What is a product launch (And how to plan one)

Product launches are the culmination of months spent building a new feature or product, generating interest in it, and building buzz. A successful launch day becomes a well-orchestrated event: the product is made available, sales teams are equipped with training and enablement to begin selling, and marketing teams launch campaigns, issue press releases, and so on to ensure that news about the product is spread far and wide. Nearly every team across your company may prepare for some level of support.

Once there’s hype around a launch, teams must meet their deadlines—especially the product and product operations teams responsible for delivery. Launch planning is critical for creating the best first impression once your product is in the wild. In this article, we’ll show you how (and when) to build an effective product launch plan.

What is a product launch?

A product launch strategically introduces a new product or service to the market. A launch includes delivering the product, communicating the value to target audiences, and driving initial sales momentum. While there is typically a dedicated launch date, successful product launches continue to promote the product through sustained marketing efforts, gathering user feedback, and informing iterative improvements in your product roadmap.

You might think about a product launch as a celebration, after months or years of research, new product development, and testing. That said, planning for the party also takes a lot of work, right up until the very last moment. Companies typically plan a host of activities that may include announcements, in-person events or webinars, post-launch marketing plans, social media influencer campaigns, and more to support the product’s success.

What is a product launch plan?

A product launch plan coordinates the timing and execution of a product launch—which is a milestone event for companies. It tracks everything from strategic components (like messaging strategy) to tactical components (like assigning roles and responsibilities for each step in the plan). A launch plan should include elements like approval and review workflows, task sequencing, and clear deadlines. The goal is to align stakeholders around planned pre-launch, day-of-launch activities, and post-launch plans to continue promoting the product and measure success. 

Importance of a product launch plan

Product launch plans are essential because there are so many activities to coordinate, and so many people supporting launch success. A product launch plan transforms chaos into organized, measurable campaigns or workflows.

A structured plan ensures all stakeholders understand their roles, deadlines are met, and messaging is consistent across channels. It also helps teams anticipate potential challenges and develop contingency plans.

Product launch checklist 

Every successful product launch requires careful attention to detail. A comprehensive product launch checklist helps ensure nothing important gets overlooked as you ramp up to and through the launch period.

Your checklist should include pre-launch activities like market research, competitive analysis, messaging development, and asset creation. It should also cover launch-day tasks such as coordinating announcements, monitoring social media, and tracking initial key metrics. Post-launch items are equally important, including ongoing campaign performance analysis, customer feedback, and product adoption. The checklist serves as a powerful planning tool to help you build and execute against your product launch strategy.

When should you think about a product launch?

Product launch planning begins well ahead of your launch date. But the timeframe will depend on your product complexity, market conditions, and available resources. Many launches require 3-6 months of preparation, although AI is helping many companies accelerate the product lifecycle—Airtable found that 31% of product teams who used AI “extensively” across their team to improve workflows reported increasing their speed to market. The speed at which companies can ship (and consider that 55% of product leaders are already investing in AI) helps them stay competitive, and also underscores the importance of efficient (and ongoing) launch planning.

As you look ahead to see what’s prioritized on the roadmap each quarter or year, it’s important to work cross-functionally to understand how much of the product development is complete and tested for usability. You need to have a firm launch date to work backwards from, accounting for time for strategic work like market research and developing the messaging that will be the backbone for all other launch activities.

Early planning helps to secure necessary resources, coordinate with external partners, and build anticipation with potential customers. By contrast, waiting until your product is completely, or almost, ready can result in a rushed launch that fails to maximize impact.

7 steps to a successful product launch

Here’s a step-by-step guide to a successful product launch:

1. Set clear and measurable goals

Successful product launches begin with specific, actionable objectives rather than vague goals. If you want to "increase awareness," for example, then you’ll need to define by how much and what you’ll need to do to reasonably get there. You can use the SMART goal-setting method, which builds goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.

Goals will look different team by team. For example, sales might set a specific target for qualified leads within the first month while your social media team works to achieve a specific engagement metric in the first two weeks.

2. Define your target audience

It’s vital that you know who the best audience for your product is, what problems they’re looking to solve, and the channels where they prefer to receive information. You may already have buyer personas and customer research in place, but plan to revisit them to ensure your launch plan’s success, especially if the window leading up to launch is on the longer side. Changes in the market may impact your messaging and approach. Consider conducting fresh market research to validate assumptions and identify any shifts in customer needs or preferences. Ideally, research around pricing happens early in the process, so that you’re releasing your product into the market at a price point you feel confident customers will be willing to pay.

3. Develop product messaging

Create a clear story that communicates your product's unique value proposition and how it addresses customer pain points. Your messaging should answer fundamental questions: What problem does this solve? Why is it better than existing solutions? Why should customers care right now? And, it should never make empty promises.

Messaging helps teams consistently tell the same story. It’s also a good idea to have a designated person to train team members on key talking points and review marketing and sales collateral for adherence to product positioning.

4. Build your go-to-market strategy

Determine which channels and tactics will most effectively reach your target audience. Consider your budget, timeline, and available resources when selecting which combination of marketing channels and partnership programs you’ll activate. Your go-to-market strategy should include multiple touchpoints to build awareness and interest over time. Even customer support teams must prepare for launches, anticipating potential customer questions.

