The success rate of new software products varies, depending on the criteria we used to define success. But a common statistic is unflattering: about 70% of new software releases fails to meet their initial expectations or goals. In this episode of Product Momentum – and in his new book, LAUNCH Code – James Whitman explains this phenomenon, describes the factors that contribute to such high failure rates, and presents research-based remedies we can deploy to reverse the trend.

Too often in product development, we become so focused on heads-down requirements building that the act of launching the product feels like an afterthought. And to many, it’s become a lost art. James says that success requires a companywide, comprehensive plan for managing internal handoffs and bringing clients deeply into product development and launch.

The development-to-sale process offers “many rakes to step on,” James says. And even the most well-intended teams make mistakes, often manifested in these critical areas:

Client Listening. We tend to sample only our most favored clients; we limit discovery efforts to a specific segment of our market; and too often we wrongly assume that internal team members possess the domain knowledge to speak on behalf of the client.

James underscores the critical role of continuous client listening and says that that every sales interaction is an opportunity for market research. “Maintaining a dialogue with clients both before and after the market launch is crucial for refining the product and addressing client needs effectively.”

The Product-to-Sales Handoff. Software launches start with innovation and product design, followed by value-added activities within the product function, James says. But then there’s this completely separate activity that happens over here in Sales. The gap between those functions is where many products fail to launch.

The best organizations integrate these activities into a holistic approach where sales and product teams work closely together rather than operating in silos.

The Sales Cabinet. There’s a solid collective understanding that we should listen to our clients and that we should work collaboratively with our colleagues. But why don’t these things happen in the real world?

James introduces the concept of a “sales cabinet,” a group of trusted senior sales representatives who provide early feedback on product ideas and help profile new offerings.

Be sure to catch the entire episode with James Whitman to deepen your understanding of the LAUNCH process: Listen, Assess, Unify, Navigate, Control, and Hone.

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Paul Gebel [00:00:19] Hi, everyone. And welcome back to Product Momentum, a community of product people and a marketplace of ideas where leaders and learners come together to shape our way ahead. My name is Paul Gebel, and together with my co-host Sean Flaherty and the rest of our amazing team, we record conversations with thought leaders in product, UX, security and beyond. That will help you shape the lives of your users through software. Check us out on all your favorite listening platforms, but for those who prefer the video experience, you can find all our latest episodes on the Product Momentum YouTube channel.

Sean Flaherty [00:00:50] Sean, how are you doing this morning?

Sean Murray [00:00:52] I’m awesome today.

Sean Flaherty [00:00:53] What a great episode. James Whitman, author of Launch Code. Really impressed with his thinking. A lot of stuff we know, but really, he drives home some pretty key tactics in terms of how to make sure everybody understands how we’re doing in front of customers.

Sean Murray [00:01:07] Yeah. And I do think that it is somewhat of a lost art. I think we get very into how are we building, why are we building? But once we actually achieve what we needed to build, launching it to market is something that we rely on another group to do. James’s perspective really helps bring it home, that we need to be a part of that process. It needs to be a part of your regular product process. And he gives us some great insight on how to make that happen.

Sean Flaherty [00:01:33] Yeah, of course, the advice that you really like, you know, making sure that you get out and have a beer with the sales team every now and then.

Sean Murray [00:01:40] Yeah. Title of the podcast, Beers with Sales.

Sean Flaherty [00:01:43] There you go. All right, let’s get after it.

Sean Murray [00:01:47] Hey, everybody. We are here today with James Whitman. James Whitman is the author of Launch Code The Playbook for Continuous Growth and the founder of Growth Guidepost. He works with mission-driven leaders to help them make their most important decisions and achieve critical growth objectives. Throughout his career, he has held senior positions in both public and private organizations, where he has successfully established repeatable commercial practices. James has a proven track record of introducing dozens of products and services to the market, scaling organizations, and building high-performing teams. James, thank you for being with us today. Really excited about this topic. It builds off of our last podcast. So, we’re excited to kind of continue that conversation. I am also really interested in learning more about your system for launch. I want to start with kind of like launch is really seen as kind of an afterthought, right? We’re so focused on the process of building requirements and working with teams to get products out. The actual act of putting something in front of customers for the first time is really kind of like a lost art. So how do you think that we got there and just want to hear your thoughts on that.

