you and use the team around you To make sure you don't miss any of these things because the last thing you want is something popping up right at the last minute because Your product development does really require extra empathy as a product manager Empathy is a key skill for any product person all of you in the room will be nodding and going yeah, that's like a huge part of my job When you're launching a new thing you have to take into account that you are at one end of the change curve You're way over here. You're excited. You're like wow. This is gonna be the best thing ever this idea is amazing I've seen it develop all the way through to nearly ready to launch The person you speak to tomorrow Maybe at the very other end of the change curve really worried about what this is going to do For them or their job or they might just be focused on the actual work They've got to do today, which is nothing to do with your exciting new product You can't assume that your excitement and enthusiasm will see you through You need to go to where people are even more so than you normally do in product development It's not enough to Understand that people are in different places. It's you really do need to go to them and And Understand what they're worried about and how you can help mitigate that So how did this manifest in the edit? well, here is a very simplified version of the Early phases of the launch plan that we took to the board We decided to do a really low-key friends and family launch getting people who worked in the company to invite Some people to test the product for us to get some early feedback Before going for a public launch, which would then be followed by a media launch Made sense the board were happy with that it fitted with a risk appetite in the organization all good in That meeting a couple of board members asked me What happens if millions of people download the product in this friends and family stage? My brain slightly skips and I go, huh? What's strange question? I'm thinking test flight codes emails links Oh, we'll be lucky if we get a hundred bits of feedback. That's what we had benchmarked as a performance indicator and my response was That'll never happen and I moved on Did I make a mistake? Yes, I did As we got close to this friends and family low-key launch the ante started to up We got more requests for more research for more information Request for some features that aren't even on this screen that we hadn't even talked about being due for the early phases of the product I was frustrated the team were frustrated. It was hard to navigate through. We didn't understand where this was coming from We eventually got through it and got to the other side and launched later than planned with a slightly heavier weight product than we Do also plant and When I did get through those first few months of haze of a new product launch and reflected back to figure out What it what had happened? Why had that been so hard and? I reflected right back to this point the point with this slide in that board meeting Was I really being asked if millions of people were going to download the product? No, I was being asked things like The reputation of the FT has been hard one over a hundred and thirty five years remember I flag flagged that at the beginning. How are you safeguarding a reputation? Is this product fit for our reputation out there in the big wide world? What are your risk mitigations? Probably I think I was also being asked what is this friends and family test flight thing You've really not explained this to me. Those were all the kinds of things. I was being asked. I didn't answer any of those questions I just answered the very top level question that was easy for me to deal with That means I didn't assuage MD's fears I didn't really get to the heart of what was important and ultimately I didn't listen So when you're in the same situation Really listen, please listen and the thing I would leave you with is you don't always have to answer there And then sometimes if you're not sure what some where someone is coming from or what might be underlying a question pause Say I'll come back to that come back to it later when you've had time to figure it through You're probably going to give a better answer and we'll really have listened and the response you get will also be better Then lesson three It's ultimately almost all about the team Biggest takeaway here is the team that launches a new product is not the same as the one that iterates on your existing product Now how those two things are different? I can't tell you sorry There is no answer. It really depends on your organization How you're already set up and what you're trying to launch and how it's different But I would say that there are Funnily enough two questions for you to ask yourself Firstly, can this team that you've built or you're working with your manager or your leaders to build Can it reach out across the organization? What are the things that are going to be different about launching a new product compared to iterator on your existing one and Can this team that you've built do they do they have the skills? To go back into their parts of the organization Understand what it means and help you and the product team navigate it But immediately I'm going to caveat that by saying that just like this soup It definitely has too many cooks if you haven't noticed You can't have too many competing voices It's super easy in that phase prior to launch when everything is possible For nothing to become possible Because you're stuck in stalemate. You're stuck in ambiguity. You're going back and forward Maybe compromising way too much like I said at the beginning You have to build it in a way that still meets to that individual need if you have too many voices in the room The risk of compromise is really great So here you ultimately need to get To the smallest number of the rightist people for your particular setup in your particular company Because with that ambiguity comes everyone's ideas You will become the next most exciting thing the new hope The idea that somebody's been pitching into the existing product for ten years and never succeeded It will come your way along with a whole load of other stuff. Some of it will be great some of it not so You have to be able to deal with it and you as a PM. I promise you you will not be able to deal with it all yourself You need that team around you who are able to communicate with other areas of the business in different ways Understand where they're coming from Get those nuggets of great ideas get their ways of working and help you with that and do it as a collective I do this slide about nine or ten months after we launched the edit to illustrate when we were looking at forming another new product team How the different roles in the team waxed and waned over time in that phase prior to launch This is what the team looked like, but of course Where the burden of the work sat was was never the same and always changing. So what did we do differently? For this product team That was not me I'm also the jumpiest human on earth. So you're really lucky. I didn't actually scream ha So fine So fine Thank you. I've calmed down now Where was I? Oh, yes the difference in the team. So what do we do? We did two things very differently for this team that we we've done for our existing product teams We embedded a data person. We typically worked in a slightly more outside outsourced model But we felt it was really important to have data there right from the start Secondly editorial our editorial colleagues who wrote stories and picked which stories were going in the product They were completely embedded in the team. We had dedicated people who were that was their full job Again in other product teams who worked with them really closely, but in this case This was the first time we'd had dedicated people both of these were great decisions. They were right But what didn't what wasn't so great or what did we what do we do that wasn't quite correct? Well, what we decided to do with our marketing and commercial colleagues was replicate How we dealt with the marketing of the existing business. So that was a lead for each different part of the funnel That didn't work so well. It became clear a few months in that that was really difficult We were asking people to juggle contradictory things that marketing a new product was not the same as an existing one And that was really tough. So we moved to a single product marketer Which worked much better going forward. So the thing I would say here is It's one thing to really think about the team up front and really do that What do you need for your particular organization? But also make sure that's actually working for you and don't be afraid to change it if it's not One final thought before I leave you. What about you? many PMs Thrive on the idea of launching something new the excitement of getting a thing out there a few people up on stage today I've said, oh the thing I launched it is super exciting. Isn't it some of you will now be thinking actually no Don't want to do that. Thank you But hopefully still some of you are excited enough to launch new things But as I've demonstrated not every company should or is ready to or or will be straight off in A place where it can launch new things. So you need to figure out for you as a PM What are you looking for exposure to what do you want to learn? Are there ways to start down that process maybe by iterating iterating out of something existing or from Maybe rebranding or redesigning something that could at least start you down this line Recognizing that you can't force something if the company isn't ready or it's not the right thing to do. It's not gonna happen Ultimately Hopefully you will be able to learn some of the lessons that me and my team have learned and not repeat some of our mistakes And you will get your new big ginormous fridge of a product up to the top of the hill like this cheesy slide with your team And you'll have launched it Ultimately, there's a whole other talk in What do you then do when it's out there and how do you know if it's being successful? But that's for another day. Thank you