Define Launch

When you build with other people, "when we launch" is an easy phrase to lean on. It sounds like a date and a finish line. It is usually neither, until you say what launch actually means.

We learned this while shipping a product. The team used launch as the cornerstone for timelines and goals, then argued about what still had to be done. The gap was simple: nobody had defined launch. We knew it meant something becoming public. We had not specified what was going out, what was included, or what that would look like.

Once we treated launch as incremental, the work got plannable. The first public step could be a small set of customers, not an all-or-nothing reveal. With that definition in place, meetings stayed on the same page.

For every later launch, on Arcade and elsewhere, we define the word before we use it as a deadline.

It's one of those things that nobody tells you to do when you're building cool things with other people. It's something we had to realize, learn, and fix. But since you're reading this you don't have to worry, I gotchu. Define "launch".