The Launch: A Product Marketer's Guide: 50 key questions & lessons for a successful launch

Why is my product not selling?
Why don’t these customers want my product?
Why did my product get leapfrogged?
Why did my team just quit?

If you’re asking these questions after launching a product you thought would be a winner, you’re not alone. Nearly 95% of startups fail, and it’s not because a product isn’t built successfully.

The answer is that validation and a go-to-market (GTM) strategy are often missing between the hypothesis stage and the launch phase. Companies build a product they assume consumers want but fail to meet the demands of the market, and then they expect marketing to deliver it successfully to consumers.

There is only so much marketing can do once a product has been built unless a number of key inputs and factors are considered from an operational and market validation perspective.

While building the right feature set for a product is absolutely necessary, many companies fail to think about the most important part of launching a product—their target customer..

After writing Product Marketing Debunked in 2018, I realized that many companies and founders want to know exactly what questions they should be asking—and answering—before shipping a product to market.

While there are hundreds of questions they could ask, I’ve hand-selected 50 key questions that proved to be most important during my tenure as a product marketer both in-house and as a consultant for more than 25 companies across a variety of growth stages. In this book, I share some key insights and ideas I rounded up from other leading product marketers.

Praise for The Launch: A Product Marketer’s Guide

"What are the known-knowns, the known-unknowns and the unknown-unknowns about your target audience? How do your customers communicate and how do you craft your unique and differentiating value promise? Using her vast experience and years of interviewing successful product marketing leaders, Yasmeen Turayhi, shines a light on these and several more product launch questions. In The Launch: A Product Marketer’s Guide, you will embark on a stimulating journey where a variety of blind spots to your go-to-market strategy will be revealed. This book is an insightful checklist and thought-provoking guide that every product marketer needs to adopt as the blueprint for any successful service or product launch."

-Francisco Bram, Head of Global Product Marketing, Uber

“Yasmeen’s background leading product marketing with fast-growing companies shines through in this thoughtful guide. Most noteworthy is her fierce dedication to comprehensive, outside-in research. It’s easy to offer product features top billing…. but Yasmeen reminds novice and veteran product marketers to put customers first.”

-Anna Rosenman, SVP Product Marketing, Salesforce