10/12/2022
Congratulations for creating the world’s largest ball of twine, to be introduced to the world at TwineFest in August. Your twine-gineers worked tirelessly for years to complete the colossal landmark (it’ll be seen from outer space, of course). Stakeholders will be beaming as you pass the ball to the marketing team in JULY. On a roll for success! Well…not so fast.
There’s a giant red flag that the initiative is headed for trouble: Short-term launch thinking.
That short-term perspective is fueled by the conventional methods. In a traditional stage-gate development process for medical devices and other B2B products, launch is the last stage — the last stage in development and the first stage in the product lifecycle. And it’s almost always seen as a marketing communications function alone.
While you’re dealing with complexity greater than a twine ball, this short-term launch mindset can lead to problems:
-A hand-off to marketing with a too-short readiness window to position, plan, brand, and align.
-Event-based thinking yielding lost momentum later in market.
-A launch-it-all mentality arising from the view that launching is solely a marketing communications effort.
-Launch projections that promise quick uptake without a longer view of adoption.
But what is the ideal product launch timeframe? Start earlier. End later.
Launching medical devices and other B2B products should involve a cross-functional Launch Leadership Team, led by a “Launch Navigator” who manages a go-to-market process that dovetails with the development process early on. And we say, start as early as possible. In highly regulated industries that might be when the project moves from upstream to downstream — 9-12 months is a good estimate. An early start allows proper time to achieve alignment on strategy, narrative, branding, and planning. It gives you time to launch internally, validate with customers, build momentum and make adjustments, so you can hit the market with the right velocity.
You might be thinking, “If we did all of our launches this way, then we wouldn’t be launching as much.” Exactly.
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