An updated or new product release is one of the most important and challenging product management tasks. Product releases are critical to your product development strategy and involve much more than simply delivering a new product to your customers.
Every product release should include market research, product development and testing, deployment, and follow-up to maximize its value to customers and the company. Product development software like Jira can greatly assist project managers when formulating a product release.
This article explains a product release, how it differs from a product launch, and the essential elements every product manager must include in their product release efforts. It will also discuss some challenges project managers face when developing a product release and provide best practices for alleviating them.
What is a product release?
A product release notifies customers, partners, and other interested stakeholders that a new product or an update to an existing product is officially available. Product releases that focus on existing products can include enhancements to current features, new features, or fixes in response to problems. A well-executed product launch is a pivotal stage in the product life cycle, marking the transition from development to market introduction.
Product release vs. product launch
A product release and product launch are distinct ideas. A product release focuses on technical deployment and availability and is generally a low-profile affair marked by a simple announcement. A product launch is a higher-profile affair and usually includes marketing, promotional, and customer engagement activities. Product release announcements are often limited to current customers and partners, with little or no effort to publicize the release broadly.
Key phases of a product release
While each product release is different, they generally include similar components, each essential to ensure a smooth release process. The following are some critical components of the product release process:
Release planning and strategy
Thorough market research is one of the most critical elements of your product release plan because there is little to be gained by releasing a product no one wants, needs, or understands. Your research and product discovery efforts must ensure a clear, significant, and accessible market before continuing your release plans.
Once you have established a market, you and your team should create product roadmaps that set clear objectives and goals for completing and releasing your product. Your team can collaborate to determine the project scope and how to achieve a minimum viable product. You can then create a well-defined release roadmap to align your strategy with goals and customer needs.
Product development and testing
After identifying your market and building your roadmap, the next step is development and testing. You should select a development methodology that fits your needs and goals while utilizing available resources and skills.
Agile and Waterfall are popular methodologies, but whichever methodology you adopt, ensure it includes effective continuous improvement and continuous deployment (CI/CD) processes. Continuous improvement focuses on iterative enhancements to a product, while continuous delivery uses automation of development, testing processes, and other tools to deliver new and updated products frequently.
Your methodology should also incorporate frequent testing and focus on quality assurance. This approach will help ensure every product you deliver functions as expected and minimizes the need to “roll back” products because of defects undetected before deployment.
Deployment
Once your team has developed and tested the product, you can move to deployment. This involves making any necessary final adjustments to your product, notifying those who will receive the product that it’s about to be delivered, and then delivering it. Where appropriate, your deployment efforts may extend to providing help with initial installation and configuration. Those efforts should also include requests for user feedback and processes for capturing that feedback and sharing it with your development teams.
These elements should be part of a formal readiness review process that you document, manage, share, and update as needed. Your readiness review should be sufficiently detailed to minimize errors and surprises while remaining flexible to deal with any.
Depending on your product, audience expectations, and available support resources, you may opt for a phased rollout or a “big bang” release. A phased rollout delivers the product to select groups of customers and then expands delivery to more after successful initial deployments. A big bang release delivers products to as many customers as possible simultaneously.
Post-release activities
Your work does not end with the product release. Monitoring customer experiences and providing support as needed is critical. During this phase, you should gather and review user feedback to help your team identify and fix any unexpected challenges users face. This enables you and your team to get your users up and running successfully and quickly identify and resolve unexpected issues.
It also demonstrates your team’s ability and willingness to help those receiving your product once it has been delivered. Your users’ post-release insights can also guide the next set of iterative improvements as part of your CI/CD efforts.
Best practices for effective product releases
Below are proven best practices to incorporate into every product release:
- Provide clear communication and collaboration guidelines. These guidelines will ensure everyone involved remains connected and aligned throughout the phases of your product release efforts.
- Emphasize the importance of documentation and knowledge sharing. Information and knowledge silos can slow or derail product release efforts. Encourage your team members to share knowledge freely and to ask questions when they need to know or clarify something.
- Discuss risk management and mitigation strategies. Proactively discussing risks and mitigation can help your team address issues before they impact your product or company.
- Highlight the value of regular reviews and retrospectives. No product release should take place in a vacuum. Frequent and regular reviews of your efforts and user reactions can improve your product and the product release process.
- Promote a customer-centric approach. Every product development and release effort is about customer benefit and satisfaction; don’t lose sight of this.
Tools for product release management
Effective product release management requires tools that streamline team planning, tracking, and collaboration. Jira and Confluence provide an integrated solution for managing every stage of a product release easily.
Jira offers powerful features tailored for product releases, such as customizable workflows, real-time issue tracking, and robust reporting tools. Jira boards, including Kanban and Scrum boards, provide a clear visual representation of tasks. This makes monitoring progress, identifying bottlenecks, and ensuring timely delivery easier.
Meanwhile, Jira Timelines allow teams to create detailed roadmaps, aligning release plans with broader organizational goals.
When paired with Confluence, Jira becomes even more meaningful. Confluence serves as a centralized hub for documentation, enabling teams to store release notes, define goals, and maintain detailed plans that sync seamlessly with Jira. Together, these tools foster collaboration and ensure everyone stays aligned, making your product releases smoother and more successful.
Common challenges of managing product releases
Product release managers face multiple challenges, such as the following:
- Balancing speed and quality. Your team will expend more effort fixing problems in an inadequately tested product than thoroughly testing it before release, so it is vital to balance these considerations.
- Managing dependencies and integrations. Few products operate entirely independently. Paying insufficient attention to user dependencies and integration requirements can result in a product release that functions unpredictably or does not work.
- Handling unexpected issues and rollbacks. Every product release effort faces challenges, some of which you will not discover until after the release. Your team must prepare for the unexpected and plan how to roll back problematic products.
- Aligning cross-functional teams. Some product release efforts may require participation from team members with overlapping roles or skills. Everyone must understand what you expect of them. You and your team members must carefully review the roles and skills of those involved, then use product requirements and user expectations to determine the optimum mix of roles and functions for each product release or update.
Comply with the above-mentioned best practices to mitigate these and other product release management issues. Clear, direct, proactive, and frequent communication among team members and with stakeholders can help mitigate these challenges before they become larger issues.
Ensure successful product releases with Jira
Multiple project management tools are available to ease and speed your product release journey. The best tools combine collaboration, visualization, information sharing, and resource management features. Jira provides a robust platform that connects and informs all project participants while ensuring goal alignment through the product life cycle.
Jira can simplify your product release efforts and ensure they are consistently effective and successful. It supports planning and collaboration and tracks your product release activities, allowing you to easily create, share, and manage product release plans, roadmaps, schedules, and timelines.
Get Jira free and learn how to simplify and improve your product release efforts and processes.