Work it through: Launching a Product
A launch sequence built on one hard-won lesson: work out what customers would actually hire your product to do before your enthusiasm spends the budget. Job, proposition, beachhead, then a rhythm of cheap tests once you are live.
Seven steps, in the order the playbook gives them. Your work stays in this browser until you save it to a file.
Your ducks
Start with what the people believe, what the paperwork says and what actually happens. The issues where your ducks disagree are the ones to carry into the homework.
You have not filled in the ducks sheet yet.
The homework
What has to be found before any of the four frameworks is worth running. Put a name and a date against each one, and tick it when you have it in your hands.
The ducks
For Jobs to be Done
For Value Proposition Canvas
For Crossing the Chasm
For Build-Measure-Learn
Step 1 of 4: Jobs to be Done
Begin with the question that reshaped my own selling: what progress is the customer actually trying to make, and in what circumstance. Customers hire products, and what they hire them for is often several steps removed from what the product nominally does. Study the four forces around the switch too: the push of the current struggle, the pull of your solution, and the anxiety and habit that block the move. Most teams over-invest in pull because it is the force they can see. The blockers usually decide the sale.
Watch forThe trap is writing the job statement as a flattering description of your product; if your product's name appears in the job, start again.
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What comes out, and how to read it
A job statement describing the progress customers seek in a defined circumstance, a force diagram for the switching decision with evidence under each force, and a corrected competitive set that includes non-consumption and workarounds.
- The switch happens when push and pull together exceed anxiety and habit. If sales are stalling, look first at the blocking forces; most organisations over-invest in pull because it is the force they can see.
- The job defines your real competition. Whatever else gets hired for the same progress is a competitor, however unlike you it looks.
- Read the forces per circumstance, not per customer type. The same person hires differently in different circumstances, which is why demographic segments predict so little.
Step 2 of 4: Value Proposition Canvas
Now pin the guess down where it can be tested. Take one segment, map its jobs, pains and gains in ranked order, then map your offer against them: what relieves which pain, what creates which gain, and what you are deliberately ignoring. The discipline is in the ranking and the linking. A canvas where every feature answers a top-three pain is either a strong proposition or a team marking its own homework, and the customer interviews you run next will tell you which.
Watch forFit is judged from the customer profile towards the value map, never in the other direction, however elegant the map looks.
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Step 3 of 4: Crossing the Chasm
Early enthusiasts will buy your product because it is new. The mainstream will buy it because people like them already have, and between those two groups sits the gap that kills more good products than bad engineering ever did. Moore's answer is deliberate narrowness: pick one beachhead segment, build the complete product that segment needs, win it convincingly, and let the references carry you to the next. Choosing a small pond feels timid when investors want a big market story. It is the fastest route to one.
Watch forA beachhead you could not plausibly lead within two years is too big; keep narrowing until domination is realistic.
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What comes out, and how to read it
A diagnosis of where the product sits on the adoption life cycle, a chosen beachhead segment with its compelling reason to buy, a whole-product plan with named partners, a two-alternative positioning statement, and a sequence of adjacent segments to take next.
- The categories are strategy guides rather than census data. What matters is which psychographic your next hundred buyers belong to, and what evidence they require.
- A beachhead is only credible if you can plausibly become the leader of that segment within a couple of years. If not, the segment is too big.
- Read whole-product gaps as the real product backlog. Pragmatists experience a missing integration or absent local support as a broken product, whatever the core technology does.
Step 4 of 4: Build-Measure-Learn
Launch day is where your guesses meet the till, and the till wins every argument. Build-Measure-Learn gives the launch a rhythm: state the hypothesis before you build, agree the metrics before you ship, and hold an honest verdict afterwards, including the verdict nobody wants, which is pivot. Judge progress by hypotheses settled per month rather than features shipped. The two diverge more often than teams admit, and only one of them tells you whether the launch is working.
Watch forVanity metrics are the danger here; cumulative sign-up curves always rise, so insist on cohort evidence before calling anything validated.
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What comes out, and how to read it
A stream of validated learning: tested hypotheses with evidence-backed verdicts, a pivot-or-persevere decision trail, and a product shaped by what customers demonstrably do. The loop's health is read in cycle time and in how often evidence changes the plan.
- Judge progress by hypotheses settled per month rather than features shipped per month; the two diverge more often than teams admit.
- Read pivots as findings rather than failures. A loop that has never produced a pivot is either a validated strategy or an unfalsifiable one, and the metrics will say which.
- Watch cycle time. If a single trip round the loop takes a quarter, the MVPs are too big or the metrics too slow, and competitors running weekly loops are learning ten times faster.
The review date
Set the date you will come back and ask whether it worked. Put it in your diary; this site will not remind you.
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