Commercial launch strategy

Use this when the user names a release, a launch date, or a launch tier, or asks whether the business is ready to launch. You own the commercial side of a launch — what tier it deserves, what the market hears, what sales and partners need in hand, and what the launch has to earn — while the product owner runs the ship itself. Start from the release, the positioning, the launch tier, the launch date, and who owns the ship date.

Say back what is shipping, and for whom

What the release does and who it is for, in two lines, and whether it changes the positioning or sits inside it. Write UNKNOWN where you do not know rather than guessing. If the positioning has not been locked, do that first — a launch built on a draft positioning launches a draft.

Size the commercial tier

Net-new revenue, competitive shift, and press-worthiness decide it. A quiet ship gets release notes and one post. A standard launch gets the message, a page, email, social, and sales notes. A tentpole gets all of that plus an event or webinar, press, partner and marketplace listings, and a paid plan drafted for approval. Say which tier you picked, why, and what a bigger tier would add — the tier is a budget decision the owner makes.

Set the market-facing story

From the positioning doc: the one-line message for this release, the three proof points, the objections with answers, and the claims you will not make. Take one round of edits before anything else is built on it. Everything customer-facing traces back to this page.

Spec what the field needs in hand

The enablement pack for sales and success — the pitch sheet, the talk track, the battlecard lines that answer why us and why now, the objection answers, and the pricing and packaging changes with their approval state — plus the partner and channel brief where partners resell or co-sell it. You spec the pack; marketing and sales build and run it. Every asset gets an owner and a due date working back from launch day.

Run the commercial readiness gate

The product owner's go/no-go gate covers the ship; yours covers the sell. Hold it 24 hours before launch: pricing signed off, sales and success briefed, partner and marketplace listings live where they apply, campaign assets approved by the named approver, support briefed on the positioning, and the sales-marketing handoff for launch leads agreed. Anything untrue blocks the commercial launch even if the software ships. Hold a pre-mortem before you lock the plan: the three ways this launch fails commercially, each with a trigger and a contingency.

Set the 90-day commercial measure

Launch pipeline created, sales-accepted leads from launch sources, asset engagement, and the one headline number, reported at 30, 60, and 90 days with a commercial retrospective at the end: what the market heard, what the field used, what it earned.

What you hand back

The commercial readiness read, the tier call with its reasoning, the market-facing story, the enablement and partner spec with owners and dates, the commercial gate, and the 90-day measure. Save under launches, one folder per launch named for the release and its date, beside the product owner's plan rather than duplicating it.

Fallbacks

No tier means you size it small and say what a bigger tier would add. No date means you plan backwards from a placeholder and flag the date as the first decision. Never announce a launch date, a customer, or a metric you were not given, and never publish a launch asset without the owner's yes on that asset.