---
name: "commercial-launch-strategy"
description: "Use when the user names a release, a launch date, or a launch tier, or asks whether the business is ready to launch: the readiness assessment, sequenced plan, enablement spec, and 90-day measure."
triggers: ["launch plan", "launch tier", "are we ready to launch", "go/no-go", "launch readiness", "release announcement", "launch retrospective"]
version: "1"
---
# Commercial launch strategy
Use this when the user names a release, a launch date, or a launch tier, or
asks whether the business is ready to launch. You own the commercial side of
a launch — what tier it deserves, what the market hears, what sales and
partners need in hand, and what the launch has to earn — while the product
owner runs the ship itself. Start from the release, the positioning, the
launch tier, the launch date, and who owns the ship date.
## Say back what is shipping, and for whom
What the release does and who it is for, in two lines, and whether it changes
the positioning or sits inside it. Write UNKNOWN where you do not know rather
than guessing. If the positioning has not been locked, do that first — a
launch built on a draft positioning launches a draft.
## Size the commercial tier
Net-new revenue, competitive shift, and press-worthiness decide it. A quiet
ship gets release notes and one post. A standard launch gets the message,
a page, email, social, and sales notes. A tentpole gets all of that plus an
event or webinar, press, partner and marketplace listings, and a paid plan
drafted for approval. Say which tier you picked, why, and what a bigger tier
would add — the tier is a budget decision the owner makes.
## Set the market-facing story
From the positioning doc: the one-line message for this release, the three
proof points, the objections with answers, and the claims you will not make.
Take one round of edits before anything else is built on it. Everything
customer-facing traces back to this page.
## Spec what the field needs in hand
The enablement pack for sales and success — the pitch sheet, the talk track,
the battlecard lines that answer why us and why now, the objection answers,
and the pricing and packaging changes with their approval state — plus the
partner and channel brief where partners resell or co-sell it. You spec the
pack; marketing and sales build and run it. Every asset gets an owner and a
due date working back from launch day.
## Run the commercial readiness gate
The product owner's go/no-go gate covers the ship; yours covers the sell.
Hold it 24 hours before launch: pricing signed off, sales and success
briefed, partner and marketplace listings live where they apply, campaign
assets approved by the named approver, support briefed on the positioning,
and the sales-marketing handoff for launch leads agreed. Anything untrue
blocks the commercial launch even if the software ships. Hold a pre-mortem
before you lock the plan: the three ways this launch fails commercially,
each with a trigger and a contingency.
## Set the 90-day commercial measure
Launch pipeline created, sales-accepted leads from launch sources, asset
engagement, and the one headline number, reported at 30, 60, and 90 days
with a commercial retrospective at the end: what the market heard, what the
field used, what it earned.
## What you hand back
The commercial readiness read, the tier call with its reasoning, the
market-facing story, the enablement and partner spec with owners and dates,
the commercial gate, and the 90-day measure. Save under launches, one folder
per launch named for the release and its date, beside the product owner's
plan rather than duplicating it.
## Fallbacks
No tier means you size it small and say what a bigger tier would add. No
date means you plan backwards from a placeholder and flag the date as the
first decision. Never announce a launch date, a customer, or a metric you
were not given, and never publish a launch asset without the owner's yes on
that asset.