Beyond The Launch Date

Making Product Readiness a Team Sport

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Product managers know at some point they need to ship products to make money. Products that ship aren't perfect.

But is the product ready to ship?

With fast-paced release cycles, end-to-end readiness is frequently an afterthought for product managers. When you layer on rapidly growing user bases to the product, readiness for scale is another consideration.

Why Teams Avoid Product Readiness Work

Readiness to ship is on a sliding scale. The readiness for the first release of a product is probably lower than the readiness for a mature product with important customers.

Different risk areas touch different team members:

• Test results

• Product security

• Sales training

• Business readiness to take orders

• Compliance to regulations

This leaves readiness as an unspoken product manager responsibility. Since the product manager drives the requirements and has a cross-functional view of the product, the product manager could be a choice.

But putting the whole burden of shipping readiness and risk evaluation on product managers is wrong.

Complex environments with technologically advanced products need the whole product team to manage readiness.

Likewise, readiness for shipping doesn't belong on the program management team or the delivery team.

How to Get the Whole Team to Own Readiness

Teams avoid readiness because they believe it slows their pace. However, readiness done well reduces interruptions to busy product teams.

Reframing readiness to protecting future business helps busy teams see the value of readiness.

A typical pushback on readiness is when the team points out there was minimal change. For example, a change in licensing that only changes one prompt on the front end. However, the licensing server might react differently and affect customers renewing service.

Instead of considering "what's changed", you can turn around to "Are we ready for what's next?". Planning for future growth is more productive than arguing over the risks of a change.

Getting the whole team to tie readiness to business impacts sets up a shared goal.

Tactics to Make Readiness a Team Responsibility

Shared goals are nice until the reality of deadlines and stakeholder needs pushes readiness to the side. Here are tactics busy product managers can use to do readiness a bit at a time:

Team-owned readiness checklist

Include a lightweight checklist in planning instead of depending on product managers to think about every possible risk. The items for the readiness checklist are:

• Walk through a customer order

• Simulate a new customer installation

• Demo of the new feature

• Test results and open issues

• Sales and support training

• Compliance reports

Another benefit of a team readiness checklist is some readiness items come after you sell the new product. Using a team readiness checklist gives the team more milestones after the initial release of the product or feature.

Shift accountability to engineering and leads

The leads on your product team have a front seat to check risks. These leads have deep knowledge of their functional area and stay silent until prompted for feedback. With forethought product managers can establish risk protection during requirements discussion.

Referring to the team's readiness checklist isn't enough for accountability, though. If you skip reviewing requirements, you will miss the chance to distribute the risk accountability. When you write requirements, you are breaking problems down into parts. As you do this, weave in the risk accountability for each team.

Here are some examples of breaking down the risks to your leads:

• The finance team reviews the pricing to check the forecast assumptions

• The engineering team reviews the sales training for a new feature

• Customer success managers evaluate the risk of the known issues from testing

• The customer support team checks the feature demo for customer experience risks

• Sales operations simulate a customer order and report on the results

• Security reports on threat risk based on architecture review

These add some small dependencies but the payoff in eyes on the risks is huge.

Create a "No Surprises" Agreement

As you bring in checklists and extra dependencies, your program management team can feel ambushed by pop-up issues. The readiness is evaluated at certain points in the development lifecycle. Often the risk evaluations depend on central teams that need to support customers and stakeholders.

Dependency tracking adds to busy program managers. This is where the "No Surprises" agreement comes into play. This makes sure that product managers and program managers never work against each other.

A "No Surprise" agreement is like this:

• 1 on 1 review on what "ready" means beyond hitting the date

• 1 on 1 meeting on how to surface risks and jointly mitigate

• No last-minute surprises - discuss concerns early

• Agreement on readiness checks after shipping and early customers

• Inside information on business forecasts including scaling triggers

• Shared decision log and impacts of decisions

• Contingency plan for high-risk issues

Getting expectations out in the open reduces the last-minute firefighting. More time for product work!

Final Thought: Readiness Is a Team Sport

The best product teams don’t treat readiness as an afterthought or an individual burden. They embed it into their culture, ensuring that no single person—especially the product manager—is left holding the risk alone.

When readiness is a shared responsibility, teams move faster without breaking what matters. Instead of chasing down last-minute issues, they’re setting the stage for scalable growth, smoother launches, and fewer nasty surprises.

Because the real measure of a successful launch isn’t just shipping fast—it’s staying ready for what’s next.

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