How do you track and sequence the activities leading up to a product or feature launch?

If you take one thing away from this AMA, it’s that you need a source of truth for your launch activities. Please don’t run a launch without one, I’m begging you. Unsurprisingly, at Airtable we use Airtable to do this. I’d recommend it, it’s worked well for us. But I won’t give you too much of a sales pitch on why since that's likely not what you're looking for. What I will say, is you need a place where you can list out every activity, the owner, the status, due date, approval activity, and ass ...Read More

The key here is to invent the wheel once, and then modify it if and when there are changes to the type of launch. This will make your life a lot easier and more predictable, and help all the stakeholders you work with also have an easier time. We start each launch with the same playbook - a set of activities that help drive a cross-functional team across marketing, comms, product, and more to help us through launch and to landing. Within that playbook, we have different tiers of launches, and th ...Read More

We use Confluence, Jira Work Management, and Jira Software to track our launches. Free templates: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/templates/go-to-market https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/templates/product-launch We create the high-level plan of activities in Confluence, aligned to the relevant launch tier (launch tiers are our guideposts from which activities we'll do for each level of launch. High impact = all the marketing activities, lower impact = fewer marketing activiti ...Read More

You have to have a pretty streamlined process. It should be starting about three, four months ahead before launch day, and probably have three, two, five key milestones until reaching that day - the launch kickoff, a launch plan, the launch execution, launch readiness, things like that. Again, there's a ton of frameworks that kind of talks about what each stakeholder is supposed to do for each of the milestones and also what the output and deliverables are. You can get as granular as defining th ...Read More