Product launches
A launch system for shipping everything from tiny integration improvements to platform-wide releases, with the right amount of planning, messaging, and campaign weight.
Product marketing, Launch planning, Messaging, Campaigns
Geckoboard
2015–2026
Work
Geckoboard was constantly shipping quality-of-life improvements, new visualisations, small integration additions, deeper workflows, and occasionally major platform changes. The risk was treating every release the same. A small update could get overworked, while a genuinely meaningful capability could arrive without enough planning, messaging, or coordination.
I pushed for a simple four-tier launch grading system ahead of each quarter. Each release got the amount of planning, messaging, and campaign weight it could justify:
- 01
Tier one
Changelog entry, with targeted customer comms where useful.
- 02
Tier two
Broader newsletter or social mentions, plus updates to relevant collateral.
- 03
Tier three
Website or marketplace updates, social content, sometimes video, and tighter messaging for meaningful new capabilities.
- 04
Tier four
A full campaign for platform-wide releases or new integrations, including Product Hunt launches, web work, and coordination with external supporters.
When it came to the release, I would handle most — and often all — of the first wave of asset production: from internal positioning docs to screenshots and videos, public-facing copy, and web pages.
The system made launches easier to plan and harder to under-resource. It gave product, marketing, and customer-facing teams a shared language for deciding what each release deserved, while still leaving room to be scrappy when the team was small.
The useful bit was not the tiering system itself; it was the discipline it tried to create. Before a launch, we had to ask: who cares, why now, what changed for the customer, what proof do we need, and how much noise should this actually make?