5. Consider the customer experience

Use insights from past launches to ground your plan in real customer needs. Tap into feedback to spot what worked (and what didn’t) so you can avoid repeating mistakes. Tools like Airtable ProductCentral use AI to pull feedback from every channel—surveys, tickets, social, reviews— helping you quickly surface patterns and prioritize improvements.

As you prepare, consider the different customer touchpoints and whether your systems are ready to handle increased traffic or new workflows and automations. Make sure sales and support teams are briefed with the right product information so they can hit the ground running. A soft launch or beta test can also help you validate assumptions, identify issues, and gather early feedback before rolling out more broadly. The goal is to provide a smooth experience for new customers (and existing ones, too). 

6. Coordinate how you’ll execute cross-functionally

Establish clear processes and cadence for communication between teams. It’s helpful to implement product management software like ProductCentral with built-in project management tools to keep everyone aligned on key messages and key features. Create detailed timelines with dependencies clearly marked, ensuring teams understand how their work impacts others. Regular status meetings help identify potential bottlenecks early and maintain momentum throughout the months and weeks before launch.

7. Measure and optimize performance

Set up reporting and tracking systems in advance of your launch date so that you can monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) in real-time and make adjustments as needed. Metrics might include website traffic, conversion rates, social media engagement, media coverage, and early sales figures. Schedule a post-launch retrospective to evaluate cross-functionally what worked and what could be improved upon in the future. Product management software makes this process easier—for example, ProductCentral helps you track progress against key metrics and OKRs with executive dashboards that deliver real-time visibility.

What are the three types of product launch events?

There is more than one way to approach a product launch and determine the level of product launch events you should plan for:

Soft launch

A soft launch introduces your product to a limited audience without major promotional efforts. It offers a good way to gather feedback, test reception in your target market, and refine your offering before opening the floodgates. Soft launches work well for digital products or services with complex implementations, which is often seen in SaaS (software as a service) companies. Or this is useful when you want to ensure quality and user experience before scaling by working with companies willing to be early adopters. The type of launch event you host may be digital or a smaller, more intimate in-person gathering focused on building customer relationships and encouraging open feedback.

Minimal launch

This strategy may be applied to updates to product features and functionality. It allows you to take a streamlined approach, especially if resources or budgets are limited. Despite their smaller scope, minimal launches still require careful planning and clear messaging. They often rely heavily on existing customer bases, email marketing, and organic social media rather than paid advertising or large events. Using an event planning template can help you keep your efforts focused on efficiency.

Full-scale launch

Go full-scale for any new product launch you want to make a splash about. These launches involve setting up new landing pages, comprehensive marketing campaigns with multi-channel promotion, media outreach, large digital and live events, in addition to demos and webinars that prospects can access on demand, later as a follow-up. Full-scale launches are designed to maximize market impact and generate significant attention for major new products. These launches are resource-intensive and require careful planning to ensure you achieve the desired outcome.

Product launch template

A road-tested product launch template can help streamline your planning process so that you don’t have to start from scratch—saving time on both setup and overall coordination. This template organizes your launch into clear phases with built-in accountability systems.

This template provides a comprehensive framework for managing deliverables, tracking deadlines, assigning responsibilities, and monitoring progress—with simplified and customized views for different teams. It offers varied permission levels and personalized view, including Kanban boards and calendars, to make it easy for team members to work in their preferred format throughout the launch process. Among its many features, it also leverages AI agents to tackle tasks like generating a product roadmap, or to suggest other tasks, features, and content you may have overlooked.

Example of a successful product launch: BlackRock

BlackRock’s wealth management platform, Aladdin Wealth™, serves some of the largest players in the industry, working to help people experience financial well-being. When Dan Cunningham, senior director of Product Management, joined Aladdin Wealth™, he saw a need to align internal communications by connecting multiple teams and disparate sources of information spread across tools like Wiki pages, email, chat, and spreadsheets. Considering that his team is responsible for product roadmapping, development, and communicating product updates to clients, leadership, and relationship management partners, they wanted to move towards a more streamlined solution.

Dan’s team built a connected app using Airtable ProductCentral to power internal collaboration. The app connects technologists and senior stakeholders internally so that they can work together more efficiently on product management, business development, engineering, design, and product marketing, and speak from the same script. The app includes only internal project information (no client data or personal identifiable information). 

Now, Dan’s team can track everything from tasks to the health of upcoming product launches. The app attaches individual tasks to sales goals and provides talk tracks for client-facing team members to describe product features. Technologists and client teams all need to be up to date on internal information around product launches but not everyone needs to see the same level of detail. So they use personalized views and interfaces to show status updates to leadership and other client managers. It’s meaningfully improved internal communication across more than 300 team members, freed up as many as 580 hours per month, and they’re now deploying new features 2x faster.  

Product launch planning made easy with ProductCentral

Airtable ProductCentral is a flexible, AI-powered solution that brings every stage of product development—strategy, planning, and shipping—into one place. It turns customer feedback into roadmap-ready insights, aligns distributed teams into a coordinated portfolio engine, and delivers the clarity you need to ensure every sprint drives your top priorities forward. Combined with Airtable’s launch planning template, you can connect product launch priorities with all stages of your product lifecycle in one central location.

See for yourself by booking a demo.