“IF YOU DO TOO MANY PRODUCTS TOO QUICKLY, YOU GET THE PEANUT BUTTER EFFECT – YOU’RE SPREADING IT TOO THIN”

Launching a product requires close choreography between product development and marketing, so there are benefits to maintaining a careful pace and rhythm. HBR recently spoke with Ellen Donahue-Dalton, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing and Customer Experience Officer, Medecision – a population health management software company based in Dallas, about new research on the importance of those factors. Edited excerpts follow.

Why is this research relevant to your work?

A:

We’re coming off an 18-month period in which we launched 10 new products. That’s two or three times as many as we’d typically launch in that time frame. So we’ve been thinking a lot about the pace and regularity of product releases, the resources required, and how to learn from each launch.

What determines when to launch a product?

We release new software multiple times each year, and many of our launches are tied to the annual industry conference or our annual customer forum. When we think about pace, the biggest issue is our customers’ ability to absorb new products. We mostly offer workflow automation software, and the impact on our clients of adding a new product is significant: Customers have to change extensive operational processes and train staff members. Health care is highly regulated, so there are important compliance and reporting considerations, too. Our software really has to be ingested by an organisation, and we consider that when pacing our launches.

Has the research influenced how you think about recent launches?

In retrospect, I would have slowed them down and spaced them out a little more. It’s less a matter of product development’s not having the ability to get new apps out and more about creating customer intimacy before and after the launch and not exhausting our marketing resources. If you do too many products too quickly, you get the peanut butter effect – you’re spreading it too thin.

How much can you really learn from one launch to the next?

For a product to be compelling to our clients, it has to reduce costs, significantly enhance operational efficiency, satisfy clinicians and consumers, and/or improve clinical outcomes. We can listen to customers all day long during product development, but until a product is in operation, we can’t measure the improvements or savings – and to get successful market uptake, we have to do a really good job of proving that value will be delivered fairly quickly. For us, that’s the learning. It’s a highly iterative process.

How hard is that to measure and prove?

It requires a lot of customer engagement with each launch. One thing I realised while reading the research is that we’ve been launching so many new products, often bundled, that it is difficult to distinguish the critical factors driving success. For instance, if we prove that an application provides value to one client, how similar does a new client have to be for that proof to hold true? We’ve bundled a lot of costs and resources into our recent launches. Going forward, I want to look at how a slimmeddown product-launch cadence can succeed.