Release and Launch Planning with the Quad

Have you ever heard this one? “Our last release was a failure.” (I think we’ve all had this scenario a time or two.)

Product teams often plan releases with an outdated and overwhelming checklist, a set of Jira tickets or user stories, a countdown to a ship date, and a long list of promotional deliverables. But that approach fails to deliver the expected results.

A truly strategic product plan requires much more than a complex to-do list. It demands that we ensure every release moves the business forward—not just technically but strategically. Every release is an opportunity to make progress on multiple fronts. But that only happens if we design it that way.

If your planning process only involves the backlog, you’re only seeing half the picture. Sure, the backlog contains important requests—things surfaced by prospects, voiced by customers, or submitted by internal teams. But a release should be more than a collection of requests.

A focused, strategic release needs:

• Visionary moves that excite executives and investors.

• Buyer must-haves that unlock new sales or prevent churn.

• User improvements that make everyday life better for your current customers.

• Technical investments that fix your foundation: architecture, performance, analytics.

Ideally, each release includes at least one priority item in each of these four categories. That’s how you make a release impactful across the organization. That’s how you avoid the trap of building only what’s requested, instead of what’s needed.

And here’s something many teams still confuse: release and launch are not the same thing. They happen in parallel, but they serve different purposes. The release is internal—it marks the completion of development and the transition to readiness. The launch, on the other hand, is external—it’s how the company communicates, delivers, and positions that release in the market.

Release = internal. Release is the end of a development process. Launch = external. Launch is the beginning of an organization’s readiness process.

You can release without launching. And you can launch something that was technically “released” months ago. But if you don’t plan for both, you’re setting yourself up for missed opportunities—or worse, outright failure.

So, who makes sure all of this happens? Who ensures your release has the right mix of investments, that your launch has the right message, and that the whole effort is executable, testable, supportable, and sellable?

Enter the Product Quad

You’ve probably heard about the product trio: the product manager, the designer, and the tech lead. It’s a solid structure—particularly for product discovery, validation, and early iteration. But when it’s time to plan a release and a launch, that trio starts to feel incomplete. It’s missing the person who understands how the product fits into the market: the product marketing manager.

The Product Quad adds that missing seat at the table. While the trio focuses primarily on what to deploy, the Quad focuses on how to deliver to the customer-facing teams and the market.

The Product Quad is your core team for execution—from the first idea to market impact. It is made up of four essential players:

• Product Manager: Owns the business plan and the release plan.

• Product Marketing Manager: Owns the launch and growth plan.

• UX Designer: Owns the experience for users and your support and services teams.

• Engineering Lead: Owns the technical architecture and feasibility.

Without all four, you don’t just have blind spots—you have structural risk. You’re not aligned. You’re uninformed. And you’ll find out the hard way when your product trips over something you didn’t anticipate—whether it’s a performance issue, a UX gap, or a lack of buyer understanding that tanks adoption.

The value of the Quad isn’t just in their job titles—it’s in the context they bring. Together, they help you look beyond the backlog. They help you prioritize what matters, not just what was requested. They challenge assumptions and identify gaps before they become emergencies. And they do all of that by working together, early and often, not in a series of isolated handoffs.

What makes the Quad so powerful is not just the skills—they bring context. And context changes everything.

Context Beats Checklists

I like to start every release discussion with context: What problem are we solving? Who feels the pain? Who’s buying the solution? Who’s using it? Why is our approach better—or at least different?

I recall a conversation with a product team developing a location-tracking device for Alzheimer's patients. Initially, they approached it like any other feature. But once the team heard real stories from adult children whose parents had wandered from home—frightening, vulnerable moments that could have ended much worse—the energy shifted. The team understood the emotional stakes. The buyers weren’t just looking for a feature; they were looking for peace of mind.

Once they understood the buyers—the adult children—and the stakes—the safety of their parents—the solution wasn’t just a feature but a mission.

That’s the power of context. That’s the kind of alignment that makes a great team unstoppable.

Unfortunately, too many teams skip this step. In the absence of context, they try to manage complexity by piling on more structure. More Jira tickets. More acceptance criteria. More documentation. More meetings. But that kind of complexity doesn’t bring clarity—it just brings overhead.

Plenty of companies say they have cross-functional teams. What they usually have is a meeting where people from different departments show up to learn about decisions that have already been made. Launch meetings become “whine parties.” (We’ve all been there.)

If you’re only documenting features for development to build, you’re missing their problem-solving capabilities. If you’re asking the designer to clean up your prototype and make it “pretty,” you’re missing a more integrated workflow. If you’re giving product marketing a list of deliverables, you’re missing insights on preparing the organization to deliver the product to market.

Context Enables Judgment. Judgment Enables Scale.

A well-functioning Quad doesn’t just divvy up the work. It builds a shared understanding of the problem, the personas, the positioning, and the outcomes.

The power of context allows team members to make smart decisions without waiting for detailed instructions. When people understand the problem, the personas, and the why, they don’t need to be micromanaged. They don’t just complete tasks; they solve problems.

The Quad isn’t there to simply review your work. They’re there to co-own the outcome. And the biggest regret we hear from product teams—again and again—is some version of “We should’ve looped them in earlier.”

That’s the real magic of the Quad. Each role fills a gap that the others can’t see. A designer challenges assumptions about user behavior. A product marketing manager flags gaps in messaging or market understanding. An engineer sees risk in architectural complexity. A product manager connects it all to business outcomes. Together, they create not just a better plan—but a better product.

So don’t wait. Don’t fall back into solo planning or final-stage alignment meetings. Bring in your Quad at the start. Explain the problem. Give them the context. Share the load.

Because release planning isn’t just paperwork. And it’s not bureaucracy.

Release planning is a team sport.

It’s how you build something that lasts.

It’s strategy in action.

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This is one of the many practical concepts we cover in Fundamentals of Managing Products. Learn more about how we can help your team focus on products people love to buy and use.