How do you determine whether or not you should do a soft launch (small) or a full scale launch?

If I’m understanding your question correctly, it’s about deciding when to go for a soft launch (releasing to a limited audience in beta) versus a GA launch. At Sentry, we take a slightly different approach—our launches are more about strategic exposure (when, where, and how to talk about a product or feature to maximize its impact) rather than the traditional soft vs. full launch.

Since we build in public, we’re constantly talking about product updates—even when they’re just ideas or still in alpha. We lean into transparency and invite our community to participate early, turning our launches into an ongoing conversation rather than a singular event, this allows us to gradually build interest, engagement, and trust over time.

We get “loud” about a beta if:

• We want substantial user feedback to shape the product or test, like when we announced Autofix

• It’s relevant to the majority of our customer base—or a key segment, where we’re clear about who it’s for

• We’re entering a new market that requires long-term investment to displace an incumbent

• It requires some manual effort or additional setup on the user’s side to get started so might take a bit to get them to start using—like when we opened a new EU data center, which required migration work from the user

During beta, our marketing/comms stay relatively contained—we’re primarily talking to our existing base via blog posts, inapp messages, videos, getting started guides, and social. But once we hit GA, we go bigger: paid media, outbound campaigns, and wider promotion.

This approach gives us a lot of advantages. By the time we hit GA, we’ve already:

• Battle-tested our messaging

• Identified what resonates (and what doesn’t)

• Engaged our most invested users and have their use cases ready to highlight

Sometimes when we release a big product, it's not yet ready for the limelight of a major marketing launch. Why might that be?

• You don't yet have externalizable customer value proof points or success stories you can share with the market — like finalized case studies, testimonials, approved stag-sig data points on how much your product helps your customers. You might want to save the big marketing moment for when you have these amazing stories and proof points in an approved shareable format. But if your internal measurement tells you the product is truly delivering customer value and has achieved product-market fit, that's a good reason to release the product while doing a "soft launch" and saving your marketing firepower for a bit later.

• The product has its most important features ready to go but it still lacks some important bells and whistles that would be necessary to launch it with more fanfare. In this case, there's no reason for you to withhold the product from customers, but you might want to save the full launch for when all first- and second-priority capabilities are available.

In these cases, we often do a mini launch and announce that the product is in "public beta". Once we have the proof points, success stories, and/or capabilities to consider the product fully baked, we remove the beta label and start to do heavier marketing promotion around the product.

A mini or soft launch might mean we train our field to sell and support, ensure our Help Center is updated with instructive guidance on how to use the product, and we equip our PR team with reactive media talking points. But we might hold back on bigger paid, earned and owned promotional channels & tactics until it's time for the big launch moment.

For me, soft launches are for when the product isn't ready or the announcement is not a step change forward. There are countless feature launches that are run of the mill, important, but not game changing features. This is the vast majority of things that ship. These launches haver a defined BOM with sales/SE enablement, maybe a blog, maybe a social post, etc.

• I covered most of this in the question regarding balancing speed to market with ensuring the product is ready for launch.

• If there is not strong conviction yet on product readiness – that’s typically a good candidate for a contained small (or sometimes beta) launch. This iterative launch approach can help product and PMM squads build greater conviction in readiness for a full scale launch and be a valuable learning exercise.

• PMM should always work with product managers to define / understand product readiness criteria which would include some obvious criteria such as (1) if the functionality works as promised, (2) if the user experience meets customer demands and needs, and (3) if beta feedback is positive and/or addressed