Product Launches

Creating a product launch project in Asana

There are a number of ways to get started. You can set up your product launch project by using our product launch template, importing an existing spreadsheet, or building out a project from scratch.

Whichever approach you choose, create a unique project for each of your launches, and track them using portfolios.

Kick off your launch with defined roles, a clear project brief, and a timeline

It's important for anyone working on a product launch to stay on-message and have access to the go-to-market plan so they know what's launching and why. By putting your project brief and go-to-market plan in the project's overview tab, anyone on your team can access these documents at anytime, so you can prevent stakeholders from getting pinged over and over with the same questions.

Most product launches have lots of critical deadlines and cross-functional dependencies leading up to launch day. Timeline helps you map these out in your plan before you start to ensure all the pieces fit together.

Once work is underway, timeline can also help you quickly address conflicts before they derail your plan. For example, if your launch messaging takes longer than expected to draft, you can shift dependent tasks in timeline. Task assignees get notified automatically that their deadlines have been adjusted. Now work can still start at the right time—without causing confusion, extra meetings, or a chaotic scramble when it’s too late.

Save time with templates, workflows, and bundles

Templates

Though each launch can be slightly different, there’s typically a core set of tasks that need to happen every time. Instead of losing time recreating your plan for each launch, or keeping a template in a doc that’s disconnected from work files and instructions, you can build and save your project template in Asana. 

1. Build out your core launch process in a project.
2. Click the drop-down arrow beside the project name and choose Save as template
3. If you want to restrict who can modify the template, give others comment-only permissions
4. For every new product launch, use your fine-tuned template to get started. Click Create in the top-left corner of Asana, select Project, and then Use a template. Choose your template from your organization's template library.

Workflow

With workflow, you can utilize forms and task templates to capture work which includes all the necessary details in the correct format. This reduces confusion and saves time going back and forth asking for clarity from stakeholders.

Workflow will help you use rules to automate how work moves forward in your launch project, ensuring deadlines are adhered to and minimising manual busy work. Rules can get work to the right person at the right time or when the right criteria are met, and can even multi-home tasks into different projects to notify cross-functional teams if and when help is needed. This means less noise for stakeholders who may not need to be bombarded with every notification, but must be informed when their time comes to contribute.

Bundles

Bundles refer to a collection of rules, fields, sections, and task templates that can be implemented simultaneously across numerous projects. Whenever a bundle is modified or updated, these alterations will automatically be mirrored in all the projects that utilize that particular bundle. By using bundles, it's possible to establish uniform processes on a large scale, thereby saving time and ensuring consistent practices across your product launch projects.

Communicate simply and clearly with status updates

With so much cross-functional collaboration going into a launch, it can be tempting to include everyone on every meeting or email thread. But that can actually lead to more miscommunications and wasted time.

Instead, commit to having a teammate provide a regular status update. These updates will go to every project member, and show up in portfolios in which the project lives. You can @mention teammates, tasks, and other projects to ping them and provide context.

To draft faster status updates, create project milestones to keep tabs on major launch goals or critical phases of work that need to be completed. Then you can easily reference them in your updates—whether they’re complete or at risk. You can also use milestones to track project progress at a glance by using portfolios. Change the progress type filter to Milestone and see complete and incomplete milestones at a glance, with the ability to drill down into the milestone tasks directly for more detail.

Manage priorities and organize work with custom fields

If you’re used to spreadsheets, you might sort and filter columns to make it easier to see key details. Custom fields are a much more powerful replacement, because they track this information in context with the work (instead of a place that only the project manager can see).

For example, if you add a priority custom field to your launch project, you can prioritize each task so every teammate is clear on where they should focus their attention. Then you can sort your project by priority to see highest priority tasks at the top to make sure they’re on track.

You can also see your tasks on timeline by custom field to help you better visualize plans and spot blockers based on color.

Combine portfolios and workload to track progress and manage bandwidth

Instead of piecing together information from meetings, emails, or spreadsheets to understand progress and team bandwidth, create a portfolio to see real-time progress, launch dates, and priority all at once.

Next, use the workload tab to visualize the product marketing team’s capacity across launches based on tasks they’re already assigned in Asana. Workload helps you make informed staffing decisions to keep workloads balanced and launches on track.

Workload defaults to task count, but we know not all tasks are created equally. You can set up effort custom fields across portfolio projects to get a better sense of the total hours or effort level going into each task.