5 ways to overcome failed product launches

Product managers are innovative. We think of new concepts, challenge the status quo, and turn ideas into profitable products. It can all be exciting, overwhelming, and wonderful. The joy and relief you feel when you finally ship a product (or feature) is like a runner’s high. But it doesn’t always last. Those feelings of excitement may get replaced with anxiety. Asking yourself thing like, was this the best we could do? Should we have added more functionality? What if customers aren’t using it the way we thought? All of those are valid questions and truthfully should have been asked and answered during the product development cycle with customer stories, testing user feedback, and other methods of verifying the need of the product.

But there are times, no matter how much you plan, things are just different after you launch. Customer sentiment or needs change, or your competition has a much stronger hold on the market than you realized. Regardless of the reason, it happens. Even the most well-intentioned products can fail.

Big companies launch failed products too. Let’s look at an example with Microsoft, a large multinational company with some of the best product managers and resources available. Microsoft developed a product called Zune, to compete in the MP3 player market. The biggest competitor at the time was Apple’s iPod. The Microsoft Zune player had way more features, more storage, and based on the Guardians of the movies, seemed a lot more durable than the iPod. But still, it did not succeed. Microsoft discontinued the product after six years of production. This product failed because Microsoft did not understand the audience. They needed to go beyond specs and cost to differentiate themselves from other similar products.

Apple has failed products too. In this example I will use a failed feature that impacted Apple’s reputation and generated a lot of negative customer sentiment. Apple decided that it would be a great experience to provide all iTunes customers with free music to celebrate the anniversary of U2. After all, who doesn’t love free music and U2 is a classic band. However, after releasing the album to 500 million users, the feedback from those customers was overwhelmingly negative. It was not because Apple provided a free album, but customers felt like Apple should not be able to impose anything upon them. If Apple had chosen to give users a choice to download the album from the iTunes library, the backlash may not have even existed, and maybe the release would have been a welcomed and praised feature.

This post is not meant to analyze why these products were not successful, but to highlight that the big companies make mistakes with their products too. As a product manager, how do you pivot from a failed release?

Assess what failed

After you’ve released and the product (or feature) didn’t do as well as you projected, you need to assess what happened. This requires you to be objective and look at what you may have missed during the planning cycle. By conducting an analysis of the failed product launch, it can help you detach from personal emotions and focus on identifying specific issues that need improvement. During this phase, you need to go beyond simply identifying the problems, but also understand their root causes and how to prevent them. It is important that you avoid blaming individuals, but instead target processes, and methods that were used.

Keep in mind that there may not be one single point of failure. It could also be more than one thing that impacted the release, maybe the pricing of the product coincided with a downturn in the economy and your competitors launched a cheaper solution. In the examples above, for Microsoft it could have been branding. For Apple, it could have been underestimating the importance of privacy and consent to their customers.

Brainstorm what could have been done differently 

A failed product launch hits not only product managers, but development teams just as hard. As product manager, you want to check in on how your team is dealing with the failures as well. A great way to come together is to schedule a brainstorm. Let your team share feedback on what could have been done differently, which gaps may have been missed, maybe there were markets you’ve overestimated.

Brainstorming as a team has two great outcomes:

1. It can be therapeutic for your team to talk about and 

2. Helps your team be able to learn from what happened and take those learnings into future products. 

Failures are rarely the fault of one individual, and taking a collaborative approach can help team members support each other during tough times.

Share your learnings 

Once you’ve done your brainstorming with your team, you should share those key learnings with your stakeholders. An important part of this step is to not only share what failed and why, or missed gaps, but to share how you will improve on those failures for the next release or the next product. It does not have to be all doom and gloom in your communication, share what worked well, what processes were improved on, and what wins happened despite the product failure.

These learnings can also help other product managers identify gaps in their processes or realize new things they need to be aware of. In every failure, there are opportunities, make sure those opportunities are highlighted as well.

An example of sharing your learnings can be hosting a meeting with internal team members or fellow product managers in your organization. Follow it up with great documentation, and you will have exceeded expectations on managing the impact and narrative of a failed product experience.

Don’t take it personally 

Building a product from ground 0 can be a long arduous process. It’s what you work on day in and day out for months, possibly years. It sometimes can become part of you. It’s hard to not take failures personally, but you should not. Reach out to your support network, whether that’s mentors or fellow product managers. You’re not the only one to have experienced a failed release or failure. Your support team can provide you with helpful information on how to move forward and provide emotional support. 

Every failure can be a valuable learning experience. Instead of seeing it as a personal setback, view it as an opportunity to gather insights, improve strategies, and develop professionally. These events allow you to build more resiliency within you. Resilience is a necessary attribute for product managers as it provides the emotional, cognitive, and behavioral tools needed to navigate the challenges of the profession. It enables you to improve adaptability, problem-solving skills, and develop a positive attitude towards failure. Building resilience ultimately leads to personal and professional growth so that you can continue to excel in your career. After you’ve done your analysis and communicated with your stakeholders, take some time off for yourself to regroup to make sure you come back stronger and re-energized.

Keep the learnings top of mind

While you shouldn’t dwell on your failures too long since that can impact your future success, you should keep those learnings top of mind. A healthy way to do this is to incorporate those learnings into your product planning processes. Stop every so often when planning a new product or feature with questions like:

• What happens if this fails?
• What could go wrong during the release? 
• Is this helpful to my target audience?
• What if there is a shift in economic conditions?

Asking yourself questions like the ones above (and others), and having a response for each, helps you move forward with a product and create a plan to pivot if needed. Learning from failed launches is part of the product management experience. Not every product will have the same conditions. It’s important to evaluate what you’re doing at every milestone and incorporate past learnings to new products. To show your team and management that you have thoroughly analyzed the failed launch, you can also include a lessons-learned document or development a post-launch evaluation checklist.

As a product manager, the ability to bounce back from setbacks is a core skill. However, this resilience is not something that gets developed overnight. Instead, it takes challenges, failures, and changes to build up your resiliency over time. Of course, failures are never comfortable, but it’s a necessary part of product management. The best part of failures is that there are always opportunities. Opportunities to analyze what happened, to create better processes, to create better products, to develop new skills. Do not look at failures as a personal setback but look at it through the lens of a growth mindset, that it is an opportunity. 

Keep a long-term perspective, a single failed product launch will not define your career. Success often comes after a series of failures and perseverance, make sure to keep going. For Microsoft, they cut their losses and discontinued the product. For Apple, they leaned into privacy and consent as a core feature of their product and doubled down on its importance. Apple prioritized privacy and consent into all its products and services and exceeded customer expectations in those areas.  Product management is an iterative approach to build products, your career and growth should be iterative too. Keep persisting, keep improving, and you will become more resilient and successful throughout your product management career.

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