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Launching with stakeholders

How to involve cross-functional stakeholders early on and over-communicate through the launch moment.

Shiva Rajaraman

SiNing Chan

⭐ Challenge: Keeping all stakeholders aligned before a launch

Most product launches involve multiple teams and multiple stakeholders. This means that there are a good number of people in the company who need to keep track of what's happening across launches. Often these stakeholders — executives, sales, marketing, customer success, external partners — are left in the dark unintentionally.

So, what do cross-functional stakeholders want (and need) to know before a product launch? Stakeholders often want to know:

Which launches should we pay attention to?

What stories can we share to ensure clarity?

What does success look like for our ideal user?

What are we going to launch next?

⭐ Key insight: Stakeholders often have less context than you think.

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Source:

Product School⁠

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Get ahead of expected stakeholder questions by providing them all with one place where they can find answers to everything they need to know to better drive and support through the various phases of a launch.

Layering on additional communication as a launch progresses is also crucial to stakeholder visibility.

💡 Stakeholder alignment is critical to a successful launch.

One way to approach the challenge of keeping stakeholders aligned at every step of a launch is to ask the question: what kinds of quantitative signals might indicate that stakeholders are not aligned during a launch?

Every successful launch needs launch artifacts that keep stakeholders informed and aligned. A few that Shiva has found to be indispensable for successful launches are:

Press release template (before launch): An approach taken from Amazon’s working backward process, which involves writing the press release for a ‘future’ product before you begin building a new feature. See Colin Bryar’s writeup,

Start with the customer, then work backwards⁠

to learn more.

Dashboard template (during launch): The best launches are targeted at moving one or two metrics and include a dashboard to measure progress.

Measuring feature impact⁠

Learnings template (after launch): Key insights often come in bits and pieces in the days following a launch. Having one place to capture and synthesize those learnings bakes reflection into your launch process like

Gusto’s post-mortum template⁠

Launch artifacts can help mitigate the risk of misalignment and frustration across teams, and prevent some of the following scenarios from happening:

Multiple launches getting scheduled around on the same day or the same week.

Marketing campaign launch dates frequently blocked, delayed, or completely missed.

Customer communities talking about new updates or features before they’ve been launched or promoted.

Customer support is unprepared with answers or assets to respond to questions about a product update or new feature added.

No usage reports have been built to track things like sessions, engagement, or signups.

The majority of post-launch reactions and comments are negative and critical, or people appear confused.

Senior leadership and external partners seem unaware (or completely surprised) that a product update or feature was launched.

💡 Create a view for every altitude.

Some stakeholders are in the weeds of the launch and want access to detailed launch steps and review statuses. Other stakeholders, like executives or external partners, may only want to see a high-level overview of all company launches.

It’s important to keep senior leaders in the company and external partner informed at the start. While they may be farther removed from the product development details, they may surface issues and concerns related to alignment to business goals and objectives.

Higher-level questions may include:

How does this launch align with our company goals?

Why is this a priority now? Where’s the data to support that?

What’s the enablement and distribution plan?

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⭐ Solution: Launch list

Start every launch with a document that lists out all the steps and artifacts so that everyone involved knows what to expect.

Before each launch, decide which steps are required and how much overhead they are adding to each launch.

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Get the template

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Launch list template Keep your launch team informed from the start.⁠

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Special thanks to:

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Shiva Rajaraman⁠

- VP Product at OpenSea

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Shiva is a product leader who spent eight years at Google and YouTube, and since then has run some of the best product teams in tech at Spotify, WeWork, Facebook, and now OpenSea. This page highlights the Launch step, a key feature of Google’s famous LaunchCal, a tool Shiva has recreated in each chapter of his career.

View the full writeup on Shiva's Launch step list and other launch tools »⁠

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