Using trade-shows as a product launchpad can galvanize a company
“Trade-shows drive 80% of innovation” Unknown.
I’m unsure where I read this quote, which I paraphrase, but it is one I generally agree with. The gist of the quote, if that really is one and not a figment of my imagination, isn’t that trade-shows are an innovation engine. They are not. Rather, they can to be a forcing function and a focal point for companies to launch their new products and services.
In my experience, product development (R&D) organizations should leverage trade-shows for two distinct purposes. The first is to learn more about the competitive landscape and customer needs. The second is to use trade-shows as a focal point to galvanize the entire company around launching new products or services. I’ll skip the former as it is self evident and instead focus on the latter. More generally, why and how can trade-shows be a focal point that can galvanize the entire company.
Why
The short answer is focus and alignment. A company that decides to target a particular trade-show to announce new products or services must marshal resources spanning almost all, if not all, departments within the company. The R&D teams will obviously be busy building the products and services that are intended to be launched at the trade-show. They aren’t alone in preparing for this event. The entire GTM teams - finance, sales, marketing, support, customer success - will also be geared towards this event. Those organizations will spend the time leading up to the trade-show on various activities: pricing, training, content, sales enablement, analyst briefings and much more.
Naturally, this alignment and focus on one goal results in all these organizations collaborating and working together to ensure the success of the launch. I’ve witnessed entire companies hum and buzz around like a beehive for months leading up to a key trade-show.
How
Great, so you’ve decided that you want to use trade shows as a product launch pad and focal point for your company. How do you do that?
First, you must choose which trade-shows you intend to use for launching new products and services. This is a joint decision by marketing, sales and R&D. Marketing, in conjunction with sales, typically owns the trade-show calendar and knows which ones the company should attend. Remember that trade-shows are of huge benefit to these organizations for lead generation and brand awareness.
R&D, on the other hand, has to select meaningful features or products to release. This implies peeking into the roadmap and aligning on a set of features that are of sufficient importance that they warrant a formal launch at a trade-show. Additionally, whatever is selected needs to be attainable. Don’t pick a feature that will require 12 months of work and try to launch it in 6 weeks. The post below outlines a process I use to sketch out a roadmap in collaboration with PM and engineering. It could be used when trying to plan what to launch at a trade-show that is months out.
Second, is to execute towards this launch. Now, this is obviously simple to write in a newsletter but very hard to do. I’ll focus on one organization in particular and that is R&D. It’s the one that does a lot of work and the one I am most familiar with. The rest is easy (just kidding, marketing, sales & finance folks 🙂)
Every single product development organization I worked at abhorred date driven releases. Trade-shows are by definition date driven. The trade-show date is immutable, meaning your teams will be marching towards an immovable date. And that makes software development teams very jittery. There are a few ways to manage these jitters and stress:
When selecting what to release, always involve members of the product and engineering organizations to ensure their buy-in and get their input. It is those teams that will do the work, no management. And do keep in mind both Hofstadter's and Parkinson’s laws! The post below outlines a process I use to sketch out a roadmap in collaboration with PM and engineering. It could be used when trying to plan what to launch at a trade-show that is months out.
Pick features that can be developed incrementally and iteratively. Do not pick features that are binary in nature: they are only functional when the entirety of the feature is development. Those are quite risky to target towards a particular data, as they offer very few degrees of freedom. Instead, pick features that can be easily scoped upwards or downwards. This will give you more flexibility to adjust as the date nears.
Monitor progress on an ongoing basis. This becomes very important as the date gets closer. You might also be evaluating reducing scope if the entirety of the feature won’t fit. Hence #2.
Your teams’ stress level will undoubtedly increase as the date approaches. That is to be expected, yet needs to be balanced. Watch out for members of your team that are overly stressed or about to burn-out. I find that some level of stress is desired, it propels the teams to push themselves harder and discover new boundaries.
Final thoughts
Try not to choose more than 1-2 trade-shows per year for product launches. Remember, AWS just has one: re:Invent (notice, the name: invent) If you end up picking more than 1, make sure that they are well spread apart. You probably want to target one in the spring/summer and the other in the fall/winter.
Give your teams a break after the event has completed, especially R&D. Do not start the next set of critical projects right after the completion of the trade-show. This down-time will give your teams a chance to recover from the stress of the last few weeks leading to the event and slowly ramp into the next projects.
Finally, share with your teams the key learnings from the trade-show and the attendees reaction to what was launched. The R&D teams won’t have direct feedback, much like other teams like marketing and sales will. Those teams will have leads and sales opportunities to follow up on. Make sure that the R&D teams are aware of the impact of their hard work and how the launch was received.
Oh, and if you do know the origin of the quote, please send it my way. Thank you!
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Things of interest that I am reading
Matt Harneylatest post on the SaaS Demand Index provides a lot of great insights on the state of SaaS
Related to the above is Battery Ventures recent report on the State of Cloud Software Spending. Hint: it isn’t all doom and gloom.
Appreciate the mention!