James Whitman [00:02:51] Yeah, absolutely. And Sean, thanks for having me in this discussion. I spent most of my career not on the product side of the organization, but in sales and sales management. And we did a lot of launches and we brought a ton of products to market successfully. And it was closely in hand with our product colleagues. But I definitely saw this dynamic from a lot of the writing in the space and a lot of the discussion that takes place in product management is just…and then we hand it off to sales and it kind of short-changed all of that into yada, yada, yada. And I had lived in that yada, yada, yada for so long that I wanted to spend time to really to think about really a holistic process because it does start up in innovation and product design and a lot of activities that happen in a product function. And then there is a separate activity that happens over here in sales and in the best organizations we found is like they’re very harmonized and integrated across. So that was really the, the kind of the core that started me on this path and in the research that became Launch Code. And I’ll unpack that a little bit for you. But it’s this. Let’s really look at what a good sales operation looks like. That is a different motion than the discovery that’s happening in product design but is also very dynamic. We brought clients into the process in the most direct way. Every sales interaction is a piece of market research is a really a powerful opportunity to be testing out product ideas and seeing how they match with actual budgets and actual buying behavior and attitudes and competitors and all of that dynamicness that that happens in the real world. And we’ve seen that really great organizations make that ‘client listening’, that happens both before you go to market and after you go to market are continuously an exercise. And that’s when the magic happens.

Sean Murray [00:04:57] That’s awesome. I really like that where we said that every sales interaction is client research. I think that’s awesome. That’s a great way to think about it. What are, what are some things that you have a unique perspective coming from the sales side of the house. What are some things that you think right away that maybe product people who don’t have much interactions with salespeople. What is something that they could learn right away by interacting with that side of the business more?

James Whitman [00:05:22] Yeah, absolutely. And it’s interesting. We spent a lot of time as we were working on Launch Code to understand why these ideas of collaboration and trust and or, you know, clear handoffs sometimes didn’t work well. I think there’s a pretty solid collective understanding that we should listen to our clients, that we should work well with our colleagues, kind of noncontroversial ideas. But why doesn’t it happen in the real world? Like what are the barriers? And there are you know, and there they show up in popular culture in a bunch of funny places in Silicon Valley and other shows like that. This product sales or product engineering tension in the organization and sometimes maybe even often it’s bad behavior on the sales side. And I think we all have examples. I’ve been part of sales organizations. I’ve seen it. You know, everyone has a lot of horror stories. And as we started doing interviews, there was a lot of like, I can’t trust sales. Those guys will say anything or had, you know, there was a bad actor there. And that’s a real thing. And it ends up kind of eroding a lot of the relationship. And, you know, in my experience, I’ve worked with some super professional salespeople who were, you know, well-educated and articulate and highly principled in their work. And that’s really the majority of the folks in sales. And when organizations listen well to that, they get better outcomes.

So kind of a very tactical idea is one that we call a sales cabinet. You’re a senior product leader. Who are the 2 or 3 senior sales reps who you rely on to do an early test of an idea or to get access to the best clients or to start profiling a new offering to the most strategic clients early on in that in a trusted way that isn’t overcommitting your roadmap but is giving you really crucial inputs about, you know, that’s not going to fly. Or here’s what I’d have to do. Or wait a second. The competitor just brought something to market so that cabinet can be a formal approach and some organizations, your chief product officer is engaging chief revenue officer and say nominate these people. It’s a great kind of career-enhancing engagement opportunity for some staff or could be a lot more informal. As a product manager go get beers with some sales reps. I mean, it doesn’t have to be this big complex governance structure. But when that happens, you start breaking down the barriers in very practical ways.

Sean Flaherty [00:08:03] And I think that’s a tremendous idea to break down the barriers. However, I think one concern played, playing devil’s advocate here is that salespeople tend to be in sales because they’re highly influential. They talk you into things, right? So, and they’re also generally, in my experience, often very opinionated. So, they have ideas, they talk to a handful of customers, and then they get in there that this feature needs to get built or this should be tweaked or this is the biggest problem. So, I would be concerned that. I don’t want to give them too much power. We want to be able to you want to be able to take that feedback from those salespeople, engage with the integrate it, but really take it with a grain of salt because they have different incentives.

