Case: Google is considering a version of Google Docs designed for large enterprises. How would you manage this launch?

Let’s start with our product: Google Docs

Docs wants to make an organized and collaborative tool that helps people share and complete work seamlessly. Its main strength is that it’s on the web and can be accessed by anyone without building the web-app for both Mac and Windows. Since we are targeting large enterprises, we need to understand that we are in direct competition with Microsoft Office. For the sake of clarity, Google Docs contains Docs, Slides, Sheets and Forms.

What would be goals of our launch?

Considering we are competing with MS Office and the fact that it comes pre-installed in almost all the corporate devices be it Windows or Mac. I don’t think we should be focusing straight away at on-boarding as many users as possible. I think we should make sure that our product has a positive impact even at the cost of slower growth. We would also want to validate that we are meeting the user needs.

How are we going to achieve our goals?

I think we should start from where our strengths are. Google workspace is already given for free to non-profit & open-source organizations and we should roll out our first version of the product to them also for free. This will also give us an idea of how good our product is and whether we are actually meeting the market needs. An added advantage to this is that in case something goes wrong; we would not have a bad image to our actual revenue generating customers (large enterprises).

Pre-Launch:

• As discussed earlier, our initial Target Market is non-profit organizations, NGOs and open-source orgs.
• We would build our product considering the final Target Market i.e. large enterprises in mind. We would not make a small MVP only for the initial target market; since if we achieve product market fit, we want it to be rolling to our revenue generating customers asap.
• For a large enterprise, security comes foremost, hence we need to verify necessary measures are taken. We also need to take care of permissions more seriously since multiple groups and thousands or users would be involved.
• We already have version history and trash but admins should have access to restore documents deleted over a month ago.
• In terms of collaboration we need to look into how our product will work when 100s of users would be editing a document at the same time.
• Coming to PR, I assume we already have substantial users for using Google Workspace for non-profit organizations. We can roll out an email notifying about this new launch (email List of the same would be required) and also add this as an additional benefit what they would get if they sign-up for Google Workspace for new users.
• We need to integrate docs with Gmail such that it opens up the file as a pop-up even for Office files not just Docs files. It would also be super useful to deliver a PDF editor where people can at the very least sign a document in built in docs.
• Although Atlassian already has Confluence, but it doesn’t have a proper office suite and hence integrating with JIRA would be a nice idea.
• We can also look into integrating docs with other email providers apart from Outlook (obviously) to view the document without leaving their emails.
• In any big organization, it is very important that data is stored in an organized fashion. Hence, we would want Docs to have the ability to organize, store and view data as conveniently as possible for the user.
• For some PR, we should also release a blog about this product. PR through influencers won’t really work because this user category does self research and decides what is best for them. But we can connect to leading media houses to allow them a use of our prototype and they would write articles on the same.
• We should have a couple of tutorial’s about our product ready to be uploaded to YouTube for sharing.

During Launch:

• First and foremost, we need to make sure everything is working without any surprises and the product should be ship ready for the large enterprise customers.
• Send out the mail to the mailing list prepared already.
• The mail should redirect to the landing page of our product where we pitch our product in detail.
• Upload the YouTube Videos and attach the same to the site.
• Press Release of this Product launch.

Post Launch:

• Okay, now is the time we verify our product market fit. Using our analytics we can track the usage time and pattern of the users.
• We need to monitor if there are features in the product that users are not using at all and if there is a reason to it w.r.t our product not meeting their requirements.
• Send out a follow-up email asking for feedback from the customers.
• See if we need to make any changes based on the feedback and analytics we have received.
• I have a feeling that although launching to non-profits is a good idea, it is likely that many non-profits won’t be as big as a large enterprise. Hence, we should invite a few selected ones to use out product and gather feedback from them too before going releasing it to the masses.