INDUSTRY:
Commercial Lighting
EMPLOYER:
SPI LIGHTING
YEARS:
2015-2024
Creating a Product Launch Engine
about.
During my nine years at SPI Lighting, new product development was a major driver of company growth. We launched more than 40 product lines, with new products ultimately accounting for more than 50% of company revenue through SPI’s New Product Vitality Index.
My role sat at the intersection of Product Management, Engineering, Sales, and Marketing. I helped turn evolving product concepts into coordinated market launches by developing positioning and messaging, campaigns, sales tools, digital experiences, and the processes needed to bring them to market.
As the pace of new product development increased, I developed a repeatable marketing launch framework and checklist that helped us move faster without rebuilding the process every time.
CREATING REPEATABILITY
I developed a comprehensive marketing launch checklist that gave each product introduction a consistent roadmap from initial product inputs and positioning through content development, sales readiness, channel activation, and launch.
The framework created structure without making every launch look or sound the same. The process was repeatable, but the product story wasn't.
challenge.
SPI wasn’t launching one or two products a year. New products were moving through development continuously, often with multiple launches happening at the same time.
Every launch required input and coordination across Product Management, Engineering, Sales, Marketing, Operations, and Leadership. Technical information had to be gathered, differentiation understood, messaging developed, sales teams prepared, and a full ecosystem of customer-facing materials created, often while the product itself was still evolving.
The challenge wasn’t simply launching more products. It was figuring out how to do it quickly, consistently, and without sacrificing the individual story behind each product.
I developed a comprehensive marketing launch checklist that standardized the inputs, deliverables, stakeholders, approvals, channels, and dependencies required for each introduction. Instead of starting from scratch with every product, we had a shared roadmap for moving from product readiness to market launch.
results.
The launch framework helped reduce our marketing launch cycle to approximately two weeks, creating a repeatable system capable of supporting SPI’s aggressive new-product pipeline.
Over my nine years with the company, that process supported more than 40 integrated product-line launches and contributed to a New Product Vitality Index above 50% meaning more than half of company revenue was generated by products introduced within the previous five years.
The framework supported coordinated launches across websites, email, social media, video, webinars, sales presentations, technical collateral, advertising, trade shows, and representative networks while giving cross-functional teams greater consistency and visibility throughout the process.
Most importantly, the system proved scalable. Years later, when I encountered a similar launch challenge in an entirely different technical industry, I was able to adapt the framework for BLACOH rather than start over.
testimonial.
Emilee was a catalyst for a great deal of change during a critical rebuilding period for SPI Lighting. She worked effectively across leadership, technical teams, and marketing initiatives. Over seven years and more than 40 product launches, she consistently helped move important initiatives forward. She is a needle mover.
President
SPI Lighting
