What Keeps Product Owners Up the Night Before the Launch?
No product or application development company can accurately predict human behavior or market changes. This is despite all the technology tools at their disposal.
Competitors can significantly improve their existing products or introduce a new “innovative” product in the market. Loyal customers can switch their brands or substitute their favorite products overnight. User behavior could change driving usage patterns haywire and stretching application performance to the absolute limit.
Product owners are cognizant of these sudden transformations. They often face questions like:
- How are their products addressing customer pain points?
- How are competitors planning to gain more market share?
- What is the user experience their current products are providing?
Before a major product launch, these questions are enough to keep most product owners awake the entire night. To that end, here’s a look at the five common challenges for product owners.
1. Product Performance
In a competitive market, delivering optimal product performance is among the key challenges for product owners. Product managers and CEOs know that user experience, and hence loyalty, is directly tied into product performance. So, with the rise in competition, companies want to accelerate their “go to market” time without any impact on their performance.
Product owners are at the “epicenter” of the organization. Thus, they need to collaborate across development teams so that they share the same product vision. Through effective communication, product owners must devise a clear and effective product roadmap and share their performance-related goals with individual teams. This includes a mix of product stakeholders (with different roles), including product managers, UI/UX designers, developers, and testers.
Before the product launch, AI-powered actionable insights can enable product owners and developers to take appropriate design routes and corrective measures to improve product performance.
2. Customer Satisfaction
Through continuous product development and research, product owners strive to guide their teams to achieve a single goal, namely, customer satisfaction. Before a new product launch, product owners must find answers to the following questions:
- Is my product meeting the customer’s basic needs and requirements?
- Will the product rise to my customer’s expectations?
- Will it perform the way it is intended to as users, usage, and uses scale, sometimes in unexpected ways?
- Can the product be personalized to meet the individual needs and how will that impact the performance?
Among their main checklist items for product launches, product owners need to sync their various functions (sales, marketing, customer support) to provide an exceptional customer experience. Key considerations here are ensuring all of performance, availability, and scalability.
Extensive research in the form of customer surveys, feedback systems, and customer analytics can provide valuable customer data and insights. With customer satisfaction insights, product owners can draw closer to their products and customers than before.
3. User Experience
With access to more customer data, product owners are now challenged to elevate the user experience with their new products. Customers increasingly demand a more personalized experience with brands that cater to their specific needs. They demand that the product be “always on”. As products become more accepted, users want speed and responsiveness even as the number of users and transactions surges. Advanced and sophisticated AI and machine learning technologies enable product brands to provide the personalized services and performance users need today.
With the emergence of mobile apps, product owners need to think about how to engage and retain existing customers using mobile devices. The challenge is about how mobile users can seamlessly perform transactions with the product company.
Besides the user experience, product owners need to enhance the employee experience in their product development team. Employee experience is crucial for teams to feel empowered through actions like taking their product-related suggestions and offering timely perks.
4. Market Competition
Competitiveness and innovation continue to be the “cornerstone” for product teams. In the face of real-world challenges like market saturation, product owners need their products to “stand apart” from other similar brands and competitors. With the added pressure of sticking to product release deadlines, owners often miss the “bigger picture” and fail to create an environment of innovation and creativity.
Here are a few measures that can build a competitive edge for product companies:
- Build products that match customer needs.
- Align product pricing with building value and match the company’s business model.
- Create a brand “niche” to stand apart from competitors and drive uniqueness.
- Pursue creative marketing that can build product and brand recognition in the market.
5. Customer Loyalty
With access to more products and brands, customers have little incentive to stay loyal to a product brand. Hence, the onus is on product owners to create a brand experience that resonates with their customers.
In the age of cloud-powered subscription-based business models, brands rely on mobile users using their mobile apps and generating business revenue. To that end, customer loyalty is not simply about the “number of downloads” but about having an “active” user base. To build customer loyalty, product companies need a team effort involving the following functions:
- Marketing: that can go beyond customer acquisition and focus on keeping them active and engaged (using content marketing and drip campaigns).
- Sales: that can “retarget” potential users (with optimum customer profiles) and convert them into loyal customers.
- Customer success: that can build an effective customer onboarding process with the right product training and support.
Conclusion
For product owners, new product launches are a testing period that can keep them awake at night. To be successful, product owners must approach these challenges as opportunities to solve customer pain points and address their needs.
At appNeura, we have the necessary expertise to forecast application failures using predictive analytics. Our sophisticated product set includes powerful solutions for tracking and understanding application performance on the browsers and smart phones of users. For our customer success, we follow a simple formula of “Happy + Loyal Customers = Increased Business.”
Our AI-powered solutions have enabled our clients to improve their application performance by 150%. Connect with us today to know how.