How would you launch an MLOps product?

Context setting

MLOps is a critical function to ensure optiminal maintenance, deployment and monitoring of software and AI products on cloud based infrastructure.This function standardizes pipelines for data, monitors performance metrics and addresses security issues, developing patches and ensuring the general optimal E2E production launch of technical solutions including building utilizing and maintaining API based infrastructures.

Clarifications

1. Is this product aimed at MLOps professionals or other users? other

2. Is there a specific product in mind or is the product any MLOps product that facilitates a user to access out of box MLOps services and processes? latter

3.Is this a B2B product or intended for internal (colleague facing) use? internal

4. Is this product aimed at citizen users or power users or both? both

Restate

How would you launch a colleague facing MLOps product which enables citizen and power users alike to access MLOps processes and services with out of the box tooling?

Structure:

I will assume that the product strategy has been established and that feature prioritization is out of scope. The product is built or being built and has a set of features addressing some piece of MLOps functionality. 

Given this I need to outline a launch strategy

Any strategy should contain at minimum

Vision

Strategic pillars or objectives

Tactics

Success measures and outcomes

A product strategy would be in place so I will focus these variables with respect to launch

Vision and goal 

To drive widespread adoption of this exciting new product that will transform the way pms, engineers, scientists and business users alike are able to access solution enablement. The goal is to enable as many users as possible targeting full adoption after some period of time specified in the product strategy. 

Strategic objectives

Reach diverse users

Drive successful adoption within all user groups

Provide feedback mechanisms for input between releases that can inform future releases

Tactics

This is a technical product aimed at widespread use. Many corporate and enterprise  change management and adoption programs focus on a champion led transformation.  In my experience a concentric circle approach works well for technical transformation in an org where work happens in podlike structures.

The concentric circle approach is

Identify circles of users or personas from power or specialized to citizen or more business or business adjacent 

Ensure your power users have used and refined the initial product beta release so that functionality is broadly ironed out

Move to your next circle (ie. marketing analytics) and drive adoption in new use case development with playbooks FAQs and collocation of already unskilled power users

That circle will then develop new use cases without collocation and can start to upskill the business users they serve with new use cases

Success measures and outcomes

Obviously new users, new use cases are overall program measurements but we should identify circle specific measures as the goal of each wave is focused on sub outcomes. For example

Circle 1 

Number bugs fixed (rate of refinement)

First successful solution milestone (purpose achieved)

Time to First release from beta (product iteration rate)

Number reusable components developed (scope of product)

Number of library packages (usability)

Circle 2

Number users per unit (breadth of usage)

Number backlog features identified (depth of usage)

Circle 3

Number business users (reach)

Number of new users (effectively self perpetuating on-boarding)

The launch should be crafted in a concentric circle approach to adoption. Playbooks FAQs and training sessions should be developed for each persona or user and at the outset of the beta launch a release communicated that exciting new technology is coming. Monthly email blasts with metric tickers should be planned and each circle has 

Overview and education session

Training session

On the job usage and coaching

Feedback session

Ongoing metrics monitoring

At the end of the launch, the program moves to BAU and the list of metrics gets narrowed to monitor overall program.