Step-by-step product launch checklist for product managers
Last updated: September 2024
It is the moment all product managers savor. Nothing is quite like the exhilaration and satisfaction you feel after a successful product launch. Seeing all your hard work come together and celebrating with teammates is a joyful experience. You know you are part of creating something that will delight customers and bring value to the business.
But planning and delivering a new product experience is a complex process. There are engineering features to define, marketing campaigns to coordinate, and sales trainings to plan. And those are just a few of the typical activities in a product launch plan.
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As a product manager, you are in a unique position to oversee all the cross-functional work required to bring new experiences to market. You sit at the epicenter of the organization — after all, you collaborate across teams to deliver on the product vision and ensure product launches go off seamlessly.
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What is a product launch plan?
A product launch plan is a document that captures all the work needed to release a new product (or additional features) on time. They are useful for aligning the entire organization around what you will deliver, when, and why it matters. A product launch plan includes everything from design, product positioning, and development to marketing campaigns, training sessions, and details on how to support customers.
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The value of having a launch plan
A product launch introduces a new or updated offering to the market. This is a pivotal moment in driving early momentum for your product's growth. Successfully launching involves developing a strategy, defining product features, building, and delivering everything you planned. This is where your product launch plan comes in.
A product launch plan provides coordination and clarification. Everyone can quickly see exactly what work must be done to successfully prep for the launch. Besides keeping the team focused, a launch plan can also help you understand the dependencies between each cross-functional group's work. Product, marketing, sales, engineering, and customer support activities must all be coordinated in tandem. Each group impacts the ultimate experience that customers have with the product.
Your integrated product launch plan should encompass everything from QA testing and drafting blog post announcements to updating billing options and training the customer support team. Although some product managers create these plans in spreadsheets, others use purpose-built roadmap software (such as Aha! Roadmaps!) so they can easily coordinate with teammates and share updates across the organization.
Product launch planning should be a collaborative process that includes multiple teams. When everyone understands how their role impacts others, it is easier to deliver a frictionless customer experience your users will love.
Related:
What is a product roadmap? Plus, roadmap templates for product managers
How to launch with The Aha! Framework for product development
Where to start with your product launch plan
Drafting a solid product launch plan starts with a retrospective of prior launches. What went well? How can you improve collaboration? Was the team clear on expectations? Capture the good and the bad so you can improve iteratively.
After reflecting on past launches, turn your focus to the upcoming one. Define a product launch strategy so everyone understands what you want to achieve and how the launch supports high-level product and company goals. Then, outline the tactical work each group will complete to deliver the new customer experience.
Product launch plan template
Break down all the work into specific tasks and list them in your product launch checklist. Using a template makes it easy to organize the activities required to launch a new product. (And in general, repeatable launch processes help the team coordinate and track release activities, deliverables, and dependencies.) A checklist can also indicate launch readiness.
The next section details common elements of a product launch checklist grouped by the type of work required: product, go-to-market, systems, sales and support, and feedback. Organizing your product launch checklist or template in this way saves time, holds everyone accountable, and lends repeatability to your planning process. Although the following outline is a good start, you will still want to customize your launch plan based on your product, company, and target audience.
Get started with the product launch plan template in Aha! software.
What to include in your product launch checklist
Not every product launch plan will require every item below. Think of this product launch checklist as a framework for evaluating what various teams across the organization might need to do:
Product
Feature definition: Ensure engineering teams have all the prioritization, sizing, and documentation needed to start building.
UX/UI design: Provide designers with the UX research, wireframes, and specifications needed to start crafting.
Engineering: Build the key features, most likely in a series of sprints.
QA and operations: Test and deploy the new functionality in production.
Go-to-market
Launch date: Set a target date and time for the launch and communicate it to stakeholders.
Pricing and packaging: Approve the pricing for the new product experience, and design and approve how it will be bundled or presented to the target audience (including upgrades, if relevant).
Positioning: Draft a positioning document or creative brief that covers the key messaging for the product launch based on the product vision, the new functionality, and the value it will deliver to end users.
Communications plan: Decide how to announce the launch both inside and outside the organization.
Marketing content: Create new messaging for the product's website, advertising, and campaigns, and map out all product launch emails, blog posts, webinars, and landing pages.
Social media: Prepare the launch announcement and campaign content to post on social channels.
Media relations: Set up meetings with the media and provide updates on key capabilities that are coming (and, if possible, leverage customer testimonials).
Analyst briefings: If appropriate, reach out to industry analysts or other influential personnel to brief them on what is new and why it matters.
Systems
Infrastructure: Make necessary changes to internal monitoring systems, such as analytics, traffic, and product administration.
Billing: Update existing billing options and functionality to accommodate the new product experience.
Finance: Set up key systems to track financial metrics associated with the new product or upgrades that generate add-on revenue.
Sales and support
Documentation: Complete and approve all product documentation, including release notes, help and troubleshooting guides, FAQs, and technical datasheets.
Sales strategy and training: Conduct training and enablement for the sales team. Besides this, create sales collateral and update existing materials to account for new functionality.
Customer success: Train customer support and service teams on the new product functionality and provide them with the necessary technical support materials.
Partners: Update and enable partners and affiliates to help communicate and promote the product launch.
Feedback
Review: Gather the team to discuss what everyone learned from the launch and how the process could be improved next time.
Follow up: Identify and submit bugs for engineering's attention, survey folks to get post-launch customer feedback, and solicit testimonials or success stories from users (if relevant).
There is also one critical phase that is not in our product launch checklist: celebration! Your team should feel an enormous sense of accomplishment after a successful product launch. Have a special product launch event with your team members on launch day and share your appreciation. It takes hard work to deliver a lovable customer experience.
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FAQs about product launches
What is a product launch strategy?
A product launch strategy defines the "why" behind your launch — with clear goals for what you want to achieve. For example, you might want to generate more interest in your brand or attract new users. Beyond the top-level goals, your launch strategy should also define your objectives across each stage of the launch, including the product positioning, development work, QA testing, promotion, and launch event timing. A launch strategy helps you stay focused on your goals as you begin to plan all of the more detailed work to bring your product to market.
When should you launch a new product?
It depends. Launch timing will depend on your product, market, target audience, and team. Generally speaking, you should launch when you are confident that you have created a Minimum Lovable Product. Cross-functional teams need to be prepared to market, sell, and support the new customer experience.
How long does a product launch last?
Not every launch is a major sensation. For instance, launching a new set of features likely does not take as much coordination as launching a brand-new product. Think of the launch as the entire process of delivering the new customer experience. Launching a product is not just the one-day event when the product experience goes live. Positioning, feature definition, and development work might start many months before the launch date. And sales and support team training could occur a couple weeks prior to the launch date. This is why it is important to build a roadmap that visualizes dates and deliverables to keep everyone informed, in sync, and on time.
What is a product release?
A product release involves delivering a new experience to your customers — in terms of both functionality and added value. Internally, a product release embodies all of the cross-functional work required to deliver this new product experience and the customer support that goes with it. Product releases can be used to manage completely new product launches or enhancements to existing products.
