| name | product-launch |
| description | Plan or review a product launch, staged rollout, adoption loop, readiness gate, and post-launch learning plan. Use when a team must decide whether to release, how to sequence exposure, what messaging and support are required, or how to measure adoption, retention, reliability, and rollback. |
Product Launch
Treat launch as a controlled transition from validated bet to operating product, with explicit readiness, exposure, learning, and rollback rules.
Inputs
- Target segment and positioning
- Product outcome and release scope
- Evidence across value, usability, feasibility, and viability
- Quality, security, privacy, policy, support, and operational status
- Adoption mechanism and channel constraints
- Metrics, instrumentation, and incident ownership
Workflow
- Define the launch decision, target segment, and value promise.
- Set readiness gates for customer value, usability, reliability, operations, legal or policy, support, analytics, and communications.
- Classify unknowns and choose exposure stages: internal, design partner, limited cohort, percentage rollout, or general availability.
- Define eligibility, exclusions, feature flags, data migration, and rollback mechanics.
- Align messaging with positioning and set correct expectations about limits.
- Design activation, onboarding, support, and feedback loops.
- Define adoption, retention, quality, guardrail, cost, and incident measures.
- Assign launch-day and post-launch decision owners.
- Set pause, rollback, expand, and retire thresholds plus review cadence.
Output contract
Return audience and promise, readiness checklist with evidence, rollout stages, ownership, measurement plan, communications, support plan, risk register, rollback plan, and post-launch review schedule.
Quality gate
- Readiness is evidence-based, not calendar-based.
- Exposure is proportionate to uncertainty and downside.
- Instrumentation and rollback work before expansion.
- Messaging does not overclaim capability.
- Adoption and retention are distinguished from announcement reach.
Avoid
- Treating launch day as completion
- General availability as the first production test
- Measuring only traffic or signups
- Omitting support and incident response
- Keeping a failing launch alive to protect the plan
Source grounding
Operational synthesis informed by lifecycle measurement in Lean Analytics, positioning in Obviously Awesome, product-risk thinking in Inspired, and AI rollout principles in Building AI-Powered Products.
