Every product launch I’ve been part of at Signoraware has looked different on paper than it looked in practice.
On paper, a launch is a timeline with deliverables. Packaging finalised by this date. Listing content ready by this date. Campaign assets by this date. Launch date.
In practice, a launch is the timeline and then the reality of what happens to the timeline when the packaging takes an extra week, when the product images come back and two of the five are unusable, when someone asks a question in week three that reveals a piece of content that should have existed in week one doesn’t.
I’ve learned to build buffers into everything, and I’ve learned that the buffers get used.
The part of a product launch that took me longest to understand was the listing work. Not just writing a product description — that’s the visible part. The underlying structure: the bullet points that carry the SEO weight, the way the title needs to be constructed for both search and readability, the A+ content that requires different inputs from different people, the backend keywords that nobody ever sees but matter for discoverability. Getting all of that right, for a new product where nobody has search history yet, requires a specific kind of thinking that sits between copywriting and data work.
I’ve become decent at it. I’m not sure I would have expected to spend this much time on it when I took this job.
The thing about a product launch that I didn’t fully grasp before doing several is that the launch date isn’t the end. It’s the beginning of the second phase. Once something is live, you start learning whether the assumptions you built the launch on were right. Is the title driving the search you expected? Are customers asking questions in the Q&A that reveal a gap in the description? Is the price point positioned correctly relative to what’s actually competing with you at the category level?
The launch work continues after launch. That’s a longer commitment than it sounds.
What’s the gap between what you thought a big milestone would look like and what it actually was?