A product launch timeline is essentially a map that marketers and businesses use to keep themselves on track for a successful product launch. timelines serve as visual representations of each of the major stages of a launch. Depending on your exact product and/or goals, your timeline will likely include various stages, such as planning, development, beta testing, pricing, and marketing. It is crucial to clearly outline and to communicate the stages to your team and to those who will be involved with these activities. When developing your product launch timeline, it is important to not only plan but to test, tweak, and review your schedule from time to time to make certain it is on track.
Failure To Launch
Many businesses and individuals fail to properly manage their product launch timelines because they are so tightly packed with tasks and deadlines. Each task and deadline must be reviewed and tracked thoroughly according to your schedule. For example, if you are marketing the launch of a product on Twitch, it is not enough to tell your marketing team to research how to get viewers on Twitch. They must know more details.
The first step to properly managing your timeline is to clearly define your goals. Your team members will know what type of work needs to be completed in order to meet the specific objectives you have outlined. If you do not have clearly defined objectives or goals in place, then you are leaving yourself very vulnerable to procrastination.
Planning
After you have defined your goals and the scope of your mission, you will need to properly plan the steps to take to achieve those goals. You will want to develop a product launch timeline that includes everything from the invention of the idea all the way through the launching of the product itself. This way, you can make sure every step of the process occurs on time and in accordance with your schedule. If any of these processes occur on the wrong timeline, you may find yourself struggling to get things back on track, or may even experience delays. Therefore, it is critical that you create a product launch timeline that is clearly detailed and follows a certain order.
Execution
Once you have defined your product launch timeline, it is important to make sure that all necessary resources are in place to execute each task. If some of the tasks do not get completed on time, then your team members should know ahead of time. A product launch checklist should include a schedule of all upcoming tasks, as well as a list of individual deadlines across teams. This way, any tasks that do not fall within your schedule parameters can be moved to the appropriate team. When deadlines are shared across teams, people know exactly what they have to do to accomplish their goals and are less likely to procrastinate.
Deadlines
Setting individual deadlines can help you measure the progress of your team members to accomplish your product launch timeline. For example, if there is only one person assigned to write a blog post on the day of the launch, then the deadline could be for that post to be posted on the morning of that day. Likewise, if there are three people assigned to handle various tasks, then the deadline for each team member’s tasks could be something like a week or two away. Having individual deadlines will ensure that everyone involved is motivated while giving you an accurate measure of progress toward your deadlines.
Since everybody is motivated by personal deadlines, making sure that each team member knows the date of their assignment is very important. You can also set up a secondary list of milestones to measure progress each week or month. In addition to deadlines, make sure that each team member knows the exact steps that he or she needs to take to complete their tasks. Following this advice will ensure that everybody involved in your launch is truly committed to your project and that none of them is going to feel left out.
Checklists
Once you have defined your product launch timeline, you should also create and distribute a product launch timeline checklist. This checklist should include everything that was discussed in the previous section. It should also have a separate item for landing page creation, as well as an item that addresses the feedback from customers received after the launch day event. Include any survey results, blog posts, press releases, comments posted on social media sites, and anything else that has been reported since the initial launch day event.
Summary
As part of your product launch timeline, you should have your most important tasks listed in order of importance. These should include the tasks that you think need to be completed by the end of the launch day and the tasks that you want to accomplish by the end of the second week or the third week. Your other tasks should be those that you want to accomplish within two weeks, four weeks, six weeks, or even a month. Each of your actionable goals should be written out, with a timeline for when they must be completed. If you have any timelines, you need to make sure that you keep these timelines very tightly constricted.