James Whitman [00:08:44] Absolutely. I started my career in national security work. And, you know, when you’re gathering intelligence, it’s evaluate the information, evaluate the source. And yeah, absolutely. I think the cabinet should be advisory. You’ve kind of called out one of the challenges that then I’ve seen in big tech environments where the senior account manager pounds their shoe on the table and says this feature must be built because one client needs it. And sometimes given sort of undue sort of power in that transaction and can steer roadmaps and kind of unconstructive ways. When we cataloged failure paths, that is one of them that often takes place. So, you have to think about what are the controls around that that it’s advisory. What I’ve seen personally and in a lot of different contexts is the selection of the right type of rep for that discussion is often the right kind of rep to be on a large team. The dynamic of the new product versus in-market product is very different and the disposition of some rep says I don’t want to touch this risky new thing, you know, where are the reference clients? You know, how many years of data do we have built up on usage patterns? What’s the renewal cycle like? When those questions are answered, a lot of reps don’t want to go near it and of reducing risks, but there are lots of reps or there’s a percentage of reps who like the new or very curious about the how the product is evolving and want to be in on something that is new to market. When I was a rep, that was what I gravitated towards was ‘What’s the new thing?’ And you know, it was both. I had an interest in doing it. It was, you know, I always saw like these I trust my product people. So this is good stuff. I won’t be the first person to grab the best opportunities. But also it was more fun, more interesting, more creative to figure out the scripting, to rearrange the collateral, to figure out, Wait a second, it’s not the procurement team we’re trying to speak with.

We need to be talking to this benefits team and what that sequencing is. Talk about sort of climbing through the lock, and figuring out what are the set of things that have to happen, what’s the formula for that product in that environment? That’s the kind of rep you’re looking for from the cabinet. Who’s going to engage in that creative process? And you have to create some governance around it. You have to create the right sort of expectations for the rep if you’re part of that conversation. For me, it was always a privilege to be invited into that room and be in a different discussion than a lot of my other sales peers. And sitting at the table kind of like the big brains in the company who were coming up with these great ideas. And, you know, initially the notes of trepidation, offering feedback, and then over time being able to say, okay, here’s where it’s right. But here’s where it’s wrong and here’s how I’d position it quite differently. And if we oriented it this way, we would be able to unlock this part of the market. That’s the kind of conversation that becomes really powerful.

Sean Flaherty [00:12:01] Helps you form much better experiments having objective people, helping you think through the problems. Something you said after you asked the first question there. Lit me up a little bit. It was about it. Why? Why don’t we put the product people in, the engineers in front of the customers, more like there’s always this, there’s this. We all talk about it. We all know it’s important. We all know we should be doing it, but we don’t do it. And I think there’s something else there.  I think the incentives on the design and development side are wrong, too, right? Like product people, engineers are often highly metric on how much they’re able to get out the door. I had a conversation–this is top of mind for me because I had a conversation with one of my leaders here with one of our bigger clients this morning. And like they’re so focused on output and the things that are coming up that you don’t have the time and there’s no incentive for you to actually take a break and go listen to what the customers are actually saying and what they’re doing, because you’re you know, the incentives are a little messed up. What do you think of that?

James Whitman [00:13:01] What we’ve seen as the key to this is that as a product leader, the client needs to be a direct part of that operation. We talk about the client deeply involved in the product. And an example of that is what Bloomberg does. The senior product leader for, you know, that new software offering or the platform that is being consumed by some part of the financial services industry is part of the sales cycle in different ways and is part of the value proposition that the sales rep presents. And I think that’s really the starting point.

