It’s not just that a product launch is your first chance to make an impression.
Seventy percent of business leaders agree that launches have a notable impact on revenue.
But product launches aren’t always a success. A lack of research, miscommunications, and poor time management can all cause problems. Also, because there’s a need for near-flawless coordination between teams, managing a product launch can become overwhelming quickly if you don’t have the right tools behind you.
Streamlined product launch planning requires next-generation solutions.
Artificial intelligence tools like Motion AI streamline product launch tasks and help you make data-driven decisions so you’re ready for whatever comes at you.
Read on to learn how AI can upscale your product launches so everything’s completed on time and just right — without your team burning out.
What’s a product launch?
The term ‘product launch’ refers to the process of introducing a product or service to the market.
The process requires meticulous planning and coordination to make sure the product is ready for market and the launch event is organized properly.
You may think of big launch events with lots of press coverage. But product launches can take many forms, like an early bird sale or a live webinar. It doesn’t have to be an in-person event.
Whichever format you choose, your initial launch is crucial in determining which customers see your product, how it’s received, and how it’s presented in the public eye.
Why is your product launch important?
While 60% of business leaders say they always create a product launch strategy, only a third of those have a systematic approach that they use consistently.
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Taking a systematic approach is important to ensure you harness the event's full potential. A well-executed product launch helps with:
Competitive advantage: Set yourself apart from your competitors by showing that you bring something new to the space to shift customers to your products.
Business growth: Reach new audiences and markets to gain brand awareness and customer loyalty.
Market Positioning: Give your audience cues about your brand purpose and product positioning in the market. Are you a quick, low-budget option? Are you a high-quality luxury brand? Your product launch will make that clear.
Common problems experienced during product launches
The problems associated with product rollouts aren’t rare. Delays, misunderstandings, and mistakes are often due to the factors below.
1. Poor market research
If you don’t understand your target market, you’ll struggle to resonate with potential customers. You’ll likely miss crucial functionality requirements, and you’ll miss important trends.
For example, imagine you’re a fashion brand launching in a new international market.
Your new designs don’t fit the country’s cultural preferences, so you experience poor sales.
2. Inadequate testing
While finishing on time is important, the ‘finished’ product won’t work correctly if you don’t test properly. This leads to poor user experience and reputational damage.
Let’s say you’re an EdTech company launching an online language learning platform.
While you tested on small groups, you didn’t experiment with large loads.
Following the launch, you have a surge of users crashing the system. This leads to high customer drop-out and terrible customer feedback.
3. Misunderstandings and miscommunication
Poor communication mechanisms can lead to misunderstandings everywhere, from product launch plans to follow-up calls. This can result in delays, wasted efforts, a burned-out team, and unhappy stakeholders.
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Imagine you’re a healthcare tech firm, and you’re promoting a new set of features.
Poor communication between the development and marketing teams results in the production of the wrong launch content.
The launch must be delayed while the marketing team works overtime to create new content for the right features.
4. Resource misallocation
If you’re not allocating and organizing your time, team, budget, and resources correctly and efficiently, you’re more likely to experience mistakes, delays, and overworked team members.
Say you’re an e-commerce startup launching your first product line.
You’ve plowed most of your time, expertise, and money into creating the most beautiful product line.
But you paid a cheap website designer to knock up an online shop in a week.
The website crashes almost immediately as it can’t handle the order volumes.
5. Inefficient scheduling
Intelligent scheduling helps you use time efficiently to finish everything by the deadline. If tasks aren’t scheduled within your team’s capacity, you’ll experience delays in the run-up to launch, chaos on the day, and inadequate feedback for future improvements.
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Imagine you’re an IT company launching a complex software solution for global enterprises.
Misaligned timelines between developers and testers meant crucial fixes weren’t scheduled.
The software crashes during the demo, and developers scramble to fix the bug in plain sight. This leads to a huge loss of enterprise confidence.
6. Ineffective promotion
The perfect product amounts to nothing if it doesn’t reach the correct audience at the right time. You won’t get the necessary visibility to drive sales and gain traction if you fail to generate enough industry buzz.
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Say you’re a green energy startup launching solar management software for commercial applications.
Poor market research meant the product launch webinar was advertised to the wrong audience.
Instead of big-ticket industry influencers and potential commercial customers, the webinar is full of Ecotech enthusiasts with no intention of buying.
How AI can streamline your product launch
Overcome these common product launch issues. Use AI tools to streamline product launch management so everything’s completed without a last-minute panic.
1. Planning your product launch
AI can dramatically cut project planning time so your teams can focus their efforts elsewhere.
It optimizes factors like scheduling, task allocation, and launch timelines to reduce time wasted on manual project planning.
For instance, say an online marketplace plans to launch a "Second-Hand Goods" feature. It uses Motion to automate 90% of planning.
The AI-powered tool schedules teams, prioritizes tasks, and sends automatic updates. If changes arise, the AI-powered tool reprioritizes tasks as needed.
2. Streamlining team schedules
AI transforms scheduling.
It automatically coordinates teams and tasks based on expertise, availability, and workload. Add customizable parameters, such as task preference, speed of worker, and project urgency to optimize your schedule even further.
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Enjoy the flexibility and responsiveness of a tool that reschedules if anything changes and keeps everyone updated automatically so nothing slips through the cracks.
Here’s an example of how this tool can help: a mobile app company has to rush to complete a product since the client wants to launch sooner to outpace a competitor.
The last time they had to speed up a project, they forgot to do last-minute beta testing, resulting in a detrimental bug.
