Soft Launch / Hard Launch Decoupling
Let engineering ship when it's ready and let marketing launch when they're ready — never on the same date.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 92%
The standard objection to a dateless roadmap is that marketing and sales need dates. Bastow's answer is to stop synchronising the two projects. Development ships on whatever date is convenient for them (the soft launch). Marketing's hard launch is a separate project that begins only once a working version exists. The two never depend on each other's slip.
Origin
Janna Bastow, as the operational counterpart to Now-Next-Later — the mechanism that makes a dateless roadmap survivable for go-to-market teams.
Core principles
- 01Marketing and development are two different types of project; forcing them onto one date is where things fall apart.
- 02While a new feature is in flight, marketing already has plenty to work on — they are still selling what shipped last month.
- 03Marketing material built from designer mock-ups of unshipped features is the highest-risk asset in the building.
- 04A working artefact unlocks better launch assets: demo video, real screenshots, beta testimonials.
How to run it
- 1
Let development pick its own ship date
Engineering targets whatever date is convenient for them. If end of September becomes mid-October because things went wrong, that slip has no downstream victim.
- 2
Ship it as a soft launch
The feature goes live quietly, in front of real users. This is the trigger event, not a calendar date.
Pro tip Use the soft-launch window to iterate and fix — especially for the rare items that DO have a hard external deadline; get the soft launch in well before it.
- 3
Kick off the marketing launch project on the soft-launch trigger
Only now do launch meetings and launch steps begin. Marketers have a functioning version they can share with customers, film, and screenshot.
- 4
Gather real launch assets from live users
Record video of it working, get testimonials from early beta users, share with selected customers. These assets cannot be faked from a mock-up.
- 5
Let marketing take as long as they want on the hard launch
Two days or six months — the hard launch is marketing's project on marketing's timescale. Meanwhile development has already moved on to the next thing, so there is no idle handoff.
Pro tip This also removes the classic post-launch stall where marketing asks 'great, what have you built?' — by then dev is already deep in the next item.
In the wild
Engineering thinks they can get something out for end of September; it slips to mid-October. Under a synchronised launch, the marketing campaign, the press, and the sales promises all break. Under decoupling, marketers do not care — through September and October they are busy marketing the thing that launched in August.
→ The slip becomes a non-event; no launch assets are wasted and no external promise is broken.
Common mistakes
Marketing a feature from designer mock-ups
Bastow: there is nothing worse than marketers marketing something based on pictures from the designers that have vastly changed by the time they go out — or where they cannot tell whether it will land on the promised day at all.
Treating the soft launch as the hard launch
If you fire the full campaign the moment code ships, you have re-coupled the two projects and re-imported all the date risk you were trying to remove.
Is it for you?
Best for
Product and marketing leaders at companies where a slipped engineering date repeatedly torches a planned campaign, and where sales asks for delivery dates it can promise.
Not ideal for
Launches that are inherently date-anchored to an external moment (a keynote, a trade show, a regulatory go-live) where the campaign and the code genuinely must land together.
From the transcript
“marketing and sales teams is separating your hard launch from your soft launch”
“so you're just separating soft launch from hard launch so that you don't have this stress of trying to line up two completely different types…”
From the episode
Building better product roadmaps
Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad)