Andrew Luxem
FREESKILL v1.0UPDATED 2026-08

How to Plan New Products and Services

A launch plan that is only a list of dates hides the two decisions that matter: when the team stops widening exposure to look at the evidence, and who is accountable for the step nobody has claimed. This playbook runs the work through six phases with the gates written in, and it keeps every gap visible instead of filling it with a plausible guess. Run it here, then install it where the plans actually get made.

Most plans fail quietly rather than loudly. A phase gets skipped because it felt slow, an owner is assumed because only one name was in the room, and a date lands in the schedule because somebody needed a number. None of that looks like a mistake on the day it happens. It looks like a mistake a quarter later, when the rollout widened without anyone deciding to widen it and the metrics that would have caught the problem were never wired up.

The fix is structural. Start from the customer and work backwards to the smallest thing that satisfies the goal, write it down before building, then run the build through phases where alpha to beta and beta to GA are explicit go or no-go rows tied to criteria the team committed to in advance. Where the input is silent the plan says so in the field itself, because an owner nobody named and a date nobody set are the two things a schedule is most likely to invent.

A rollout that widens without a decision row does not have gates. It has momentum.

SIGNALS YOU NEED THIS
The plan has dates for everything and a decision point for nothing, so the beta widens because the calendar said so.
Instrumentation is scheduled after the beta rather than before it, which means the beta cannot be evaluated.
Every row has an owner, including the three steps nobody has actually agreed to take.
REPLACES
Launch calendars that track dates but not decisions, MVP scoping done in the build phase where changing it is expensive, and the cycle-planning meeting where five initiatives are compared from memory.

Pairs with

Playbooks that combine with this one. Each hands work to the next rather than repeating it.