What does your post-launch operating cadence look like for monitoring, retrospectives, and iteration on messaging and assets?

Launch day should be considered day 1, not the finish line. This is a problem at many organizations. Everyone rallies around the singular day you put out your press release, and you assume everyone will consume it, know it, and be amazed by the months of work you and the team put into this launch, but the reality is anything but. You should have at least a two-month post-launch day plan to integrate the new capabilities into other programs, include highlights on social, and equip field teams to ...Read More

Honestly this is where most teams fall down, including ones I've been on. The launch gets all the energy and then the day after it ships everyone moves to the next thing. But launch day isn't the finish line, it's when the real learning starts. By launch you should already have conviction on your positioning. The job post-launch is watching where reality diverges from your hypothesis and acting on it fast. In B2B especially, the feedback loop is gold. What are AEs hearing in discovery calls? Whi ...Read More

What does your post-launch operating cadence look like for monitoring, retrospectives, and iteration on messaging and assets?A few pieces of advice for making sure your post-launch activities are successful: Define your post-launch metrics before you launch. For a waitlist launch you are watching signups, then activation rate, then PQLs. For a feature launch it might be adoption rate, retention, PR mentions, and pipeline influence. Have the dashboard ready on day one—these metrics should drive t ...Read More

This probably depends on the tiering (significance) of the launch or product tier. If this is a Tier 1 (significant) product being brought to market it deserves a more frequent check-in cadence which should be grounded in short, mid, and long term success metrics. Short term could be activations, sign ups etc whereas mid term will likely be more focused on revenue aligned metrics. Long term will focus on LTV, expansion, usage, consumption, cross/upsell etc etc. Messaging iteration needs to be do ...Read More

The first two weeks after launch I'm basically living in a war room mentality. Daily standup with product, CS, and sales to surface anything weird including support ticket spikes, deals stalling at demo, messaging that's landing flat. You find out really fast what you got wrong. At 30 days, I do a lightweight retrospective. This includes what got used, what didn't, what did sales actually say in calls? I pull call recording snippets and compare them against the talk track we gave them. The gap i ...Read More

Having a post launch plan is just as important as any other elements of your launch plan. Here's how I usually navigate the post launch activity at a high level: Retrospective needs to happen with 1 week of launch, when it's fresh and relevant for all Aligning with product prior to launch on the key metrics to be tracked across adoption and marketing activity. For marketing, monitoring the first few days to ensure there's nothing off with the launch Then weekly, assessing how you're progressing ...Read More

To me, post-launch is more critical than the launch itself. What I've observed over my career is that a lot of energy goes into the launch moment and then things fizzle out. The launch is exciting, it's a great moment for the company, but the real value is what happens after: are sellers pitching it, are CSMs educating customers, is it driving pipeline, and are customers actually adopting and getting value? The first thing I do is conduct a formal retrospective about a month after launch. It's b ...Read More