How Asana drives impactful product launches in 3 steps

There’s no secret recipe for the perfect product launch. It takes weeks, months, or even years of careful planning and coordination across teams. With more than 20 years in product marketing and experience working on countless launches, Eric Bensley, Head of Product Marketing at Asana, knows firsthand the value of a successful launch. According to Bensley, "there's nothing more critical for product marketers than a product launch. It’s the apex, where every aspect of product marketing shines and comes together, and the company rallies around it."

That’s why Bensley and his team don’t do it alone. Instead, they rely on a trusty teammate with built-in automations and native AI capabilities—Asana.

The challenges of product launches

Successfully launching a product means aligning multiple teams, managing countless tasks, and staying true to the company’s strategic goals. According to Bensley, some of the main challenges of successful launches involve coordination and visibility, including:

• Cross-functional collaboration: Coordinating activities across different teams, such as marketing, sales, and product, is complex and can lead to delays and budget overages.

• Lack of visibility: Without a clear view of the launch’s progress and performance, teams can miss deadlines, run into miscommunications and experience an overall lack of alignment.

• Maintaining quality and consistency: Different execution styles or processes can lead to uneven results, reducing your launch’s impact.

• Constantly evolving executive, customer, and market needs: With so many individuals, teams, and partners involved—not to mention shifting priorities and changing market dynamics—avoiding confusion comes down to clear, centralized, and accessible communication.

• Differentiated market message: Making sure each product launch delivers a unique and compelling market message is key to standing out. This requires a deep understanding of customer needs and market trends.

And no matter how well you plan, things inevitably change during the launch cycle. "In the execution stage, there's a lot that comes up that is very unexpected,” says Bensley. “Things go off track. New information comes up that changes the direction. Course correcting, pivoting, and communicating that out is a big challenge of running product launches."

A smarter way to launch

Challenges are normal, but struggling through your launches? That’s optional. With the right platform, Bensley and his team have been able to streamline processes and improve collaboration across the board. 

They do so by optimizing all their work in Asana, focusing on the three key stages of their product launch workflow:

1. The planning phase

2. The execution phase

3. The reporting phase

Here’s how.

The planning phase

Build comprehensive launch plans: The first step toward a successful launch is creating a detailed project plan. In Asana, Bensley’s team breaks down the launch into manageable tasks and milestones. 

They build projects within portfolios, which are easy to share with leadership and stakeholders. This ensures everyone knows their responsibilities and deadlines, and that everyone has visibility into the progress of the work.

Setting and tracking goals: Asana helps teams set and track goals, keeping everyone aligned with the launch’s objectives. Using Asana AI’s smart goals feature, Bensley’s team can quickly create goals to measure and track the success of their launches.

For example, if they want to track press releases for the upcoming launch, they can set this up in smart goals with specific parameters and get back a measurable, effective way to assess this work. They can then connect this goal back to the project they’re working in, so it updates in real-time.

The execution phase

Managing execution with portfolios: Asana’s portfolio feature acts as a central source of truth, offering a high-level overview of the launch. It helps teams track progress in real-time and make necessary adjustments. With Asana’s AI, Bensley can get quick status updates about how the work is moving along.

According to Bensley, "Portfolios become like your command center when you're quarterbacking a launch. I can view our milestones and their status to quickly understand what's on track or if there are any blockers."

Ensuring alignment through task assignments: Task assignments in Asana help delegate responsibilities and set deadlines, ensuring everyone knows what they need to do and when.

Instead of holding daily stand-up meetings, Bensley and his team use Asana to assign tasks and check in asynchronously. This saves time and allows the team to focus on their work.

The reporting phase

Detailed impact analysis and retrospectives: Post-launch, Asana’s reporting dashboard and AI features help teams collect and analyze data on the launch’s performance, including launch results and feedback on the launch process. 

Bensley’s team conducts a retrospective in Asana after each launch, documenting key takeaways and areas for improvement to enhance the next one. Since all the work is tracked in one central space, they can quickly and easily pull the insights needed to inform their next launch strategy.

Build the foundation for higher impact launches

By leveraging Asana’s features like smart goals, portfolios, task assignments, and automations, our product marketing team ensures every product launch is well-coordinated, timely, and impactful. The insights and examples from our AI product launch show how Asana helps us navigate the complexities of bringing a new product to market.

To create truly innovative and impactful product launches that resonate with your audience, your team needs the flexibility to adapt and evolve their strategies. By using Asana's platform to streamline workflows and processes, product teams can focus more on the uniquely human aspects of launching—thinking strategically, creatively solving problems, and connecting with the audience in ways only they can.