[Test the Best] Running an effective product alpha, beta, and pilot 📈
Ah, the joy of building. It's a wonderful feeling to pour energy into making new products with our team.
For me: it's a "pinch-me" moment from seeing a Figma design or a product spec/PRD turn into something real. 🌱 But now the hard part: is it valuable?
As a PMM, we lead the efforts to answer this question via alpha, betas, and pilots. And after running a few over the years, I wanted to share a few learnings I've had to run effective betas.
💻 Plan: Set your exit goals, objectives, or KPIs in advance.
Get in your time machine, and imagine the future of your product. What does success look like?
For any beta: at the beginning, it's vital to look at the end. Set up measurable exit criteria that identify outcomes you want. These outcomes should be an indicator of the product/market fit with our user's needs.
Effective goals I have seen: 1) activation/usage: how often are you using the product? 2) satisfaction (CSAT/NPS): how happy are they? 3) quality: how stable is your product? and 4) performance: how does it compare to benchmarks?
👥 Select: Recruit the right cohort to give you operable feedback.
With a new product: it's uncharted territory, and the ocean is rocky. And when you're building a new ship, you need helpful shipmates. So it's essential to consider what type of beta participants can guide you with grace.
Funny enough: it may not be the customers with the highest likelihood to spend, but those most likely to be vocal, good or bad. Find the most willing to share their candid opinions that are open, honest, and constructive.
Another top point: Consider how big you want your group to be. A smaller group lets you go deep: richer feedback among few. A larger group lets you go big: scaled feedback across many. My recommendation is to think of the types of feedback loops you desire. If you're looking to host individual customer calls, consider a smaller group so you can talk to more people. If you're looking to publish a survey, a larger group might be more ideal.
Think also about segmentation: either by vertical, sophistication, region, attributes, or buyer. How can you mold distinct groups that will use your product differently?
🌎 Connect: Make a community, internally and externally.
For B2B companies: most beta recruiting starts with your sellers. They manage the end-to-end experience — from pitching, activating, and observing.
That's a lot of work! So it's up to us as PMMs to reduce friction in the process. How? Write content for your sales team to leverage with their clients at the very beginning: such as an overview deck & one-sheeter summary. They can share this content and focus more on the dialogue, so you can get more participants and dialogue in your beta.
Once you have clients in the beta, do a kickoff call with your sales team so everyone understands the product, limitations, timeline, and more. And keep it fun! Play some music and run some polls. 😀
After that, use digital channels to keep everyone updated on the situation. Consider using a Teams/Slack channel to share notable updates, learnings, and benchmarks.
For B2C companies: If you can work directly with your beta customers (without sellers), set up a LinkedIn or Facebook group to stay in touch with your beta participants. You can also set up an email alias (e.g. beta@company.com) that you can respond to questions and triage problems.
📊 Track: Monitor a dashboard of "metric movers"
One of the best things you can do as a team is stand up a beta dashboard. This should be a one-stop place to track success. Ideally, it should have a few key metrics against the exit goals (see above). Add in weekly or monthly changes (W/W or M/M) so you can see how metrics are evolving.
We have found success with internal tools, but feel free to use external tools like Tableau & Power BI. Key point: whatever you make, make sure it passes the "no brainer" test —would anyone be able to understand your dashboard and its meaning?
Make it easily accessible (pin to your Slack/Teams channel and bookmark it) and readable (less is more here). Every week, review the dashboard and ask the team for commentary. Why is this number the way it is? Any patterns or insights? Rate progress on red, yellow, green for your exit goals, and only move to the next stage of development when the goals are met.
📧 Share: Publish internal & external newsletters on progress
You are rooting for the success of your beta participants. Because if they succeed, you succeed! So how can you elevate their success and keep everyone excited? The best way I found to foster interest is by sharing a regularly scheduled update—both internally and externally.
Internally, share a monthly note to a large group of stakeholders who care about the outcome so they can stay close to the progress. They can ask questions, share feedback, and even jump in to give resources if things are going south. It becomes a great source of truth.
Externally, publish a newsletter to your beta participants to keep them invested. Tell them about new features on the horizon, stories from other customers, resources to help them achieve more, and a timeline for future phases.
Building is beautiful, and I wish you and your teams nothing but success as you test together in your alpha, betas, and pilots. Any other tips you would share? 🚀