How to Create a Realistic Product Launch Timeline

There aren’t many things that are universal in e-commerce strategy, but the product launch plan is a must-have. Whether a manufacturer or a reseller, whether you’re launching something big or small (or even updating an existing product), the launch plan is how you get the right pieces and players in the right places.

The critical information that most brands are fuzzy on in their plans, however, is the product launch timeline.

Those pieces, players, and places that go into your product launch are three sides of a four-sided viewfinder. Add time, and the future of your product launch becomes crystal clear.

A successful product launch boosts your brand’s image and ensures the best possible “first impression” as your product enters the market. There’s no second shot at first impressions, so dial your product launch timeline in for product success.

Why is a product launch timeline important?

Time is the current running every other part of your plan. You need to know at what point everything will be started, worked on, and done. Only then can you allot the resources you need to meet the product launch date you’re aiming for.

• How long should you expect a product to take to launch to market?
• How long will each step of your launch plan take?
• When should you start each step?
• At what point should you consider pushing your product launch timeline back?
• Your product launch timeline will answer all those questions.

To build your timeline, simply break your product launch goals into the following milestones. Then, commit to timeframes for each. These milestones will tell you whether your target release date is realistic, and then it will drive an easier product launch process for you and everyone involved.

10 steps to building your product launch timeline

Consider these the milestones of your product launch plan. Review them, then assign the resources you’ll need, and then commit to a timeframe for each. The total time required will reveal your ideal launch date.

Key takeaways:

• Always, always start with customer research. This could include interviews or surveys, or any zero-party data. Your purpose is to understand customer needs and pain points so you can show customers how your product meets those needs.
• Visualize your product launch timeline in some kind of graphic representation. This might take the form of a simple step-by-step or a larger product roadmap.
• Define roles and responsibilities for each milestone in your product launch timeline. Keep communication clear and consistent across teams.
• Each milestone in your timeline can be broken up into smaller actionable tasks. Make sure you use checklists to cover all the necessary steps.
• Build checkpoints into your product launch timeline to ask yourself if your product launch date is still attainable based on deadlines you’ve met to that point.

Product launch timeline: milestones

These milestones serve as a starting point. You might need to change, move or add them to fit your business needs. This is still a helpful place to think about your product launch timeline using these key stages.

1. Kick off with customer research

Your product is designed to meet your target customer’s needs or goals. Just like a tree that falls in a forest with no one to hear it, though, that product will never do its job if you don’t get customers’ attention and convey the value of the product.

Your product launch timeline starts and ends with the customer. At this stage, get high-level feedback from multiple people who fit your avatar profile to learn about their pain points and communication preferences. Where do they hang out online? Where can you “find” them? What language around your product is most evocative for them?

You can gather this information through surveys and interviews or even zero-party online data like website heat maps and online quizzes. Do note, though, that these last two options require an existing brand presence with sizable website traffic.

2. Draft your initial messaging

Once you have insights from customers (or your target customer), describe your audiences in avatar profiles—if you don’t have them already. Get specific about their pain points, needs, desires, channels used, and communication preferences.

Next, start drafting some initial product messaging. This will be the sandbox of ideas you can “play” in later when you finalize marketing collateral.

To get started:

• Focus on your customer’s needs, not just your product
• Paint the picture of how customers will use your product
• Use language that evokes immediate understanding
• Provide any proof of experience that you can
• Be relatable

3. Create checklists for each milestone

The first two milestones above are high-level stages of data collection and brainstorming. For every other milestone on your product launch timeline from here forward, get specific about each step that goes into the milestone.

For example, this milestone might be broken down into:

• Read through each milestone
• Re-read and take notes on actions needed to complete the milestone described
• Review actions needed and put them into practical order
• Share with stakeholder(s) to see if any additional steps should be added

Whatever steps you write out for each milestone, make sure each is measurable and clearly defines what completion of that step looks like.

4. Assign pieces, people, and places

Pieces and people refer to the resources and team members who play an active role in your product launch timeline. Some of those pieces and people will be internal and some will be external. For each step in each milestone, take the time now to assign resources and team members. Indicate for each whether they’re internal or a third party.

Tip: if you aren’t sure yet who the third party will be on a task that you know you’ll outsource, identifying and hiring that third party should be another step in your checklist. Ensure you start looking for that third party well in anticipation of the step said party will work on.

5. Assign timeframes

With all your milestones and steps laid out, now you finally have enough information to add your timeframes.

If you have lots of players involved in specific steps in a milestone, get their input on the time required for each step, too. This ensures your timeline is more realistic and gets their buy-in and commitment.

Finally, assign a start date and a due date to each step of every milestone.

6. Determine the “good enough” mark

Sometimes it’s better to launch before the competition instead of waiting and perfecting every asset in your launch. Yes—this means launching with “less than perfect” product collateral.

Of course, that’s a fine line to walk. You don’t want to compromise on quality. Perfection, however, is unattainable. Even if it were possible, would it be worth being the last entry into the market?

Put perfection on the back burner and determine what “launch ready” looks like for your product collateral (like marketing, product information, and product images). “Launch ready” marks the moment when you know your product delivers the features you designed it to and when your product collateral is polished “enough.” It might not be perfect, but your time to market has to be kept as short as possible.

Perfect product information is even more unattainable today with a growing majority of brands selling on multiple channels. Product data optimized for your website might not fit perfectly into the fields on Material Bank, for instance. Even if the data is mapped to the closest fields, will it convert the same? Not unless you make tweaks to position your data to the new audience and with the user experience of the Material Bank platform in mind.

Every channel requires different optimizations, which is why the Next-Gen Product Information Management (PIM) software has become so central to today’s business operations. This system reduces the time to market with bulk editing, custom lists, built-in data quality scoring, and many other features that take the manual labor out of product data management.

7. Beta testing (if applicable)

If your product is one with bugs to work out, establish a list of beta testers who can review it before launch. This might consist of people in your network or of volunteers who get a perk for helping out.

SaaS and other apps and software are typically the products that require beta testing. This phase of early feedback will help you refine your product before the official launch, because there will always be issues that come up.

Beta testers can also act as brand ambassadors. Provide them a swipe file of posts they can share that align with your early drafts of messaging. That way, they can post about their experience as they test.

Tip: Using beta testers to help produce hype along the way gets other people excited to see your product. The success of your product revolves around how excited people are, so getting started on buzz early will go a long way. Releasing teaser pictures of your product is helpful, too. You can also run controlled product tests on social media.

8. Use initial drafts and finalize product collateral

Those initial drafts of copy and the swipe files you share with beta testers are all fodder to create your finished product collateral.

The product collateral you need for launch has to be completed by the end of this milestone so you can get it in place for launch. That product collateral includes:

• Polished product data
• Product images, video, etc.
• Product data management plan
• Marketing graphics
• Marketing copy

9. Announce your launch

Whether you work on buzz beforehand or not, there will come a time when you officially announce your upcoming product launch. Post about it on your website and on social media. Push out a PR. Send emails to your email list of customers and prospects. Tell the world!

10. Go live!

Post your product, post your content, and see all your hard work in action.

Launch time is an exciting time. If you’ve taken all the steps above to incorporate customer insights and get your collateral positioned, you’ll see an initial boom at the product launch. Try to keep the momentum by regularly posting updates, photos, and more content.

Your product launch timeline needs to be planned just like a big event. Think about what you’ll need, who you plan to invite, and where it will be held. Underneath it all is the inevitable ticking of time, so know how to manage your timeline so it doesn’t manage you.