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Product Launches

Launch Tiers

Use this page to think through how you’ll tier and prioritize launches. Sometimes, you need to prioritize out of necessity. Sometimes, you have the luxury of tiering strategically. A unified framework for your launch tiers can be especially helpful in driving cross-functional alignment and understanding.

Often, folks rank them from Tier 1-4 (see Liz’s Betterment

Tiering Calculator⁠

that she built with Coda).

At Coda, we do things similarly, but I had a little fun with it. In addition to being “A Doc” backwards, Coda also has the musical definition of being

the passage that brings a piece (or a movement) to an end⁠

. Our launch tiers follow the musical metaphor with four volumes: ff - fortissimo!!, f - forte!, mf - mezzo-forte, and p - piano.

Feel free to customize with your own naming convention, and add your proposed criteria. Then, have a healthy conversation with your PMM team and extended family to make any changes, and aim to stay aligned on these for at least 6 months. Try not to change your launch tiers until you can have an honest retrospective with a variety of launches in your rear view mirror.

Launch Tiers

Launch Tiers

Launch Tier

Description & Criteria

Audience(s)

Min Lead Time

Examples

Baseline Outreach Channels to Activate

ff - fortissimo!!

This is as loud as we get, with the entire company working in concert to support the launch. Everyone is going to pay attention to this

These are the defining Company Moments that reverberate throughout the entire company, our users, our prospective users, our investors and others

Who do you endeavor to reach with a launch of this size?

How long do you need to prep?

What is an example of this kind of launch from your team/company past?

What channels will you typically activate for this type of launch?

f - forte!

We're still making quite a bit of noise with these launches and getting a lot of attention from a big audience.

Product & Features that expanded our core product uniqueness.

Differentiates us from competition by offering something new, or vastly better & re-imagined than what already exists.

Launches & Templates that make clear our product Magic & make people say "Holy smokes! That's incredible!"

Be sure to consider asset generation lead time, internal training needs, Beta testing periods, etc.

mf - mezzo-forte

Thoughtful, comprehensive launches that live between "louder than piano" and "not quite as loud as forte."

Feature is likely of interest to only a specific subset of our user base

This is especially helpful in aligning on timing with your Product team

p - piano

We have a strategic reason to be quieter with this launch, but still want to bring it to market crisply and cohesively. These launches may take a variety of forms, including:

Updates/Fixes to products that had issues, but the issues weren't noticed/reported by our users nor community

Features that already exist in a number of competitors' solutions, and we’re late to reach table stakes

Fast follows from big launches, where we don't want to pull attention from the recent big launch

Other Moments

What other moments (awards, speaking engagements, funding rounds, etc.) should you consider putting your operational engine for launches & outreach behind? How will you do it?

There are no rows in this table

Count

⁠

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