The product team uses terms that no one outside the organization understands. Sales creates its own slides to explain what the new offering does. The website isn’t discussed until the launch date has already been set. Presentations focus on features and technical capabilities, while customers mainly want to know what problem the product solves. Ask three colleagues to explain the new product, and you’ll get three different stories. Meanwhile, the launch date is getting closer and closer.
When developing a new product, we look for the point where product knowledge and customer needs intersect. The product team knows what has been built and why certain choices were made. Sales knows what problems and concerns customers have. We bring that knowledge together to form a narrative that makes it clear who the product is intended for, what problem it solves, and why it’s relevant.
From there, we build out the launch strategy. We determine which message should be communicated first, what evidence and examples are needed, and what the sales team needs to tell the same story. This way, the communication isn’t just created after the product is ready—it evolves alongside the product as we move toward the launch.
A new product can be technically excellent and still struggle to gain traction. Customers evaluate not only what it can do, but above all what problem it solves for them and why they should care about it right now. That’s a different question from what it does technically.
If that story isn’t developed until the very end, different versions emerge. Product explains what has been built, sales translates that into customer benefits on its own, and marketing then tries to weave it all into a single narrative. This makes a product launch unnecessarily complicated, precisely at the moment when the market is first introduced to the offering.
