Keys to Launch Success

For a brand manager, a new product launch can be a rewarding, yet overwhelming, experience. It is intense and challenging. Much like a symphony orchestra, it is complex, has many players, must be conducted expertly, and can be a beautiful thing when everything goes right.

Seldom, however, does everything go right. In most cases, deadlines slip, deliverables are forgotten, and crises erupt. If things go badly, a product’s commercial viability can be compromised and its revenue trajectory negatively affected for years. The stakes are extremely high at launch, so brand teams must have a solid strategy to execute flawlessly.

The challenge is making it all happen. How does one avoid chaos, stay on schedule, and make sure nothing falls through the cracks?

*{Regardless of how a launch is characterized, its success depends on how well it is executed. To successfully execute a launch (often under severe time pressures), a brand manager must use a structured approach to address critical questions, such as:

•         Which functional areas need to be involved in the launch?

•         Within each functional area, what sub-teams are necessary?

•         For what deliverables and activities must each sub-team be responsible?

•         What is the best way to track the progress of individual launch deliverables and address issues before timelines slip?

•         What are the key interdependencies?

•         How should the team keep senior management informed about the progress toward launch?

Keeping these questions in mind, it helps to consider a four-step approach to successfully managing the logistics of the launch.}*

Identify the Players

As a brand team maps out the path to launch, the first step is to identify various functional areas—and team members—whose contributions will be critical: marketing, sales, medical affairs, manufacturing, trade, distribution, regulatory, and reimbursement. Given the large number of deliverables to be completed and the high level of complexity, it often makes sense to split the larger functions into sub-teams. For example, within marketing, there could be promotional strategy, market research, competitive intelligence, and corporate communications sub-teams. This exercise is important for the brand team, which will coordinate the activities of each function, acting as a “command center” of sorts. It also serves as the foundation for what comes next.

Develop Work Plans

Each function or sub-team will have distinct launch-related responsibilities and deliverables. The brand team must identify all required activities and provide a sufficient level of detail to monitor progress. This allows the team to quickly identify and address any issues before problems develop.

For each function or sub-team, a work plan must define and prioritize deliverables, identify the individual(s) responsible for each deliverable, identify key tasks required to create those deliverables, establish start and stop dates for each task, identify key interdependencies within sub-teams and across functions, and estimate budget and resources for each deliverable.

After the work plans are created, it is important to bring all of the major stakeholders together to review and refine the work plans. This ensures transparency and facilitates communication among the sub-teams.

Create a “Launch Playbook”

A disjointed list of key players and a pile of work plans would be useless without a system to organize them. That information must be combined into a centralized tool that a designated brand manager can use to oversee and track the activities of the various players. Programs such as Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Project have been used to build this tool. To allow the individual functions or sub-teams to track their progress, worksheets can be created for each, outlining the deliverables and supporting activities, designating the start and end dates for each activity, identifying the people responsible, and displaying a given activity’s status.

Keep Senior Management Informed

Launches often demand top management’s attention, and it usually pays to keep management up to date about a product’s progress toward launch. An effective means of doing this is to build report templates that distill key pieces of information from the launch playbook into short, easily read flash reports. Such reports can distill information about how each function or sub-team is performing by using color codes to show the status of each task. Since the reports go to senior management, they can motivate everyone to stay on schedule and avoid being singled out as a cause of delay.

Product launches are extremely complex, and the process of managing launch logistics cannot easily be distilled into a short column—but arming yourself with a launch playbook is one key way to build a framework that you can use to keep your next launch on track.

* Additional text quoted from: ‘Managing the Logistics of a Product Launch’ by Nader Naeymi-Rad, Senior VP, Brand Management Practice, Campbell Alliance)

(Abstract from the source: “Building a ‘Launch Playbook’” by Darius Naigamwalla, Vice President, Brand Management Practice | Campbell Alliance, Woodland Hills, California)