Go-Live or Launch
When you have a new product (or a “v1.0″ as I like to say) you have the opportunity to do both a go-live (or as some folks call it - a “soft launch”) and a full-on, hardcore, big court press marketing / sales effort launch.
There is a big difference between the two and what they provide to you in strategic benefit.
For me, as PM, the biggest thing they offer is flexibility in risk mitigation. If you go-live and launch all on the same day, chances are you’re going to have some very unhappy customers and users looking for retribution with pitch forks and fire. Eek. Avoid that at all costs if you can.
We’ve got a 2 week window baked into the marketing / launch plan. You have to be able to offer up a chunk of time to things just flat-out going wrong. For example, if you were to do a full-on press release, big ad splashes in a bunch of places (and more) and then you realize that while you were successful in driving 5,000 people to try & subscribe, the product just cacked?
Bad news bears.
In the end, ensure you always leave some time. And, depending on the size of a major release (i.e., a v1.0 to a v2.0), you may also want to think about doing the same thing — this doesn’t only have to apply to v1.0’s.
August 22nd, 2007 at 6:01 pm
Very good advice in this post. In prior (software only) lives, we would run the last “dot release” e.g. 1.7 and the new release e.g. 2.0 in parallel, and for some period of time use a load balancer to progressively shift traffic to the new system until we had confidence.
Now, I work with hardware products and there are similarities; the software development is usually the long pole in the tent and I’ve learned not to even set a release date until we hit pilot production, and then go 90 days out from that.