This time, they use Motion's real-time auto-scheduling to automatically reprioritize, reallocate, and reschedule to meet the new launch date. They effortlessly navigate changes so all critical tests are complete and they meet the new deadline.
3. Allocating resources efficiently
AI drives productivity by optimizing resource allocation so the right person is doing the task in an appropriate time frame.
It’s not just that AI tools can allocate development and launch tasks based on pre-set parameters and availability. It also recognizes patterns in how your team and stakeholders work to improve future workload distribution.
Picture a digital marketing agency preparing for a customer's product release.
Motion automatically reassigns editing tasks to the most qualified assistant editors when the editor falls sick a week before launch.
4. Managing tasks automatically
AI platforms don’t just automate task management.
They intelligently analyze shifting teams, urgencies, and resources.
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This enables AI tools to optimally allocate, track, and manage tasks to get the most done in the shortest time without compromising quality.
By taking care of these activities, AI enhances efficiency and accountability, prioritizes critical tasks, and reduces the hours spent on manual oversight.
For instance, imagine an ecommerce homeware company that needs to balance custom orders while preparing to launch a new line.
The AI system alerts the team of potential overcommitment on custom orders just before launch.
Motion reorganizes launch team schedules upon approval to accommodate custom-order tasks to pick up the slack temporarily.
5. Making data-driven decisions
AI has the power to quickly and accurately analyze enormous datasets. Its pattern-recognition capabilities detect trends and opportunities.
These data-informed insights guide you to make sensible decisions quickly without bias or misinformation.
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Think about a financial firm launching a new digital banking service.
It uses Motion to provide AI-driven insights to plan the launch event's date and time.
The Meeting Assistant communicates with key attendees and analyzes responses to find the most suitable time.
6. Improving communication
Consider the time wasted on back-and-forth communication about tasks, continuous stakeholder updates, and change negotiations.
AI can intelligently personalize and automate updates so relevant team members and stakeholders stay in the loop without experiencing information overload.
Consider a sustainable skincare brand that’s launching an organic sunscreen.
Upon external testing, it’s found that one ingredient doesn’t meet the organic certification criteria.
Motion Meeting Assistant coordinates one succinct meeting with influential advisors to determine what needs to be done.
Improvement tasks are automatically allocated to product development specialists, whose schedules are reorganized to prioritize these changes. Alerts go out to relevant team members.
Everyone immediately knows their role in remedying the issue so the launch proceeds on time.
7. Actionable launch improvements
A third of business leaders say turning go-to-market data into action is hard. This is where AI comes in.
AI uses powerful machine-learning algorithms to analyze your product launch timelines, identify bottlenecks, and suggest improvements. This turns complex data into actionable insights.
Imagine running a local coffee shop chain and launching a new line of cold brews with a tasting event.
After the launch, Motion identifies that guests invited earlier had a chance to attend. In the future, launch invites will be sent out earlier.
4 AI product launch ideas: upgrade your product launch with Motion
Looking for ways to supercharge your product launches for higher impact? Try these product launch ideas.
1. Intelligent cross-departmental scheduling for enhanced coordination
Sixty-one percent of business leaders agree that departmental alignment is the biggest factor in driving growth.
Coordinating departments across different communication tools and project management platforms is slow, and you’re bound to miss something.
A tool like Motion uses AI-powered scheduling to align departments from planning to launch.
It synchronizes calendars, meetings, task dependencies, and schedules across departments to coordinate the launch process across your whole organization.
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Imagine you’re a local brewery launching a new line of ales.
Following taste tests, testers decide if a batch works or doesn’t.
If it’s a yes, Motion automatically schedules and allocates product launch marketing tasks to the marketing department. If it’s a no, the tool allocates improvement-related tasks to the brewers.
2. Automated task management for smoother workflows
Automate task management in your next launch.
Manual task management wastes lots of time. You’re overwhelmed by coordinating teams, allocating tasks, reshuffling schedules, and updating stakeholders.
This leaves you little time to handle complex issues or notice potential opportunities.
Imagine an eco-friendly clothing line is running a fashion show to launch its new collection.
At the last minute, a notable industry influencer announces their attendance. This requires the brand to find out the influencer’s needs and accommodate them while making sure they get good coverage for their social channels.
Motion automatically allocates jobs to the most qualified team members, tasking them to hire an extra photographer and makeup artist.
3. Guest-optimal delivery to maximize attendance
Rather than picking a launch date that suits you, find out what fits with your star guests.
Leverage AI to optimize attendance by picking a date, time, and delivery format that suits your target audience.
Let’s say a luxury hotel chain is opening a new hotel in Dubai.
It uses Motion’s Meeting Assistant to send personalized availability requests to key investors and lifestyle and travel media icons.
Based on guest responses, Motion organizes an optimal launch date, with a live stream of the event, a post-launch viewing, and a follow-up Q&A session. Timings match guest schedules so everyone can attend at least one of these launch opportunities.
4. Post-launch AI analysis for future improvement
Automatically improve future launches by harnessing AI’s predictive analytics.
Machine-learning algorithms analyze past product rollouts to identify common bottlenecks and find ways to overcome them.
Imagine a property developer planning to sell a renovated property as quickly as possible.
Motion identifies that the last few properties sold later than planned because the estate agent’s process took 20% longer each time.
With this property, Motion schedules 20% extra time for estate agent communication tasks and organizes them earlier in the process.
Futureproof your product launch
Customers want new products quickly, and brands must grow into new markets to keep up.
Don’t slow down your product launch with manual project management and back-and-forth meetings.
Use Motion to deliver your product to the market at the right time to have the most significant impact without the headache.
