Launching a Product - Make a Product Family!

Hello, my name's Ian Peterman. I'm CEO and founder of the Peterman Design Firm, and on today's episode of Launching a Product, I wanna talk about making it a product family. So launching a product is exciting. It's really good to launch a product. And I think that it is very beneficial to launch a product family, or at least have it in your strategy for launching, maybe not all at once, but have that as a, as part of your ongoing, maybe year, couple year long strategy is to launch a product inside of a product family. And I think there's many benefits about it. There's reasons why I recommend it to clients, and there's also things to avoid. And a few strategies. So I'm gonna talk about what is a product family, what are the benefits, things to avoid, and strategy to follow when doing a product family rather than just an individual product. So first, what is a product family? Now, there's a few different ways to define it, but typically a product family is— A group of products that all are related to each other And sometimes they work together hand in hand. Sometimes they're just similar products. So say a product family could be a hand soap, a bar of hand soap, a toothbrush, toothpaste, bathroom accessories. You could all loop into a product family. They're going to have a similar design language. So design language is typically one of the things that helps a product family. The packaging is going to look the same. Look and feel, it's all going to coordinate together. And so especially with products that are out and visible, product families are, you know, when you buy a set of dishes and there's bowls and plates and you have glasses and mugs and they all kind of match, they're all part of a product. That's a product family where they're designed to work together, they look well together, they fit together, they operate together, but they aren't necessarily the same— they're not the same product. So there's not just a product family, isn't a, oh well, this one's blue and this one's red. Those are product variations and are not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about different products that all work together. Now, what is the benefit of launching product family? So when you launch a single product, it's going to exist in a little bit of a vacuum, especially if you're launching if it's your first product, it's going to live in this little bit of vacuum where you launch a product and it just sits by itself. It doesn't have any friends, it's not part of a group, and it could be really great. There's a lot of companies that start with one product and it's really good, but they often find that there's a need for additional products that go with that product, whether it's variations, which are great, but also other products that are in a product family. And if you can plan it out, and I've talked about this a little bit, if you plan it out, then you could share components with each other. You could share materials. You could share different setup and tooling for them depending on what your product family is. If they could share components, then that's an advantage that you can take at the beginning in cutting down your development costs down the road. It also creates more points for people to find, and especially find you, and things that are, especially with products that do work together, usually in groups, you don't wanna just, like in dishware, you don't wanna just launch a bowl and have no plates. That would be a little bit weird, and nobody would have anything to match with it. So you also wanna be aware of, how do people typically use the product? Is it usually in a group? Is it, is it something that people, oh, we always buy this and this? Well, you want to be launching— you don't want to launch just one of those. You actually want to launch both of those at the same time. And maybe there's additional things you can add around it as time goes on to expand the family. But you also want to think of like, what are people typically buying? And the benefit there, of course, is when you launch multiple products you have multiple SKUs, so there's multiple things that people can be attracted to, which means somebody could be looking for bowls and they find that you do plates, and they can be looking for plates and find that you do bowls. And so you're able to allow people to find you in new ways, in more ways, and be able to, of course, have larger sales, be able to have them buy more of your products, be able to improve their lives with your products more. And so there's a lot of benefits to having a product Family. Now, some things to avoid. So things you want to avoid are forcing a product family that doesn't really work together. So in my early example of oh soaps and toothpaste and toothbrush, toothbrush in that case wouldn't really work. And I put it in there so that we could talk about it. So it's It technically is, you know, it's in the areas in the bathroom, but does it really work? Does it really match? Maybe you could maybe work, make it work, but you want to make sure that your product family is really relatable. And typically in a product family, they are within one industry. They're in one kind of segment. So to speak, if you're going to go to a store, they're going to be in one category. They're going to be on one category on Amazon. They're going to be on one shelf section or maybe one small area in a store. That is where product families typically live. So you want to be aware of product family becoming too big, and you don't want to encompass everything. What you can do is create another product family that maybe ties in, but has its own design language, it's gonna be its own thing, and it's more of a companion rather than a one giant product family. So avoid sticking all of your products into a product family and trying to make them all fit the same if they don't actually work. So don't force it, you wanna avoid that. The other thing that you wanna avoid is doing too many. So if you have a product family and you're launching Think about how people are going to buy it and don't try to just launch the entire product family just because. There's benefits to launching more than one product, but there's also benefits to launching, you know, the couple products that really tie together, people always buy together. Launch that first and then follow up and allow the family. So if you, if you kind of push the whole product family out at once, then you're not gonna have something new to add and you won't be able to help create an incremental growth. And there's some, some thoughts in terms of marketing that you want this spread out. You want to be launching something every so often. That way there's always something new, something fresh, something you can be sharing about, something you could be talking about in terms of marketing. So you want to think about that in terms of marketing. And if that's something that you need, if you need to be doing that based on whatever your marketing thing, avoid launching it all at once. And make sure that you avoid just trying to, trying to create a family, product family by variants. So make sure you're actually making a product family and not just little variants that don't actually work together. 4th thing to talk about, strategy. So the strategy for launching a product family— touched on this a little bit— is you can launch it all at once, you can launch it spread out, or you can launch it in a little bit more clumping. And that just depends on what type of product, how do people use it, what your marketing strategy is going to be. For the actual products and depends on what your tooling is. So I've put together launch strategies for product families that was based almost entirely on the tooling required. So these first 3 products, for example, would be— they'd be sharing 80% components, they'd be sharing a bunch of different tooling. So we wanted to launch those first, right? You have this expense, so anything that's sharing componentry, you you can group together in a smart way in order to say, okay, well, we're buying the tooling that makes these parts. We might as well launch— let's launch all the products that use that tooling. And then the next batch of products is separate tooling. It requires different components that these don't share, or maybe these share 80%, but the rest share 50%. So you bulk it out and you bunch them together based on what the tooling is, What the design is, what what engineering or testing has to happen. So companies will do this too in in terms of oh we'll launch the products that require this certification at once. That way all of those are we get them all certified, we get them all checked off, they're all ready to go, and they launch. And then because we have to go to a different agency or we have to get a different certification for these products. These are going to be the second products. So there's a balance between not just, oh, I market it and people buy this, but also what is the backend? What does your supply chain look like? What does your validation process look like? And what does your documentation— what is your certifications that are required for your products? And seeing how they fit together. So your strategy may be different. One product family could be straight— would just We launched all of them and that would make— made the most sense. And the next one could be broken up over 2 years of launching depending on what the process is and how long each one takes. You might launch part of product family because it takes 6 months to get those out, and then you have the rest of them which are going to take a year and a half. And so maybe you're spreading it out that way as well. So hopefully this gives you an idea of how to make it a product family, why, why I think it's a good idea. I think there's a lot of benefits to launching more than one product. It builds brand recognition better, it allows you to find more customers in different ways than you would have with just one, and allows you to pair products together that your customers would typically buy together anyway and have To products that match, which people like and people enjoy. Hey, thanks for watching. We really appreciate our viewers, and if you haven't subscribed yet, please do subscribe to our channel so you can get more great videos like this in your feed. And like the video. If you want to learn more about the Peterman Design Firm, please check us out on our website, petermanfirm.com. You'll find link and information in The description. And of course, we're on all social media as well, so check us out there. All right, thank you. Thank you.