Product Launch Checklist: 12 Steps That Offer Big Impact

A product launch can help you establish your business, break into new markets, and even strengthen your brand. Given the potential payoff, many merchants spend time and resources to ensure they make the biggest impact possible when introducing a new product. A product launch checklist can help you keep organized and move intentionally.

Here’s what a product launch plan checklist is and how to create one.

What is a product launch?

A product launch is when a business introduces a new product or service to the market. Planned ahead of time, launches often require the coordination of several departments—from how the marketing team positions a new offering to how a customer support team fields questions—to present a cohesive narrative to the public.

A product launch checklist is a detailed list of everything a business must accomplish to make launch day possible.

Why is it important to have a product launch checklist?

• Makes launch day more manageable
• Shapes your strategy
• Gets everyone on the same page
• Ensures you don’t skip steps
• Helps you anticipate roadblocks

A product launch checklist ensures your team is organized and ready to debut a new product.

Here are a few of the key benefits:

Makes launch day more manageable

It can be daunting to tackle an ambitious project without segmenting tasks into smaller, more manageable steps. A product launch checklist helps you break down every aspect of your launch plan so you can make steady progress. 

Shapes your strategy

Your launch strategy differs depending on your goals. Once you know what you want to accomplish, it can inform other parts of your strategy, including how to allocate resources, how much time to spend on tasks, and where to find your target audience.

Gets everyone on the same page

Launching a product requires coordinated efforts across various departments—from your customer service team to the managers of your marketing campaigns. A product launch checklist outlines every team’s responsibilities and how it affects other departments, ensuring no one works in a silo or targets different goals. It keeps everyone moving in the same direction.

Ensures you don’t skip steps

A product launch plan is a roadmap accounting for everything you need to launch your new offering. Outlining how to get from point to point until you reach your goal ensures you’re moving in the right order without skipping steps.

Helps you anticipate roadblocks

To set yourself up for a successful launch, it’s important to anticipate what may go wrong. Your product launch checklist allows you to anticipate what situations may arise and how to address them. For example, if a user complains about a product’s features, the customer service team can have answers prepared to help them navigate those situations.

Product launch checklist

1. Evaluate previous launches
2. Conduct market research
3. Create a product positioning statement
4. Set attainable goals
5. Test your product
6. Work on product branding
7. Take care of logistics
8. Create product documentation
9. Collect feedback
10. Get your team ready
11. Launch your product
12. Review performance

Your company’s specifics determine what constitutes a comprehensive product launch checklist, but here are 12 steps to get you started:

1. Evaluate previous launches

Before you start making plans for your new offering, review your previous product launches. What went well? What areas could use improvement? What did you learn through the process? Having these answers can help you understand what makes a successful product launch for your business and what you might do differently this time.

If this is your first time going through the product launch process, research examples and solicit advice from similar small business owners. For example, Marcus Milione, the owner of the clothing brand Minted New York, decided against accepting preorders when launching a new jewelry line. While preorders can be an effective launch strategy for some brands, it wasn’t something that felt right for Marcus.

“I felt as though a founder taking preorders to subsidize the production of a product wasn’t the right signal to send to new customers,” he says on an episode of Shopify Masters. “If I saw a founder taking preorders for a consumer product like apparel or jewelry, it wouldn’t give me much faith in their product.”

2. Conduct market research

Your customer is the core of your business. Conduct market research to learn more about them and their needs. Speak to about 10 to 15 people and ask them specific questions about their pain points, motivations, and thoughts about their current situations, tools, and products. This can help you create a solution to their problems.

With all this information, you can create buyer personas—fictional stand-ins for your ideal customer—and further define how you market your product. 

3. Create a product positioning statement

A positioning statement explains why you’re launching your product. Key stakeholders, such as product managers, define what the product does, what differentiates it from other offerings, and the target audience.

Your positioning statement serves as a North Star—the rest of your product launch strategy stems from what makes your product special.

4. Set attainable goals

As you develop your strategy, set goals—as broad or as narrow as you like. For example, you can define the company’s overall sales goal for the new product and how each department’s contributions relate to the main objective. Set achievable goals, so you don’t set your team up to fail.

📚Read more: Uplevel Your Growth: Setting SMART Goals for Business Success

5. Test your product

To deliver a good product, you need to test—and often. Have multiple people use your new offering to make sure your product works under different circumstances, and to find bugs or issues that can negatively impact customer experiences.

On top of testing your product, take time to test the purchase steps ahead of launch day. For example, make sure your ecommerce checkout process works as well on one browser as on another. Avoid leaving this critical task to the last minute, as you may run out of time to ensure the product works properly.

📚Read more: Product Testing: Examples and Tips

6. Work on product branding

This important step determines your product brand identity—the process of giving your products a personality. Product branding includes name, packaging, color palette, typography, tagline, and more. These elements can help potential customers form an emotional connection to your product.

7. Take care of logistics

Before launching, ensure production (including scalability), distribution, and storage are all streamlined. Any breakdown in these areas can delay your product delivery.

8. Create product documentation

Create product documentation—like user guides and how-to videos—to assist your customers. When launching in multilingual regions, provide training materials in various languages to serve your customer base.

9. Collect feedback

Gather feedback from users to ensure the product or service works well, is intuitive, and has no bugs. User feedback is valuable because it’s a peek into your audience’s reception. Unlike other team members, they don’t go into using your product with the same context. If they find something that doesn’t make sense or is not easy to use, it’s likely other customers will feel the same.

“There are constructive criticism comments and criticisms that you can use to help improve your product,” Marcus says.

“For the tote bag, as an example, when we originally made it, it was a rigid strap. There was no adjustability. [There was] tons of feedback in the comments section about wanting it to be adjustable. We went back and retooled the design to make the strap adjustable. Now it’ll fit taller people, shorter people.”

10. Get your team ready

Before you launch, your team should be able to address questions and help users effectively. To achieve this, ensure your team is familiar with the product, the sales team has the necessary materials to pitch to customers, and customer service can provide support to users.

11. Launch your product

When everything is in place, you’re ready to launch your product. Meet with your team before launch to triple-check you’re in a good place and your website is functioning well. You might also consider working alongside the customer service team to learn about initial reactions to the new product.

12. Review performance

After launch, take time to see how the product launch performed, specifically noting what did and didn’t work. If the launch isn’t as successful as you hoped, this is the time to adapt and make changes to help increase sales.