So, when sales rep is offering the solution, they said, well, in addition to access and this many licenses, you have an opportunity to have an annual briefing with our senior expert in this area who’s also talking to hundreds of other similar clients on a on a daily, weekly basis. And it’s part of the promise of the offering is not just the software. It’s got some solutions around it as well. So, what that sets up is a couple of different things. It’s great. It’s more value for the for the offering and allows it to sell more readily. Then perhaps more most importantly, it gives that product owner a direct connection with the customers. They have an annual conversation. We don’t talk to every customer every year. But if they’ve got, you know, it’s a small platform with 500 to a couple of thousand clients, they’re talking to a couple hundred clients over the course of the year, establish a relationship. They’re able to test out some ideas on that conversation, considering doing this and this and, and get direct feedback. And then if they’re in a direct mode and they really need to sample a big part of their base, they can do that directly and they don’t really have to mediate through the sales team. They’ve got a direct relationship, but keep the sales team informed. But it’s a natural part of the value proposition of the offering. That’s the kind of now the client is in the design part of the process on a pretty regular basis.

Sean Murray [00:15:13] Yeah, I always like to preach that, you know, you can’t really build a great software product without having a group of what I call advocates, like customers who actually care, users who care about the products and the problems that it solves. That’s how great products get built –– involve those folks, not all your customers. You’re not going to serve and solve problems for everybody. But if you can figure out and hone in on who is it that we can turn into advocates, how do we go find more of those and turn them into beta testers for you? That’s how you build great products. I’m totally aligned with that.

James Whitman [00:15:46] Yeah. And it’s a continuous activity. It’s not like you do it once. You know, a company like Bloomberg is great because they’re always adding new products, and that product leader is always looking at extensions and sort of adjacencies. And those conversations start feeding on themselves and they really build a practice area around a domain because they build people who trust them. They’re in a dialog with, in a very regular way, and they’re getting that really direct feedback. So they’re not just guessing at what clients want. The clients have designed it, co-developed it with them.

Sean Flaherty [00:16:17] They’re part of the process.

Sean Murray [00:16:18] You mentioned something earlier that because I recently read, I recently read your book that has stuck with me, and I want to make sure that I get an opportunity to ask this question in each chapter within LAUNCH Code. You start with you start with failure paths. Why did you take that route? I thought it was really unique as a unique way to approach the subject is to start each section of the book with failure paths.

James Whitman [00:16:44] It’s interesting. With my editor, we had a bunch of discussions and the book is ultimately very uplifting and is about finding meaning in work and the excitement and the freshness of being involved in new pursuits. So the question was, you know, why are we bring everybody down with these failure paths? The kind of the framework is built that way because there are rakes to step on. There are things that will trip us up if we overlook them. And they’re shocking in terms of they’re right in front of us.

So the first chapter of Launch is listen. Listen to your clients. Basic core activity, good client discovery, you know, couple of your other podcasts, many of your episodes talk about the importance of this. So we know and we have a lot of really powerful tools and frameworks for doing that client listening. But we make mistakes, and the mistakes (when we started to take a look at the research process around the book) really manifest are very specific, about a half a dozen ones are our client listening and they’re in areas like too few examples. We sample only our most favored clients or we slice a very particular part of the market and we don’t see the whole picture. One of the things I’ve seen a lot of is sort of speaking on behalf of the client. So, you know, if you’ve come from the domain where you’re now selling an offering, it’s really easy to say, no, no, no, I don’t need to talk to systems engineers. I was a systems engineer for 20 years. And the second you switch roles and are now developing or selling an offering you’ve lost that connection. And with technology, we go out of date really, really fast. We could switch roles and there’s all kinds of problems around leading the witness. Isn’t this an amazing feature? What do you think, Sean? I mean, people are polite and they say nice things, so there’s a lot of errors we make. So we call them out. We’ve pseudonymed all of the failure paths. So kind of protecting the innocent or the guilty in that process. But we found or I found it really useful at least to take a look at why do we make these mistakes and have those as a kind of point of reference and then talk about what can we do to avoid these. And there are some real clear approaches and steps that we can do to do that.

Sean Flaherty [00:19:18] Another big one for product managers is the survivorship bias, right? We don’t typically go out and interview the people that left. And I think I think there’s a lot of juice to be had in that population.

James Whitman [00:19:31] You follow your churn and understand what’s going on.

Sean Flaherty [00:19:34] Yeah, exactly.

