Beta Launch Part 2: A Simple GUIDE (Launch and Post-Launch)

Before releasing your product, website, or application to a large audience, you might want to verify it first with a limited audience to gather feedback and fix your bugs. Such launch is generally known as a "Beta launch".

Beta launch is a chance for product teams to gather valuable user feedback and find out what your product is missing. In the second part of the Beta Launch articles, you will learn what you need to do and think of while executing and closing your Beta launch.

Phase 2 - Launch

1. All hands on deck - make sure that your team is ready

2. During the launch, invite users in "waves", like from 50 up to 100 people at one time (you would need as many waves as many users you would like to invite). It is done for a few reasons:

• to control traffic and load of the servers

• in case you discover any critical issues, you want to have a chance to react quickly and apply hotfixes before the next wave of users

• to keep feedback gathering in a more controlled way as you will earn time to process information

3. For the users that signed for the beta launch but didn't participate, you might want to consider sending reminders via emails or any other communication channel

4. Keep track of your KPIs

Phase 3 - Post-Launch

1. After you finish the beta launch, get feedback from users. Some of the options to be considered:

• Establish contact email, phone, or chat that users could provide with feedback directly

• Establish customer support tickets

• Make screen sharing sessions with participants to understand how they use your product

• Send out survey questions, and suggestions & improvements form

• Consider making feedback public to users that were participating in the beta launch that they can vote on what features they would like to have implemented in the next version of the product

2. Also, make sure that your Support team also provides input into post-launch activities:

1. The support team, together with the Product Manager should be responsible for tracking feedback, gathering, and organizing it (using tools like Jira and dividing tickets into 3 areas - bugs, feature requests, UI/UX issues)

2. The team also should be responsible for tracking product or application performance, identifying and fixing any possible issues

3. Once the beta launch is completed, based on gathered data and feedback, the team should work on lessons learned and improvements identified during this activity

4. Next step - Public Launch