The gravitational pull of a launch date
Once a launch date exists (announced to the board, promised to the sales conference, whispered to a key customer) it stops being a plan and becomes a deadline that evidence must fit around. Testing that might delay the date gets descoped; findings that question readiness get reframed as things to monitor post-launch. This is how organisations arrive at launch day with a product that engineering knew was undercooked, pricing that was never tested on a real buyer, and a support team hearing about the product from the press release. The date should be the output of the readiness evidence. In most launch plans, the relationship runs the other way.
Enthusiasm is not demand: the evidence test
The most common substitute for demand evidence is internal conviction: the sales team is excited, the executive sponsor loves it, the early customer conversations were positive. Each of these is contaminated: sales teams are excited by anything new to talk about, sponsors hear what they funded, and prospective customers are courteous in meetings and truthful in purchase orders. The demand questions worth answering before launch are behavioural: has anyone pre-ordered, signed a letter of intent, joined a paid pilot or given up something of value to get early access? A launch case built entirely on stated intent (surveys, meeting feedback, internal excitement) is a hypothesis, and it should be funded and staged like one.
Readiness questions the launch plan should answer
- Can the channel actually sell this? Has anyone trained them, do the incentives favour it over the products they already know, and does it cannibalise anything they earn from today?
- Where did the price come from: tested willingness to pay, or cost-plus arithmetic reviewed for whether it felt about right?
- What happens on day one when the product breaks: who answers, with what knowledge, and has support seen the product before customers have?
- What are the supply and inventory commitments, and what is the exposure if demand comes in at a third of plan?
- Which existing revenue does this launch put at risk, and has that cannibalisation been netted against the forecast or ignored because it belongs to a different P&L?
- What specific numbers, by what specific date, would tell us to stop, and is anyone empowered to act on them?
Pressure-test the forecast and the failure path together
Launch forecasts deserve the same stress as any investment case: rebuild the revenue line bottom-up from named channels and conversion assumptions, and see whether it still reaches the number that was announced. Then walk the failure path deliberately. If month-three sales are at forty per cent of plan, what does the organisation actually do: cut price, add marketing, fix the product, or stop? Each response needs different reserves and different data, and a team that has not chosen in advance will do what every team does under pressure: keep going, describe the numbers as building, and let the sunk costs vote. Kill criteria agreed before launch are not pessimism. They are the only mechanism that lets a company run more launches, because they cap what any single one can consume.
What operators outside the building can see
By the time a launch reaches its final review, everyone in the room has a stake in proceeding: the product team built it, marketing has booked the campaign, and the executive sponsor has spent political capital. Operators from outside that gravity, who have launched and killed products of their own, tend to spot the same few things: a forecast whose shape is copied from a more successful product's history, a channel plan that assumes attention the channel has not agreed to give, and a positioning that describes the product rather than the customer's reason to switch. Their most valuable contribution is often a staging suggestion (a narrower segment, a single geography, a pilot cohort) that converts an irreversible bet into a sequence of evidence, before the full budget and the public commitment make that conversion impossible.
