What common pitfalls have you seen derail product launches, and what practices help you avoid them?

The most common pitfalls that can derail product launches are usually something like: Not planning for the unplanned Not having clear alignment around launch goals - across teams (Marketing, Product, Sales, etc.) Not having the right ICP/Persona Here's how I've navigated these in the past: Planning for the unplanned: has a product launch ever been delayed? Timelines shift ALL the time. Scope also changes. Having contingency plans and getting creative around hard launch dates has been a life save ...Read More

The biggest one I keep seeing, and honestly keep having to fight against myself, is launching for the product instead of the customer. Teams often get so excited about what they built that the messaging ends up being a feature dump rather than a story about what changes for the buyer. The fix is forcing yourself to write the "press release" before the product ships. If you can't explain the "so what" in two sentences, you're not ready. The other big one: misalignment between product marketing an ...Read More

The biggest one I see is confusing a release with a launch. Teams ship code and call it a launch, then wonder why nobody cares. A release is an engineering event. A launch is a go-to-market event. They're not the same thing, and treating them like they are creates noise without meaning. The second pitfall is launching features instead of telling a story. Nobody wakes up excited about a feature. They wake up excited about what their life looks like after using it. The best launches I've been part ...Read More

The most common pitfalls I've seen derail product launches come down to two things: skipping internal enablement and measuring activity instead of outcomes. On internal enablement: launching to the market before you've launched internally is one of the most costly mistakes I've made. If the internal stakeholder teams cannot articulate the value prop of what is being launched then external messaging does not matter. Sellers especially, are the voice of the product to the custom If your sellers an ...Read More

There are quite a few but for brevity's sake I'll keep it to a few! #1 is the lack of a 'prepared GTM' to ensure product launch success. All too many times companies will 'launch' a product simply because it's 'GA'..i.e technically ready. The problem with this is that products and solutions often need a much broader ecosystem to support true success including enablement, collateral, partners, services teams, pre and post sales components and much much more. This is before even beginning to talk ...Read More

The most common one is product readiness, which is why I separate the product-ready date from the launch date and work within a defined window, as I described earlier. Beyond product readiness, there are a few that I see consistently. Not getting stakeholder alignment early. A product marketer's number one job is to herd the cats. Do a stakeholder mapping exercise early in the process. Identify who needs to be involved, what kind of RACI you need, and bring people along the journey with you. PMM ...Read More

The biggest one I've seen across 12+ enterprise launches at Microsoft, Salesforce, and UiPath: the post-sale experience contradicting the positioning that closed the deal. We spend enormous energy on launch day messaging. But the most damaging launch failures I've seen happened 60-90 days after launch, when early customers discovered the product didn't deliver what the positioning promised — not because the product was bad, but because customer success and support teams were still speaking the o ...Read More

I've watched good products fail at launch. Not because the product wasn't ready, but because the go-to-market wasn't. Sales leadership isn't bought in. You can have the best messaging in the world, but if the sales leader isn't pushing adoption, reps default to whatever worked last quarter. I once had a launch where PMM executed perfectly and sales leadership never showed up. The story, and a lot of the content we built, died on the vine. Getting sales leadership aligned, not just informed, is n ...Read More

Misalignment with leadership will derail a launch every time. It doesn't matter if the launch is next week, an executive WILL redirect you if they don't agree with the message or execution. The most successful launches I led had intentional touchpoints with cross-fx leadership BEFORE we hit milestones. Usually that meant: Alignment meeting before the broader kickoff to decide on payload and theme Mid-way sync to 1) ensure nothing had changed across the org that could change launch direction and ...Read More