An aggressive launch calendar, kept on time and on message
- Role
- Director of the launch program. I built the process, developed the marketing brief, and reviewed and guided the work of the in-house team
- Scale
- 10 to 15 launches a year across multiple divisions
The Problem:
Several divisions were bringing ten to fifteen products to market every year, and each launch needed a full set of campaign and sales material from one shared team.
How I think about itA crowded launch calendar is won in the planning: know what each launch needs, how long it takes, and what it depends on.
Ten to fifteen launches a year meant several were always in flight at once, for divisions with their own deadlines and their own sense of urgency. I built the system that let one team deliver all of them: a tiering model, a standard brief, a review process, and a schedule that showed where every launch stood.
I created launch tiers so that effort matched importance. Each tier carries a defined set of deliverables and a level of messaging investment, which settles most priority questions before they are asked. Because I tracked every launch, I knew how long each kind of asset takes, and planned new launches against the team’s real capacity.
I developed the marketing brief that anchors every launch. It begins with product training from product management and engineering and becomes the single source of truth: positioning, naming, features, audience, timing, anticipated customer questions, and the approved copy for every channel. With the brief settled first, the team can produce the whole launch kit in parallel.
The launch kit
What a full launch produces. Each tier draws a defined set from this list.
- Marketing briefPositioning, naming, audience, and approved copy
- Sales enablementTraining, sales flyers, and presentations
- Email campaignAnnouncement and nurture sequences
- SocialLaunch posts and paid placements
- WebProduct pages and launch landing pages
- Technical literatureData sheets, manuals, and brochures
- Product videoOverviews, demonstrations, and motion graphics
- PackagingBox, label, and insert design
- PressReleases and trade publication advertising
- Displays and demosTrade show, event, and point-of-sale displays
I set up the schedule in Wrike with every asset’s dependencies mapped, so a date that slipped showed up the day it slipped, not the week the launch was due. When launches competed for the same people, the tiers and the schedule made the trade-off visible, and I could rebalance priorities while there was still time to act. The intake and tracking system behind that schedule is covered on the creative operations page.
Everything that reaches a customer has to be engaging and technically exact, because a wrong term in front of a technical audience costs credibility. To prevent that, I put a review system in place that every asset passes through: a named owner in marketing, sales, product management, and leadership, each with a group accountable for sign-off. A review workflow with version history let me review and guide every piece from first concept to pre-release.
The Results
- Overlapping launches, kept on scheduletiered, briefed, and planned against the team’s real capacity
- Accurate on every launchone accountable owner per discipline, every asset reviewed
- Products that found their audiencelaunch campaigns that drove adoption and drew attention at every show
