When you're launching a transformative product, what ground work can you lay to ensure that the product lands successfully?

Build fast feedback loops with cheerleaders and challengers

How you build your feedback loops will determine your product trajectory. You need to ensure your recruiting the right customer type, but also go out of your way to try and include cheerleaders (people a bit more on the cutting edge) or challengers (later adopters who don't like change). Both will become vital in terms of your trade-offs for when to launch the product and to understand your true value proposition of the product. Obviously you want to also recruit your target market, etc too, but try to balance out your feedback to unbias it as much as possible. Plus, nothing feels better than converting a late-adopter, so try to get a few into the beta to ensure the product proposition has potential. 

Support with marketing activity air cover, so the product and engineering teams have time to build for "best to market" not just first to market

If you're building a long-term bet, that means there could be significant time between product changes. What do you do? You put the marketing in product marketing. You re-package, and activate solutions and drive stronger use cases and POV for your core product to ensure your eng and product teams have the air cover to go and build something big and bold, vs. nagging them with small feature launches.   

There will be a lot of stakeholder management to ensure your eng and product teams can build what's best, so amp up on other things to drive adoption other than product releases.

Seed the marketplace with what will be coming next, and prep the market for the shift that you will make, especially if it's a non-confidential change.  

 Teams always underestimate how long it will drive a behavior shift. For our major product launch, we seeded the market with roadmap presentations and long-term industry POVs and trends for about a year. If you're just planning the launch marketing and post-launch, you're losing valuable time. If the change isn't confidential, seed the market with thought leadership pieces, whitepapers even social media content on the direction you want to shift. It takes alignment to ensure you're working in the same direction, but when the launch comes more people will be ready, which will lead to a stronger launch.