Typically, our clients need design services following the ideation and project approval portions of a new product development project. We have experience developing the following common plans:

• Launch Plan
• Marketing Plan
• Support Plan
• Training Plan

Often, different individuals create these plans and the opportunities for synergies between different disciplines are not fully realized. OpLaunch provides a unique service for launch design called Launch Architecture.

Launch Architecture provides domain specialists (everyone that should be on the team from engineers to communication specialists) the context to focus their efforts, collaborate, and minimize waste. Launch architecture improves the sales trajectory during launch because good plans get better and individual efforts effectively contribute to system goals. Launch architecture ensures a better, faster, and more efficient path to launch success because it is a “launch design drives development” method.

More Effective Product and Service Launch

Launch architecture is a development activity that naturally follows the front end of innovation. It provides a robust, system-level plan to complete all of the development within the project constraints.

Launch architecture: The interdisciplinary design of new product and service launches. Launch architecture provides the design to combine many development ideas and contributions from multiple disciplines to create a synergistic launch. It includes the entire launch environment from the macrolevel of selecting product features and communicating product benefits to the microlevel of developing the search engine optimization strategy. The characteristics of the budget, product, company, and the market drive the decisions about the specific launch architecture design that will be developed.

The goal of the launch plan is to ensure that the proper resources are enlisted (from the set of all possible resources) and that the proper components (such as the appropriate product and effective advertising) can be produced and orchestrated for maximum impact. Launch architecture can be developed in the ideation phase or in parallel with the very early traditional engineering activities. It is an endgame or reverse engineering approach to new product development.

After several iterations to understand the potential of a new product or service idea, a launch architect combines their extensive knowledge from disciplines that range from engineering sciences to social sciences to create an innovative launch design. Ideally, this begins with a "clean slate" - an unprejudiced view. The launch architect iterates the launch design and develops the proper schedules, milestones, and checklists.

Launch architecture is symbiotic with processes such as Stage-Gate®. Launch architecture provides 'what to do next' guidance for developers. Stage-Gate provides a formalized perspective for management to review progress and fund future development.

Launch architecture encourages synergy

One trend in new product development is the increased reliance on multi-disciplinary, geographically dispersed teams. What are some of the ways that teams to become more efficient? Two ways addressed by launch architecture are selecting the appropriate team members for the task and creating the design that facilitates collaboration. Another benefit is that individuals do more than just 'turn in their assignment."

Development synergy: the positive incremental performance gain of the development team that is greater than the predicted performance of the individual developers working together.

Opportunities for synergy during development include:

• Using the same prototypes and feedback, the selection of features can be evaluated by both engineering and advertising. Contrast this with a 'build it then learn to sell it approach.'
• Cooperation between a technical writer and an interface designer can lead to improved usability. Contrast this with a 'build it then document the user tasks afterwards approach.'
• Evolution of ideas between individuals not just sharing of project files