I’ve interviewed roughly one hundred product marketing teams as part of starting LaunchScience, and I’ve learned a lot. One thing that stands out is how the high performance teams have defined processes and document templates for doing the hard work of launching new products.

The value of using templates is they make you go through the key elements of the launch plan every time, rather than skip over parts that might be difficult or burdensome. And maybe they also bring to light some assumptions you might have that aren’t entirely valid. For example, maybe your first pass indicates that a given feature is not offered by any of your competitors, but someone on your commercial team knows better.

There are two key templates that make up any good launch plan:

• A task-oriented spreadsheet for tracking the activities in the launch
• A “one pager” document that describes the launch and has all the key information for stakeholders

These templates should vary based on the size of the launch. You can read more about launch sizing. You don’t use the same project plan for once-per-year “Large” launches as you should for small, incremental releases.

With that said, here are the example templates we used when creating LaunchScience. We’ve implemented these in our app, but just in case you’re not using us (yet) you can get them from our Google Drive.

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Google Sheets Template: Task Tracker (Large Launch)

Google Docs Template: One Pager (Large Launch)

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