You might have heard some of these terms on websites or apps you use in your personal or work life. Here’s a definition of them.
Alpha
You’re beginning to deliver publicly. You’re taking all your learnings from user research and testing, and are making them into a real thing, even if it’s a prototype you throw away later, it’s something that actual users can use. You’re making the service openly available as early as you can, so you can learn from how people interact with it.
Beta
Things are getting more certain. You’ve made some changes to your service from what you’ve learnt in Alpha, you’re testing more hypotheses and are building better versions of existing features, and adding new ones if your research tells you they’re needed.
Live
Your service is fully available to everyone to use. The service has stability and is complete as defined by your user research. But it’s not the end of development and research. Nothing is ever really fully finished and you’ll be iterating and improving as you understand more about user behaviours, needs and expectations, which may change depending on circumstances.
Once you’ve tested a basic prototype of your service or product with your users, and you’re happy enough to roll it out to a wider audience (Alpha, Beta or Live), there are a few things to think about.
Creating excitement for your product
One of the most important things you’ll need to do is become your product’s champion, preferably well before launching. It’s crucial that people know what you’re working on and why it’s important, so that when it comes to rolling it out they’re excited about it and keen for it to be a success.
Talk to members of the senior management team so they know it’s coming and can start to get it on other departments’ radar.
If there’s a plan to hand over the process, service or product to another colleague or team to manage, make sure you involve them as early on in the process as possible. This will help with the handover and they’ll feel more invested and involved in its success.
Securing funding
All processes, products and services will need some level of funding to roll out. During Alpha you’ll likely have learnt enough to build a case for why the service is needed and how well-used it is. This will make getting funding much easier.
Funding can come from many different sources:
- Internal funding (from the board, reserves, unrestricted funding)
- Private funds
- Public
Launching
When you roll out your process, product or service, you’ll need to launch it. This could be a soft launch, where you don’t publicise it too heavily, or a full launch to your users and audiences.
You’ll need to think about the following:
- Who will manage and own it?
- Do you need additional resource in order to run it for a wider audience?
- Do you need a comms plan to launch it?
- Who needs to know about this? Are there other organisations that could help the service reach its audience?
Once the service is launched, you’ll be learning a lot about how your users interact with it. This means that you can review and improve the service on a regular basis. No service is ever really finished, so make sure come back to your users’ needs. Have they changed since you launched?
If so, it’s time to make some changes to your service to ensure you’re still meeting them. This might be anything from some small copy tweaks to a full round of development to add new features.