Accelerate and Transform

The launch preparation: Have we prepared everything?  Have we worked out how we are going to market the product? What sales channel we are selling it through and how are we going deliver our product to our customers> Hold regular launch readiness meetings, monitoring completed progress using go / no go checklists.  

The Launch itself: This is just the starting point.  What a great feeling to have launched a product or service, or new feature enhancements - its butterflies time. However, this is just the start and there is a long way to go to success, but getting this far is an exhilarating time. Market the launch, advertise, blog, message, IM, DM, share photos, update websites etc, celebrate and enjoy.

Forward scenario planning:  Be prepared to Adapt plans. Like a flowing stream, every second downstream is past history. What lies upstream will be different in the future. During your business / product idea journey, keep an open mind as to the possible scenarios that might occur and in what order.  Anticipate, or react to unforeseen obstacles and in the moment, leverage your team to discuss alternative tactics.

A product lifecycle through its growth, maturity & decline is like stages of a jigsaw 

At first you have 1000 ideas that come together to form a completed jigsaw, but that's only the start point for the puzzle. What's next? Is it ready to be broken up to be resold and made again (and again, over and over?). Is it to be re-branded, put in a frame an sold as a picture to put on the wall.  If its extremely popular, is the same picture going to be slightly re-designed for different markets: a 10,000 piece for die hard puzzle goers (?), but is that market big enough to justify the re-tooling and re-investment?; or simplified to 100 pieces, appealing to a much wider audience (younger, older, novice etc)? Or perhaps genuinely too old & really is time to discard (even then, what's the plan, bin or recycle?)

Compare where your product is and the lifecycle maturity stage stage to a completed jigsaw of the ballon. Is it on its way up, riding a rapid up-current of growth, making it a rising star, flying high above the rest? Has it got as high as it can and started to float down, but needs some more energy re-injecting to keep climbing over the next peak and so forth? You certainly don't want to have an unknown question mark how your balloon is doing - you need a clear plan and soon ... do I look to withdraw from the race and ground quickly(?), do I remove some features to become more and rapidly rise again(?), or simply accept this as as high as I get, but I can adjust course to go round obstacles(?)