Your team has been working around-the-clock to build a game-changing new feature. As a product leader, it’s up to you to successfully launch that new feature, get it in the hands of users and drive product adoption.

So, the million-dollar question here is … how?

The key is a carefully crafted feature launch plan. Here are the steps to launching your feature release plan and ensuring your new product release announcements smash expectations.

Spread the word about your new product release.

Before you launch your new product or feature, it’s important to create buzz around it and get your team on the same page. Here are the best ways to map out your new feature announcement and build awareness around your launch:

Align With Your Marketing Team
Start by thoroughly explaining your new feature to your marketing team. That means revealing why your team decided to create the new feature and the value it adds to your users’ experiences. With this information as a baseline, your marketing and PR teams will have the ingredients to drive awareness, weave together a compelling story about your new feature, and open the floodgates to more users.

Use Targeted In-App Engagements
By deploying in-app engagements to the right users at the right time, you can quickly hit cohorts of users with important information about your new feature. Because they directly interact with users as they’re working within your product, in-app engagements can deliver critical information that users appreciate as they go about their business.

Remember, the more targeted your engagements are, the more effective they’ll be. For instance, maybe you just released a feature that helps people analyze survey results. You can create a targeted engagement for your survey power users that pops in and explains this new path to more value within your product.

Draw in Users by Design
You can grab your user’s attention and alert them to your new feature by creating prominent eye-catchers, such as callouts or visual hot spots. By highlighting new features, you prevent them from going unnoticed and signal the value of your new addition.

Craft a new feature adoption plan.

It doesn’t matter how much buzz you build around your product — if your users aren’t adopting features, your launch will be disappointing. The best way to drive adoption with new features is to map out a clear plan that removes friction during the product adoption process.

Wondering how?

Start by determining whether your release is simple or complex. From there, you can follow a few easy best practices to promote higher adoption:

Tips for Simple Product Releases
Simple product releases may require less work than complex features, but they still need to catch the user’s attention and alert the user to new benefits. Here are a few tips for launching simple product releases:

1. Use a dialogue box to explain simple features.
2. Use hot spots to draw in the user’s eye.
3. Map out a new product description that’s clear.

Tips for Advanced Product Releases
The key to successfully launching complex features or product additions is delivering education to your user. The more you can break down the feature, the easier it will be for users to embrace it. Here are some tips for launching more complicated features:

1. Give your users access to a clear walk-through that explains how to use the feature and its advantages.
2. Create an onboarding checklist that guides users to a positive experience.
3. Consider launching an in-app survey at the end of the workflow to spot any friction points or quickly identify simple improvements.

Measure your new product release’s success.

If you want to prove ROI to stakeholders and improve subsequent product release launches, you need to measure every new launch’s success. And that takes key success metrics. Here are the best metrics to use to measure your new product release’s success:

• TTV: Time to value (TTV) is the time it takes for your user to discover the true value of your product. The sooner they have this revelation, the quicker you’ll see subscriptions, contracts and upsell opportunities. And the best product leaders and managers will work to improve TTV obsessively. By tracking TTV and stacking it up against earlier figures, you can measure the success of a new release.
• NPS and Sentiment: Your net promoter score (NPS) is one of the best metrics out there to measure customer sentiment. Generally, the higher your NPS, the better your users’ experiences. That’s why it can be a solid indication of whether your new product release launch landed successfully or is missing something.
• Session Duration: You can measure how long your users are engaged with your new product release through session duration. As users learn more about your new product or feature, their session duration should grow — along with their satisfaction.
• Tickets Submitted: Your tickets submitted metric is a good indicator of how well your users understand your new launch. It will also reveal if there are any glitches or friction points dragging down your users’ experiences.

Take your next new product to a higher level.

Once you perfect your product release plan, you’ll be on track to more user engagement and adoption. But if you want to take your next product to the next level, you must be using the right metrics to measure your success. Download our white paper and learn how the top SaaS organizations measure the success of their product strategies.