How do you define product readiness for launch?

You need to pick a couple core beta success metrics or exit criteria that you and Product agree on. In our world, these metrics tend to boil down to some sort of business impact metric (like did we hit our revenue or customer adoption targets in the beta; are beta customers indicating X% greater willingness to pay now that they've used the product?), and a customer-value metric (is the product improving customer ROI or a key outcome by Y%, did it achieve our CSAT or NPS targets, etc?)

For our largest product releases — the ones that have the most future revenue or customer relationships at stake, for example — Marketing makes the final decision on when we move from beta to launch. Our Marketing leadership will first ask whether we hit our beta exit criteria when making this decision.

The release date is not the launch date - they can and often should be different.

At SurveyMonkey, we distinguish between when a product is released and when it's launched. While we try to keep these dates close, we often launch under experiment or limited availability first. Sometimes we get quick results showing positive impact on metrics and can proceed with a full launch. Other times, products need more refinement. For example, we have an AI-based thematic analysis feature for open-ended survey responses that's been in limited availability since last year. Despite customer excitement, our first MVP wasn't meeting expectations - users found it finicky and not good enough. We've rethought the feature and held back the public launch because we don't want to market something that won't hit the mark. This requires frequent communication and staying close to your product partner to jointly determine when something is truly ready for launch.

Product readiness is rarely a binary decision and often involves staged rollouts with both qualitative and quantitative assessments.

For consumer products, launches typically aren't a sudden 0-to-1 moment but rather a staged rollout. One exception was when Uber launched tipping - we didn't do a gradual percentage rollout because it was a principled decision that wouldn't be rolled back. Generally, though, there's both a qualitative and quantitative aspect to readiness. As product marketers, we need to wear the customer hat and assess whether the product is good enough or if it needs specific improvements before launch. It's our job to represent the customer perspective and provide that feedback to the organization.