When companies prepare for a new product launch, they typically spend a lot of time planning out all of the work items for different teams and use a project management tool to organize the cross-functional collaboration required to ship a new product out to customers.
The task that is often overlooked by many teams is how to track the success of a product after it’s launched and share cross-functional data out to different teams and stakeholders.
For example, while engineering and product teams work together closely to prepare for a launch, afterwards engineering often goes back to monitoring infrastructure KPIs, and product goes back to tracking product analytics – making it tough to see the big picture across teams.
If you'd like to see an example product launch dashboard, check out the Plus launch dashboard here: https://plusdocs.notion.site/Public-Beta-Launch-Dashboard-c5a62f9a22c245b888ee6e71061fdce2.
Building a product launch dashboard
Building a launch dashboard is one of the best ways to share cross-functional data across a company and allow individual teams to see the impact of their work as well as enable teams to work cross-functionally to tackle new problems and opportunities as they arise.
To build a new KPI dashboard, we always suggest starting with the basics and then adding on to the dashboard as your needs change or new questions arise. We’ve found that just getting started on something makes it easier for everyone to figure out what they need next.
Here is our basic flow for setting up a new dashboard:
Identify the key goals you are trying to achieve
In the example of a new product launch, we are trying to find customers and help make them successful when trying out the new product. We want to understand the customer funnel from awareness, to activation, and early data on retention.
Understand the data you already have and what you might need
Our team already has several different tools to track our marketing website and conversion data. We also have data on our app usage and our app infrastructure. We are missing some data points on our in-app analytics, so we want to add them to our analytics tool prior to launching.
Put together a first draft of the dashboard
We find that it’s difficult to define all of the perfect specifications for what you need on a dashboard before seeing it in action. That’s why we suggest “shipping” a “draft” version first so your teammates can react to it, and it’s easier to make changes as it’s not yet finalized.
If this step sounds challenging because your data sits in multiple different applications, and you’re worried about how to set up complicated software integrations, take a look at what you can do with Plus.
Plus makes it easy to take data from any app or website and bring it straight into the productivity tools you use every day. This allows you to quickly build a dashboard and start getting insights from your data, instead of worrying about how to get it where you need it.
Revise and refine the dashboard as things change
Last but not least, we understand that dashboards are always changing and evolving as business needs change. If we are focusing on a new sales, marketing, or engineering KPI, we make sure that we can quickly update the dashboard, so that it stays fresh and useful.
Product launch KPI dashboard example
This screenshot (link to full dashboard) is an example of a product launch dashboard that the Plus team used to track the launch day performance of our app. It includes
- Marketing site analytics from Google Analytics,
- Community metrics from Product Hunt and Product Wars,
- App analytics from Mixpanel,
- Platform health data from Metabase, and
- Project management updates from Linear.
Each of the Plus Snapshots automatically stays up to date, which makes it easy to share data with our team and our investors.
Ready to build your own KPI dashboard? Try out Plus today!
