Some questions for anyone who has ever launched anything:
- Do you ever feel like you’ve worked super hard on a project, only to release it without much fanfare, and immediately move on to The Next Big Thing?
- Are you ever uncertain about what exactly has changed since the last bug bash for the feature your team is about to launch?
- Do you ever find yourself missing the opportunity to thank your teammates for their work, until several days later at the next team planning meeting or retro?
Okay, I’m using the word “party” loosely here. But this is what we did:
🤝 Made sure that everyone on the team was on the same page about the state of the feature:- Reviewed what changes/fixes were implemented since the last bug bash
- Reviewed what non-launch-blocking changes were in-progress or coming-soon as fast follows
Zoom screenshot of the launch release party.
- In this particular case, the context counts chart is something that we’ve gotten repeated feature requests for. Customers are always wanting to answer the question “how many users have seen my new feature?”. It was very motivating to explicitly recognize that our hard work would finally empower users to answer this important question.
A Launch Party template
If you’re interested in doing something similar for your next launch, you can follow this template to create your own launch party doc:What’s new?
- List any updates and details on what has been fixed since the last round of bug bashing
What’s coming up?
- List any work that will be addressed after the launch as fast-follows
Let’s release <cool new feature>!
- You can use this section to note the guarded rollout configurations you plan to set, or link to the guarded rollout approval request
Shout-outs!
- Explicitly call out the importance of this feature
- Tag folks on the team and shout them out for how they’ve contributed to the project and the launch