How to keep your company healthy: when is the best time to launch new products?

The Sigmoid Curve shows that the best time to launch new products is when your current ones are still at 70-80% of their lifecycle. Better you cannibalize your success than the competition does.

The most dangerous moment for any business is not when things are going badly. It is when things are going well — and the leadership team decides this is exactly the right time to leave the next product in the drawer for a little longer.

Key takeaways

I have watched this play out more times than I can count. A product is performing well. Revenue is strong. The team is confident. And somewhere in that confidence, the urgency to build what comes next quietly disappears. Why would we change now? Things are going well.

That question — 'why would we change now?' — is one of the most expensive sentences in business.

Every product follows a curve

The sigmoid curve is a framework that has been around for decades, but it still describes the product lifecycle more accurately than almost anything else. Every product, business model, or service follows the same arc: slow initial growth, accelerating expansion, a peak, and then — unless something changes — a decline.

The curve does not lie. The question is only whether your leadership team is willing to look at it honestly and ask: where are we right now?

The 70-80% rule

The insight that the sigmoid model offers — and that most leadership teams fail to act on — is this: the right moment to launch your next product is when your current product is at 70 to 80 percent of its lifecycle. Not at the peak. Not in the decline. At 70 to 80 percent, while you are still growing, still generating cash, and still have the confidence and resources to invest in what comes next.

The counterintuitive nature of this is precisely what makes it so hard to act on. When you are at 70 percent, everything feels fine. The board is happy. The numbers are good. There is no burning platform. There is no crisis to justify the disruption of building something new. And so the conversation gets deferred.

By the time the decline is visible in the numbers, it is often too late to respond well. The resources are thinner. The morale is lower. The options have narrowed. You are now innovating under pressure, which is a completely different — and much harder — problem than innovating from a position of strength.

The cannibalisation question

There is a second reason leadership teams avoid this: fear of cannibalising their own product. If we launch the new model now, will it compete with what we are already selling?

Yes. It will. And the alternative is to let your competitor do it for you.

The companies that have done this well — and there are famous examples in every industry — made a deliberate, sometimes uncomfortable choice to disrupt themselves before the market did it for them. The ones that did not are case studies in what happens when the comfort of success delays the work of renewal.

Three questions for your leadership team

Where are we on the curve? Not where you hope you are, or where you were eighteen months ago. Where are you now — and what does the trend in your growth rate tell you?

What is in the pipeline? Not the vague aspiration of future innovation — the actual products, models, or services that are being developed and tested right now. If the answer is nothing, that is important information.

What is stopping us from starting earlier than feels comfortable? If the answer involves waiting for the current product to plateau, or for a crisis to create urgency, you are already in the danger zone.

Better to cannibalise your own product than to let your competitor do it for you. The only question is who goes first.

Over to you.