Ten questions that test whether a launch is standing on customer evidence and operational rehearsal, or on a date the organisation has promised itself.
Score the specific launch as it stands today, including the parts still marked as in progress. Fixed questions and points, nothing entered is stored, and the same answers always return the same result.
Last reviewed 3 July 2026 · Free and ungated
Launch spend converts quickly from plan to commitment. While it is still a plan, a confidential brief to the Global Board puts it in front of selected senior operators who have taken comparable products to market.
Challenge the assumptions before committingAnswer for the launch as it is today, not as the plan says it will be by launch week.
On these answers the launch is being carried by the date rather than the preparation. The problem evidence, the channel and the operational rehearsal are all provisional, which means the market will end up conducting the testing your process has not.
The core proposition has evidence behind it, but the machinery around it is unfinished: typically sales enablement, support rehearsal or a competitive response no one has planned for. Launches in this band tend to survive week one and struggle in month three, when the gaps meet real volume.
Most of the readiness conditions are in place and the remaining items are specific rather than structural. The characteristic risk now is the calendar: with the launch visibly close, open items get reclassified as fast-follow, and fast-follow is where launch discipline goes to dissolve.
Evidence, operations, enablement and metrics are in place to a standard most launches never reach. What a readiness score cannot test is the market's opinion: a perfectly executed launch of a proposition the market shrugs at is still a shrug, just a well-organised one.
Launch dates start as planning devices and become commitments: announced to the board, promised to the channel, wired into marketing spend. From that point the date stops serving the launch and starts commanding it, and the readiness question inverts. Instead of asking whether the product is ready, the organisation asks how to be ready enough by the date. This score exists to keep that inversion visible.
Most launch checklists stop at the product: does it work, is it priced, can we sell it. The questions that decide month three are the uncomfortable ones at the end, about whether anyone has planned for the incumbent's response and whether the organisation agreed, in advance, what would justify delaying. Teams that cannot answer the last question have not decided to launch; they have decided not to decide.
Ten questions with three fixed answers at 0, 5 or 10 points, normalised to 100 and mapped to four bands. Re-score weekly as launch approaches: readiness that is genuinely improving shows up as movement, and readiness that is being asserted shows up as the same score defended more firmly.
It means the visible preparation will not be the reason a launch fails. Whether the proposition deserves launching is a different question, and it is decided by customers. The score keeps preparation from being the excuse; it cannot make the market interested.
Score against the launch you are actually doing. A deliberate MVP can honestly tick pricing, metrics and kill criteria at small scale; what it cannot skip is problem evidence and a rollback plan, because an MVP without those is a hedge rather than a test.
Fixed windows are real, and they change the question from when to what: which scope of launch is genuinely ready by that date. Scoring the current plan shows what a full launch would carry into the event; scoring a narrower one usually reveals a better option.