Launch Campaign Document template

If you just want the template then here you go! Otherwise, continue reading to learn more about launch campaigns and templates.

Why you should write launch campaign documents

The most important reason to write a launch campaign document is for your own understanding. The process of writing the launch campaign document will undoubtedly reveal areas where your understanding is not as deep as it should be. A deeper understanding will lead to a better campaign. I write blog posts for the same reason, to better understand topics that are important to me.

Launch campaign documents provide documentation of decisions and strategies. If someone wants to know how a feature or product was launched they can find out by reading the relevant launch campaign document. If someone is trying to launch something similar they can learn a lot from past campaigns.

Launch campaign documents can be used to drive consensus. In my blog post Driving consensus in an engineering organization, I outline the what, why, when, and how of consensus, so I will not repeat that here. My choice of Google Docs as a launch campaign document template allows the document to be easily copied, shared, and commented on. I also include a table at the top of the template where the participants in the consensus process can be called out with their status. You can use any launch campaign document to drive consensus, my template just makes it easier and more explicit.

My consensus blog post gives some ideas about when consensus needs to be driven and when it does not. If consensus needs to be driven about a launch campaign, that means a launch campaign document needs to be written. Although there are other reasons to write launch campaign documents, this is a good place to start when deciding if a launch campaign document is necessary.

Why you should use launch campaign document templates

Launch campaign templates are a place where organizational learning can be gathered. When something goes really wrong then a postmortem should be completed to understand what happened and stop it from happening again. If the issue was caused by a launch campaign problem, then the long-term solution may be to update the launch campaign template to make a relevant consideration more explicit (more on this in “How to use my template”).

Having standard templates to use for launch campaigns speeds up the writing process. Proposers will not need to make decisions about what sections need to be covered. Proposers will understand over time what information is most useful to include in their campaign and will focus on those areas during research.

Having standard templates to use for launch campaigns speeds up the review process. Reviewers can learn over time what to look for and where.

How to use my template

As a first step to use my template, make your own copy. Then start copying from your template for each launch campaign. If you run into a problem twice consider adding a section to your template. This means if you run into some social media related issues you may want to add an additional subsection to evaluate the social readiness for launch. Be careful with being too reactionary with making edits to the template. You may want to perform a postmortem to validate that the social media issue was caused by the campaign and not an error in execution or something else.

Although I recommend using the table at the top of the template to manage your consensus process, this is not necessary. Writing a launch campaign document without a consensus process will still give you good benefits in terms of improving your campaigns and creating documentation.

Do not become dogmatic about the launch campaign process. Although the benefits of writing launch campaign documents are significant, not all organizations recognize this. Always be cognizant of the environment and adapt accordingly.

Writing launch campaigns should be fun! If you find yourself dreading writing an upcoming launch campaign then that is a sign that something is wrong. Do not be resigned to a bad launch campaign experience, step up and fix it!

In case you made it this far and still haven’t made a copy of my template here it is again, enjoy!