Pre-launch Metrics Down
You are about to launch a new app that is of strategic importance for the company. One month out from launch, internal Dogfood suggests the app isn't ready (you are below target on several key metrics including CSAT). What do you do?
Think about what you would do if this situation came up in the real world. Identify the main questions you’d have.
What’s the larger process you’d use to solve this problem? Walk through your process at a high level and then explain the finer details.
Make sure your approach covers both how you’d make product decisions and how you’d manage your broader set of stakeholders.
Have you explained how you make sense of the situation? How do you make sense of the strategic importance of the app? How do you understand what’s going wrong?
Have you considered the implications for your stakeholders? Who is impacted? What do you need from them? What will they care about?
Have you considered ways to show off your experience? Have you identified risks, pitfalls, or challenges you might watch out for? Have you thought of examples of similar situations you could draw on?
Your approach may be different from mine - but let's let’s look at the major considerations here. At a high level, we’ll need to understand the situation, work with stakeholders to identify solutions, and then execute on our plan.
To understand the situation, we need to know:
What does it mean that this app is strategically important? Can we push the launch?
This will be helpful for knowing if/how we need to launch the product. If it can’t be pushed, we need to descope, find more resources, or, worst case, launch an underwhelming product and fix it after.
What’s our hypothesis for why the key metrics are low?
If there are particular aspects of the product that are ruining the experience, can we cut them for now? It’s also useful to get a sense of how far off the mark we are.
With this information, we can begin identifying reasonable ways to resolve the issues.
Once we have this context, we need to work with out stakeholders to align on the best plan. Important stakeholders might include:
- Engineering & Design, if we need to make changes to the product
- Marketing, if there was going to be a push around this launch
- Sales, if this was something customers needed
- Leadership
Most important here will be our Tech Lead counterpart. They can provide insight into the effort required and the resources available. In order to fit this work in, we may need to change upcoming sprints, and the TL will be the responsible for making this happen in the least disruptive way possible.
This app is strategically important, so we’ll probably need to inform your leadership. We may also need their support for some directions. For instance, we may need to ask them for more resources.
A notable pitfall here could be difficulty getting alignment with stakeholders. Communicating early and often will be helpful. We’ll need to have a clear sense of the situation & the impact of each possible solution.
Once we have a plan, we execute on it. This approach will depend on the specifics of the problem. Along the way, we’ll need to stay engaged with stakeholders. Make sure status is clearly communicated to them, and keep tabs on any plans that got changed to make sure there’s no confusion.
A major risk here is, if we choose to improve the product, our plan may not completely fix the issues and get our metrics to where we want them to be. However, we already have hypotheses from before and now will have more insight, so we’ll be able to iterate more quickly. We should account for this risk and possible need for more time in our planning, rather than expecting our plan to work perfectly.
There’s also the risk of team members getting confused or demoralized given the changes. I recommend reading back through the cross-functional collaboration module before talking through the stakeholder management piece. In general though, communicating early and often is key to getting stakeholder buy-in and maintaining alignment through conflict.