How do you roll out a new GTM launch tier framework across the business?

When rolling out a new GTM launch tier framework across the business, start by identifying key stakeholders across R&D and GTM who can represent their functions’ objectives and needs for launches.

With the group of key cross-functional stakeholders, determine which launch tiers you need. For each launch tier, determine the cadence and product criteria that defines each tier. For example:

• Tier 0 launch: Happens once per quarter. This is a large feature or bundle of features that have significant impact on and high visibility with customers, and therefore require more GTM support to have the highest impact. 

• Tier 1 launch: Can happen every two weeks. These launches have larger customer implications or will drive meaningful impact to business metrics, and therefore warrant more GTM support. 

• Tier 2 launch: Can happen once per week. These are launches for standalone features that have high visibility with customers, but low calculated risk to customers and aren’t expected to drive meaningful end-user adoption, so don’t require more GTM support.

• Tier 3 launch: Can happen whenever features are ready to ship. These are small, incremental feature updates that have a smaller impact on and less visibility with customers, and therefore don’t require any GTM effort to launch. If an update doesn’t add new functionality or change the behavior of existing functionality (from the user’s perspective), it likely falls into this category.

It’s particularly helpful to sanity check whether you have appropriate definitions for launch tiers by using past launches as examples, and determining where those launches would’ve landed in the launch tier framework. 

Then for each tier, determine which activities are required from each function, across R&D and GTM. Higher tiers (i.e., tier 0 and tier 1) will naturally require more support from each function. Once again, use past launches as examples to determine what the required launch activities should be for each launch tier.

Once all key stakeholders are aligned on the launch tier framework, leaders from each function should share the framework and solicit feedback from their respective functions— and start using the framework! When planning new launches, the planning process should include identifying a launch tier from the launch framework. You may find that you need to make adjustments to the framework, but teams will have a starting point for defining the type of launch and which activities are required to support the launch.