Sean Murray [00:19:35] So you got into some of this like some of the common challenges you’ve seen in product launches, who right now in who right now in product is, is if our listeners want to go out and say, okay, we’ve got we’ve got the direction from the book we’ve got we’ve talked about in this podcast, who are some companies out there that are really nailing launches that we could really learn from?

James Whitman [00:19:58] Yeah. No, it’s a great it’s a great question. And we’ve we have built the book around a series of profiles organizations and the about kind of rewind a little bit and give you the quick sense of the research that we built to be conducted to build this. It was really a look at organizations that had grown successfully over an extended period of time. It had delivered strong financial results and had done that through new product introductions. We identified about 65 companies that public companies that fit that profile. And we then spent a lot of time and energy to understand what they were doing differently and how they operated. We had a lot of great conversations with many of these companies. We got some interviews. We were able to conduct secondary research, really understand, and the companies mentioned:  Bloomberg. There’s a couple others in financial services. S&P is really strong. Moody’s also has a great platform for growth. The pharmaceutical industry. Pharmaceutical industry has a very disciplined, very unique launch approach. A lot of constituencies, doctors and payers and providers and regulators. They have an extremely disciplined approach because the stakes are so high. There’s companies like Thermo Fisher, and Industrial company Waters.

They’re not companies that are the kind of the big headline grabbers. Typically, they’re working in a very disparate way and growing in a very consistent way. In the tech space, I think Atlassian has been so, so deeply effective at building a internal culture that deals with the different cadences, the different functions they’re going to be facing, and brings together the organization in really smart ways. Are you familiar with Elkay? They make those water fountains at airports and in schools. The water fillers are really great for like discipline, exercise and a really great at understanding the complexity of placing one of those machines inside a piece of infrastructure. Think about all of the different people who have to say yes to put one of those on a campus or an airport location and maintain it and put the filters in and do all those componentry. They’ve been really smart at figuring that out and thinking about their products, not just as that machine stuck in the wall, but the system around it and the selling motion.

Sean Flaherty [00:22:30] More evidence that every company is becoming a product company. Like there’s product everywhere you look. For sure.

James Whitman [00:22:35] Exactly right.

Sean Flaherty [00:22:36] It was I’ve been capturing some notes here on the side. I’ve got, I think, five pretty profound takeaways that I think all product leaders should think about. No, I don’t want to discourage people from buying the book. I think if you’re listening to this podcast. You’re interested in the product space. You should buy the book. But here’s my key takeaways, and then I’m going to ask you to kind of explain why. Why did you write the book, at the end? But here’s my takeaways and I’ll let you reflect on them after I throw them out there.

One, I think client listening, one of the themes of your book and of this entire podcast is that client listening should be a core value embedded in the fabric of everything you do.

Number two, information for product leaders comes from a lot of different sources. I loved your quote you that you probably stole from whatever covert government work. You evaluate the information. But also always evaluate the source, understand the incentives of the people that are giving you the information.

Number three. Evaluate why engineers and product people don’t get access to customers as much as we all say they should. You know, there’s a lot of other things going on. And if we don’t purposely make time for that customer interaction and customer interfacing, we’re losing something big. And that’s important. Number four. Find the right team members. Make sure you’re choosing the right people to include in your what you call like cabinet or your sales cabinet or your customer cabinet. Because everybody tells themselves stories and you want to look for people that can be as objective as possible and really read the room and try to understand, you know, what’s really going on with the customers. And it’s not everybody. And then lastly, this concept of finding your advocates –– like go get some customers to be a part of the build process, get customers, get them involved. Like, you can’t build great products without great customers who literally care about the future of the product and even get them to care about your team. Like I think that’s important. Important lessons. What do you think about the captures?

James Whitman [00:24:37] I love it. I love your first one. Make sure to buy the book. That’s top priority. I know that the book is a very practical, it’s a useful book. It’s designed to help leaders both on the product side and the commercial side, lean into this process more. It’s a guide for senior leadership to think about how our incentives are different in different functions–– our ways of work are different, our calendars, technologies we use. Think about the systems of record at each one of those functions use and how many times leaders from one function log in to the system of record of the other and how many times, you know, dashboards go back and forth. Not that much. Done some research on the topic and not surprisingly, product people aren’t logging into Salesforce and salespeople aren’t logging into Jira.

