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Programme No. 04New products

Product launch.

Positioning to shipped product — with momentum behind it.

You’re shipping a product — an app, a platform, a service productised. The build alone won’t carry it: it needs a position people understand, an experience they stay for, and an acquisition-plus-onboarding engine that turns interest into use. That’s three disciplines, sequenced.

No. 04Route signature — programme 04
The moment

Where it goes wrong.

Product launches fail at the seams: the product ships without a story, the campaign promises what the UX doesn’t deliver, and nobody owns the first-week experience where retention is decided. One programme, one owner, no seams.

Built forFounders shipping v1Businesses productising a serviceTeams adding an app to the offerProducts stuck at "almost ready"
(01)The product ships without a position — features in search of a story.
(02)The campaign writes cheques the onboarding can’t cash.
(03)Launch spikes, week-two silence — no lifecycle plan existed.
(04)Build, marketing and design ran on three timelines.
The build

How the pillars combine here.

Positioning gives the product its story, design and engineering ship the experience, and growth builds the acquisition and lifecycle engine — planned as one launch, not three projects.

01 — Brand
Product positioning & naming
Launch story & messaging
Launch campaign creative
02 — Growth
Acquisition campaign
Product analytics & funnels
Onboarding & lifecycle comms
Post-launch optimisation
03 — Technology
UX/UI & prototyping
Application or site build
Instrumentation & QA
Release management
Sequence

Five phases, in order.

Phase 01
Discover

Users, jobs and the market — what version one must prove.

Phase 02
Define

Position, scope and architecture locked; launch plan drafted.

Phase 03
Design

Experience designed and tested; campaign built alongside.

Phase 04
Deploy

Product shipped, instrumented, campaign live, onboarding on.

Phase 05
Drive

Adoption read honestly; releases and campaigns iterate.

Deliverables

What ships in the programme.

Scoped to your situation in Discover — the programme flexes; the sequence doesn’t.

Product positioning & story

What it is, who it’s for, why now.

UX/UI & prototype

Tested with users before engineering spends.

The product — built

Web or mobile, engineered with discipline.

Product analytics

Activation, retention and funnels instrumented.

Launch campaign

The story, in market, with media behind it.

Onboarding & lifecycle flows

The first weeks, designed — where retention lives.

Launch operations plan

Stores, support and sequence — owned.

Post-launch roadmap

The releases after v1, already queued.

Measured against.

Success criteria are agreed in Discover, in business terms, and reported against for the life of the programme.

Ship date metActivation & onboarding completionAcquisition cost read honestlyEarly retention signalsRelease rhythm established

Common questions.

The product is already built — can you launch it?

Yes. The programme starts wherever you are: an audit of the product and its readiness, then positioning, campaign and lifecycle — with fixes fed to the build if the audit finds gaps.

Do you work with our in-house engineers?

Comfortably — we can design and launch around your build team, take the build ourselves, or split it. Define settles who ships what.

What decides launch readiness?

Criteria agreed in Define: the journeys that must work, the numbers that must be measurable, the story that must be live. Ready is a checklist, not a feeling.

Shipping something
this year?

Tell us what launch would make it a success — we’ll plan backwards from that.

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