Skip to main content

What Do You Do If a Product Launch Is Missed?

January 20, 2016

5 minute read

The cold, hard truth is that if you’re a product manager, you will miss your deadlines. It happens all the time to product managers everywhere. No matter how you try to avoid it, issues will arise, priorities will change, and unforeseen circumstances and issues will squash your plans.

And yet, this is still one of the most common questions product managers ask us,  “But what do I do when we realize we’re not going to be able to launch on time?”

First of all, there is no reason to panic. This is the unknown territory you were hired to manage. If the variables have changed, so can your plans.  You have every right to change the product launch date. You can even change your mind about priorities if that’s what you’ve realized is best for your product.

But you can’t do any of that if you’ve promised too much, too early. This is the problem many of the PMs run into – they put themselves in a box and then they can’t get out.

You don’t have to do this to yourself.

If you successfully build enough space around your plans today, you can negotiate the specifics later.

The wiggle room you create for yourself now puts an incredible amount of power and confidence back in your hands. You don’t have to commit to anything anymore!

Communicate themes, don’t promise features

If you’re promising features, you’re going to HAVE to deliver on them – and you will get a lot of grief when you go back on your word.

So don’t promise anyone anything. Communicate with themes instead.

For example, a theme could be: “Awesome reviewer experience”, “User story management” or “Custom reporting” – each with a short description as to what your goal is, why you’re building it, and what your goals are tying it back to your product canvas.  (By the way, I’m lifting these straight out of ProdPad’s public roadmap.)

We are always clear and transparent with our themes so our stakeholders know what to expect from us – but we also want to leave ourselves room to adjust when and how we do it.

If you work with themes, you get to control how you solve a problem rather than getting stuck solving pieces of a problem. It’s also much easier to communicate changes using a theme-based roadmap because you haven’t tied yourself down to a specific feature or product launch release date.

Just think – if you cancel a feature you’ve already promised, you’re going to have to do a lot of damage control with your product launch.

Instead, if you’ve communicated the overall themes you are going to tackle in the current term, you can easily shuffle your priorities around. Maybe instead of 1-2-3, you go 2-3-1. Or 3-2-1. The important thing is you’ve already communicated your priorities to everyone, so nothing will come as a surprise.

Hear that? That’s the sound of freedom.

Hand over release planning to your dev team/project managers

You’re a product manager, you’re not a project manager – you shouldn’t be working two jobs. (Unless you’ve been somehow been roped into doing both, my condolences to you.)

When you’ve decided on a set of priorities, send them over to your dev leads or project managers. They can evaluate the specs, allocate resources and come back to you with time estimates. At the end of the day, they know and understand the resources at their disposal better.

If you’ve spec’d out things properly (which hopefully, you have), then anyone from the lead dev to the junior dev can pick up something at any point and work on it. Let them dictate the order and speed in which they knock out their tasks, so you can adjust your priorities against them.  

Other benefits that come with keeping your product and project management separate:

  • You get to keep your strategic plans (product roadmap) separate from your tactical plans (release plan). When one changes, you can adjust the other.
  • If you do have the unfortunate double role of product and project manager, you can keep the two distinct roles separate by using two different apps. You will have the work nicely organized for the day you hand over one of the roles to someone else.

It’s been proven plenty of times that project management tools are not meant for product management!

Prioritize a product launch realistically

Why wait until the worst thing happens? The best product managers know that the worst thing IS going to happen. Know where the cracks might be and have a backup plan ready.

Get some help from your other teams here, especially your client-facing colleagues. Sales, support and marketing have useful insights, but you have to dig for them early and often. Ask yourself and your teams questions like these to help you identify an alternative course of action:

  • Is this feature all that important?
  • Do we have any quick wins?
  • Will launching or not launching it really make a difference?
  • How pissed off will clients be if we re-prioritize?
  • Is this big priority worth putting all our resources in this one basket?
  • Should we kill the project altogether?

On that last note, sometimes you do have to kill the project. It’s better to realize that than continue to spend time launching something that no longer makes sense.

Sign up to our monthly newsletter, The Outcome.

You’ll get all our exclusive tips, tricks and handy resources sent straight to your inbox.

How we use your information

6 thoughts on "What Do You Do If a Product Launch Is Missed?"

  1. Andrea,
    Good insights, especially on themes vs. features. Timely because, I have a couple of occasions this week to use the wisdom – a class project st Stanford and a presentation to the business.
    Cheers

  2. Hi Krishna – that’s awesome! Let me know of any questions/comments that come up in the discussion. I’d be happy to (try) to cover them in future blog posts!

  3. Excellent article, but the big challenge I see is that in more mature products, the sales teams want specific features to help close deals, ie this really important customer/prospect needs this feature (and of course if the feature is added then that salesperson will sell lots more). I do like the idea of themes and have used them in product roadmaps with mixed success not withstanding that need to be more specific.

    1. Hey Jim,
      Thoughts – is the potential client not signing because of one little missing feature? Often, that’s an excuse to not want to sign up in the first place, and/or could also open up the doorway for more demands you won’t be able to meet! Just things to consider.

      Additionally, you don’t want to get tied up in the specific feature but the actual problem of the customer instead. Features still need to fit with the overall company strategy. For example, even on ProdPad we’ve done a few “must have for sale” features which we’ve found:
      1. Rarely has the person actually stayed because we built the feature for them
      2. We’ve only really done it when it fitted the strategy of ProdPad

      We keep getting asked about stuff all the time. We could theoretically spend time working on huge features that are demanded, but in reality if the company/person is unwilling to pay upfront for it then they are unlikely to stick around even if we built it. And then it’s just a waste of time, money, effort, and loss of other potential clients.

      There’s a great article on the MTP blog about playing politics and how to converse with sales properly: https://www.mindtheproduct.com/2016/02/stop-common-b2b-dysfunctions-product-team/

  4. Hi Andrea. I have been doing Project and Product management for quite a long time. I usually work on very small start-ups that don’t have the resources to hire both and what I have been noticing is that on a positive side it puts me much closer to the dev team and I end up having a great relationship with them.
    If I have to separate the both I would have a hard time nowadays to understand clearly where one role ends and the other one starts. Could you help me out? I predict this will happen soon, so I want to start organising things. Thank you so much!

  5. Hi Cat,
    First, my condolences to you on having to do both jobs, it is not an easy thing! But the good news is you’re not alone – there’s a lot of people in the same position as you. So here’s the thing, just because the roles may be separated, it doesn’t mean you have to stop working with the dev team.

    Here’s how it works at ProdPad:
    First of all, *everyone* is encouraged and welcome to participate in the ideation process. From dev, to marketing, to support – our team gets on ProdPad and votes, discusses, and helps create the specs. This will help everyone in your team understand what is being built, and the specs will be a bit more accurate if your dev team is involved! (As opposed to just writing up a spec and throwing it over the fence to dev and expect them to build something without understanding their own capacity.)

    It’s also important to understand that while as a product manager you may not be directly in charge of releases, it doesn’t mean you can’t be involved in the release planning process. Just as your dev team is welcome to be part of the ideation process (hopefully within ProdPad 😉 ) you as well should be involved in the release planning process. This will allow you to bring balance to the release, and ensure there’s both an equal amount of new improvements + fixes going out.

    Hope that helps!

Comments are closed.