Felicity Coghlan

I've created tier systems for many companies now and one nuance I've picked up is it's important to consider your audiences and shape a tier system around them too. For example, in my current company we have very distinct buyers vs users. I found it important to recognise this in my launch planning as some launches are more impactful for buyers while others are more important for users. This might seem like a small difference, but it actually requires very different internal enablement since buyer-focused changes will need much more sales enablement resource, but our internal customer-facing teams won't care too much about user-focused changes - they just need to know it exists. Therefore, I created a 4-tier system that basically breaks down into: * T1: Big for both buyers & users * T2: Big for buyers, medium/small for users * T3: Medium/small for buyers, big for users * T4: Small for buyers & users I tend to think the role of launch tiers isn't to create rigid tick lists of what what each launch will involve, but more an internal heuristic to help people understand who a launch is for and how 'important' it is, and therefore how much resource they should allocate for it. Each launch will be unique and it will be nearly impossible to create a framework that perfectly fits each launch (this would probably render tiers meaningless), so don't worry too much about the details of what materials each tier should include, use it more as a guide and leave it down to the judgement of the team to determine the specifics.

One that I think we are all guilty of (myself included!) - don't forget to check back on how the feature is performing 30/60/90/180 days after the launch. It's so easy to have the big bang and then move onto the next one, but don't forget to think about the full lifecycle of the launch and how you are keeping it alive in the longterm.

Of course it is super important to have the typical KPIs in place to measure how successful a launch performs -but one thing I've also started to think about it is the more holistic measures of success. For example, when I came into my current business launches weren't really planned at all. In fact, product would often surprise the rest of the business with features no one knew were coming let alone prepared to tell customers about. Therefore, a creating a successful launch meant one that internal teams were aware of and prepared for. They felt included and taken along the journey. Success was measured by reducing conversations around "I had no idea this was happening" to "Here are my thoughts on how this launch could be improved". Basically, don't forget to measure those internal metrics of success too!