So the conversation, there’s a lot of forces and there are positive forces, in many ways, we should continue to run agile teams with sprints, and we should continue to run sales teams with quarterly goals. Those things still make sense, but we need to find bridges across that and think about sort of the governance and creating opportunities to stumble over each other in positive ways and get into discussions so that as you kind of drawing out is a little bit of the the kind of the big idea in this that we’re in a workplace, that we’re hopefully working with people that we like, we’re spending a lot of time with them and we’re working with clients that we hopefully like we want to spend time with, and we’re hopefully representing developing products that we believe have an impact and are going to drive some real change. So we need to be very practical. We need frameworks, we need processes, we need governance, but we need to do it in a very human-centered way. And that’s the balance that that I tried to strike with Launch Code is to bring those two things and think about, you know, what, within our power in a really practical way to implement or change our thinking or changing approach to build a better impact for our clients and I think for ourselves.

Sean Flaherty [00:27:00] Awesome. Two quick questions. One:  What are you reading? Like what’s got your attention these days? What do you recommend to our audience?

James Whitman [00:27:07] So I just saw I want to check out Itamar Gilad’s book. That’s top of my list. There is another book called Founders Code that looks at high-level pieces––these are both on my reading list, a little bit of fiction that just hit. You know, there’s a group of books that have been very impactful. Dan Oleson’s work. Rita McGrath, Clayton Christensen, have been really impactful in my writing, was a close colleague of Matt Dixon for many years.

Sean Flaherty [00:27:39] I’m a big fan of his work.

James Whitman [00:27:40] He’s fantastic.

Sean Flaherty [00:27:42] Fretless Experience, one of my favorite books.

James Whitman [00:27:44] Excellent. Yeah. They came out of our old company, Corporate Executive Board.

Sean Flaherty [00:27:48] That’s awesome.

James Whitman [00:27:49] Yeah. So, you know, great writers who bring a lot of rigor to their writing and try to create useful books and that have an impact that are based in fact and you know, talk about real problems that we have and how do we address that. And in many ways.

Sean Flaherty [00:28:11] Cool. And one last question. How do you define innovation?

James Whitman [00:28:15] Defining innovation. Let’s see. So for me, innovation is indeed an upstream activity. It’s the creative exercise that helps us create something incremental or truly step function that sometimes has to be sort of disconnected from the rigor that happens in things like market research and validation. And these exercises. It’s a little more of a creative process, but in an enterprise we can’t just exist in that creative space. So, it’s when we connect that creativity with the real practical. So, will it fly? Is basically the question. So, innovation for its own sake has to be connected with the organization what we do. So, I would argue that the huge part of what we do as organizations is innovation, that we’re coming up with ideas. We’re running it through this design and test and validate exercise. We’re bringing it to market, and then we’re repeating that. And if we’re refreshing our portfolios maybe a quarter or a third of our profit and our revenue is now flowing from these newer areas. And product maturity models are going to say everything is going to mature and slow down. So, what is new today? What is an innovation today? Goes through its cycle and there needs to be more to replace it. So, if we’re living in this mode where there’s new and there’s sort of decay over time, then innovation becomes our way of working.

Sean Murray [00:30:07] That’s great. James, we really want to thank you for hanging out with us today. My big takeaway and I think maybe the title of this podcast should be Get Beers with Sales. That sums it up, right?

James Whitman [00:30:22] Are you buying, Sean?

Sean Murray [00:30:23] Yeah, that’s my next book. It can be a one-page book. That’s it. Find a way to get them to pay. So, thanks again for being with us today. This was awesome.

James Whitman [00:30:36] Good stuff. Thanks, guys.

Sean Murray [00:30:38] Thanks, James.

Paul Gebel [00:30:40] Well, that’s it for today. In line with our goals of transparency and listening, we really want to hear from you. Sean and I are committed to reading every piece of feedback that we get, so please leave a comment or a reading wherever you’re listening to this podcast. Not only does it help us continue to improve, but it also helps the show climb up the rankings so that we can help other listeners move, touch and inspire the world, just like you’re doing. Thanks, everyone. We’ll see you next episode.