The Invisible Work Nobody Measures: Why So Many Product Launches Fail

Leaders love ideas and teams love building them, but launches usually fail for one simple reason: the invisible, unmeasured orchestration between people and systems. Marketing teams can point to clicks and campaigns, and engineering teams can show sprint velocity and bug counts, yet the go-to-market work — the careful choreography of product, messaging, sales enablement, launch communications and feedback loops — remains fuzzy, under-resourced and hard to quantify.

The central question most teams cannot answer is painfully simple: what does success look like for this launch, and when will we measure it? Too many companies wait until launch day to decide. They assume success lives in the press release and a spike in signups. But a true launch victory is not solely external. Conversions, revenue and customer advocacy matter, yet they are incomplete without internal health. A conversion spike achieved while the team fractures and burns out is a short-term win that creates long-term liability.

This is why GTM metrics must be defined as early as the product hypothesis stage. If your roadmap is taking shape, your launch checklist should too. Writing the press release before the product is built — a tactic some teams use to force clarity — exposes gaps in positioning and customer benefit long before the marketing calendar goes live.

Pre-launch signals such as beta feedback and usability issues must be identified and monitored alongside short- and medium-term external KPIs, while employee engagement, stakeholder alignment and projected workload should be tracked as internal signals of launch health.

The hidden cost of poor GTM surfaces as emotional attrition: miscommunication, unclear ownership and conflicting priorities translate into stress, resentment and turnover. Teams can recover a customer relationship; they rarely recover a burned-out culture without significant time and investment.

For this reason, the work of go-to-market should be treated as company infrastructure rather than an afterthought. Launches are opportunities to rally the organization, to test messaging in the market and to learn — but only if leaders define metrics early, align people behind shared goals and measure both what happens externally and how people fare internally.

If you are preparing a launch, begin by answering five core questions in plain language and share those answers across the company. Do this early and honestly; the clearest launches I’ve seen are the ones where the organization agreed, in advance, on what success would feel like for both customers and internal teams.

You can read my book The Launch: A Product Marketer’s Guide, for more.

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My latest book, The Launch: A Product Marketer’s Guide, is now available onAmazon. I also wrote the book “Product Marketing Debunked. The Essential Go-To-Market Guide” which you can purchase on Amazon