How to plan a product launch
A twelve-week plan for launching a software product: five teams, fifteen activities, a go/no-go review, three milestones and a mandatory offsite. The three views below show the same plan. Drag an activity in one and the others follow.
Gantt chart: will every team be ready in time
The plan grouped by team, with activity names on the left. Each milestone sits in the row of the work it waits for.
- Product writes the brief and interviews customers, then holds the Go/no-go review.
- Engineering finishes the release, marked by Feature complete, runs a private beta and fixes what it finds.
- Marketing sets positioning and price, builds the launch page and prepares the campaign and press kit.
- Sales is trained once the positioning is ready, then warms up the pipeline.
- Support writes help articles and gets ready once the beta has shown what customers ask.
The go/no-go decision is a two-day review, not just a date. It waits for the fixes, the campaign, the pipeline and support readiness; Release rollout and Press briefings wait for it, and Go/no-go sits beside it. Give the review one more day and the milestone, the launch work and Launch day all move one work day later. The yellow band is the offsite: the plan counts work days and treats it as time off, so the release and the launch page lose four days there.
Kanban board: what is happening now
Each team has a row and each status a column.
The brief and the interviews are done; engineering and marketing are working. Each card shows its dates: drag Sales training a week later in the Gantt chart above and its card here, and the cards of the work after it, show the new dates. In a weekly launch meeting each team speaks to its own row, and a row full of In progress is a team doing too much at once.
Flowchart: what decides launch day
Lanes show the teams; each arrow is a dependency.
Diamonds mark where work splits into chains that all run. Go/no-go review is one because both the rollout and the briefings follow it; the shape does not mean a yes-or-no branch. Two chains have no gap between their steps and set launch day: the marketing chain from the interviews through positioning, launch page and campaign, and the engineering chain through the release, the beta and the fixes. Sales training could start about three weeks later, and Warm up the pipeline and Support readiness end two work days before the review. Dragging an activity still keeps those gaps and moves everything after it; see Moving dependency chains.
Make it yours
- Choose Open in Tidigar under any view to get your own copy. It is free, needs no account and stays on your device.
- Rename or remove the activities that differ in your launch.
- Drag Launch brief to your real start week; the work after it follows.
- Update the status in the board as work moves, and hold the go/no-go review with the Gantt chart on screen.
Frequently asked questions
How long is a product launch plan? Eight to twelve weeks is common for a software release with a campaign; a small update may need four, a new market or hardware more.
Which teams belong in it? Every team that must be ready on launch day: usually product, engineering, marketing, sales and support.
What is a go/no-go review? A short meeting before launch where every team confirms it is ready. If one is not, the date moves before it is announced.