What type of goals do you define for product launches?

I look at leading and lagging indicators for product launches. Leading indicators are your marketing goals (website performance, ad performance, click-through rate, email opens, press pick-ups etc). And Lagging indicators are impact to pipeline (meetings booked, opportunities created, attach rate, deals closed -- both quantity (#) and $ amount. 

Goals depend on the type of business, the GTM strategy for the product, and selling motion. I will highlight a few examples from my past companies (including B2C and B2B).

But first, some advice that’s really helped me throughout my career:

1. Tie your goals to marketing team goals, and even better, to the business
2. Set northstar metrics (usually lagging indicators), and corresponding leading indicators to ensure you’re on track
3. Align goals with key cross-functional partners: Adoption goals with product; revenue with other marketing channel owners; sales-related metrics with enablement

I found that doing the above helps set your team and the launch up for success—even if you don’t meet every single KPI you’ve set.

Now for some examples. 

At Udemy, I worked on the B2C side of the house, so we primarily launched consumer products (online courses). As a marketing team, our primary goals were monthly revenue, so launches would roll up into that. We’d set a monthly revenue goal for the new product, which was based on historical data from previous successful courses we had launched.

As leading indicators, we’d track visits & click throughs on the course landing page—which helped us understand if awareness was the issue (visits) or landing page content (clicks). These were variables we could still control.

At Asana, our team owned several self-serve motions:

1. Non-users signing up for Asana; 
2. Free users moving from a freemium account to paid, and 
3. Paid users upgrading their account from a basic plan to a more premium version.

Asana offered a 30-day free trial for all 3 motions, which made it the lowest barrier to entry for a signup (and trials had a strong conversion rate). Therefore, many of our launches drove trial starts; this was the northstar metric we optimized for. Leading indicators included other campaign metrics like landing page visits and clicks, email opens and CTR, in-product channel views & clicks. Very quickly, we were able to identify which channels drove the most trials (email & in-product for existing users), and zero in on their performance to ensure we were on track.

On the other side of the B2B spectrum, Gong is primarily a sales-led motion. When we launch new features, there’s a scaled customer campaign motion, as well as field enablement. Depending on the product, we’ll either launch strictly to the existing customer base or to prospective customers as well.

My team focuses on platform and core product, so I can highlight some of the KPIs we’ve used for launches. For northstar metrics, I like to set:

1. Campaign goals; 
2. Product adoption; and
3. Field enablement KPIs

We use Gong at Gong, no surprise here, so we can actually track when our product messaging is being used by field teams with customers. We call this “field adoption.” We can even take it one step further by correlating field adoption with sales metrics like win rate or sales stage conversion. A very cool way of measuring messaging impact. 

Field adoption is a bit of a lagging indicator, so a leading indicator would tell you if your sales or CS teams are actually finding your messaging and resources. For that, a CMS can be helpful to track engagement and downloads of your content.

A lagging indicator for product adoption could be daily/weekly/monthly users (depending on the nature of your product), or the # of users or companies that have completed an important action. Leading indicators could be visits to that particular product or taking the first step in completing said important action.

Campaign goals could include driving demo requests from your target audience; leading indicators would be channel metrics like landing page views and click throughs, email opens and click throughs, etc.

Typically, I think about goals throughout the funnel for a big product launch, for example: 

• At the Awareness level you might want to track goals around:

1. # of media outlets covering the announcement
2. # of impressions (aggregating email, blog view, etc.)
3. # of social impressions

• At the Consideration level it might be:

1. Pipeline
2. CSAT
3. Enablement metrics (e.g. certification pass rate)

• At the Adoption level, you can have goals around

1. Bookings
2. Adoption rate

When it comes to defining goals for product launches, we tend to consider both short-term and long-term objectives.

In the short-term, our goals may be centered around acquisition, engagement, and awareness. For example, we might aim to gain a certain number of new users, or to generate a certain amount of buzz on social media in the weeks following the launch. These early indicators can help us understand whether our product is resonating with our target audience, and can give us some early feedback on potential areas for improvement.

Long-term goals, on the other hand, are focused on driving sustained usage and adoption. We want users to not only try our product, but to continue using it over time. This may involve goals around user retention or activation rates, as well as measuring how frequently users are engaging with our product.

Ultimately, our goals for product launches are tailored to each specific product and our broader company objectives, but it is important that we consider both short-term and long-term goals in order to create a successful launch.