For the majority of product launches and feature releases at HubSpot, we're rolling new functionality out to our install base. That's part of how we "delight" our customers, through consistent improvement. While it can be difficult to quantify delight, we think of it as a core part of the value we offer to customers, that should be reflected in our high level customer satisfaction measurements like NPS.

Determining which product launches or feature releases are deserving of P1 / Editorial status can be difficult. Rather than leaving this up to the interpretation of the team, we seek feedback from executive leadership, and try to ensure that our list of P1 campaigns maps to what they see as important and what company-level priorities are in a given year.

This framework grew out of a very clear need at HubSpot. We found ourselves regularly being asked questions like: "what do we plan to do on behalf of [product X] this year?" Having an objective classification system that maps to specific efforts makes the answer to this question clear, and helps us ensure that we're pointing our limited bandwidth (and our audiences' limited attention) toward the right things.


This tracker serves a couple of primary purposes. First, it drives accountability among the different teams who might be contributing to a product launch or go-to-market effort.

Second, there are times when a leader will want a single source of truth that they can use to dive into the details of what we are doing on behalf of a new product or feature, which this allows them to do easily.

At HubSpot's size and scale, we are rolling out dozens of features every month. At a certain point, it made sense to build a custom system that drives automation of other parts of a rollout like actually ungating functionality to customers, and updating our pricing pages. (That being said, the spreadsheet served us well for a long time!)

OGP is HubSpot's equivalent of an OKR. It stands for "Objectives, Goals, Priorities."


At HubSpot we have a team dedicated to developer marketing - this column helped that team identify which product improvements they should activate around.


At HubSpot, it is typically the responsibility of the Product Marketing team to develop an initial launch plan, pulling from this list of discretionary activities as needed based on their experience and judgement. They would then run this proposal by marketing, product, and sales leaders for feedback, potentially adding items as needed.

We've found that having a clear, coherent plan that has been reviewed and agreed upon ahead of time is key to a smooth day-of launch of a new product. We'll often complement this "run of show" document with some sort of in-person coordination, whether that is the actual individuals responsible for different efforts being in the same room, the same slack channel, or on the same zoom meeting for periods of time during the day.

Whether or not timing needs to be managed to such a precise level likely depends on the organization and the launch.

We've found that being precise about timing can be important for a couple of reasons. For one, if there are certain windows of time where specific efforts - like email sends or social promotion - are most effective, you'll want to coordinate the go-live of those elements closely. Second, there are often cases where the order of certain operations matters. For example, you wouldn't want a banner going live promoting a new product on your pricing page before your sales team has the ability to add it to a quote in your quoting tool.

Jeff Russo

We’ve used this Google Sheets template to organize dozens of product launches over the years, and it's similar to what we used for the launch of HubSpot CRM many years ago.

Product Launch Documentation at HubSpot

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