Why most product launches fail (and how to fix them)

Remember Ray Gunn from the Paris Olympics? The breakdancer who had to publicly apologize to her fans and fellow Olympians after her performance went viral for all the wrong reasons?

I'm willing to bet you've been part of a product launch that felt eerily similar, where things fell apart so badly that someone had to send an apologetic Slack message or, worse, an apologetic email to a customer.

If that hits close to home, you're in good company. And you're exactly who this article is for.

I'm Kate Jack, and I've spent my career sitting at the intersection of marketing, product, and revenue, a chaotic space if there ever was one. As a certified project management professional who's served as go-to-market chief of staff to various CROs, I've seen launches from every angle.

And I'm here to share what I've learned about transforming launch chaos into what I call revenue orchestration.

Why launches still feel like we're making them up as we go

We've put people on the moon. We have AI-assisted planning and entire teams dedicated to go-to-market. So, why do launches still feel like organized chaos at best?

The answer lies in five fundamental disconnects that plague most organizations:

The roadmap serves as a heads-up, not a trigger

Product teams plan in milestones. GTM teams plan in calendar dates. And those systems almost never fully connect.

The roadmap tells you what might be coming, but it doesn't automatically kick anything off on the GTM side. There's a massive gap between "this feature is coming" and "here's exactly what everyone needs to do about it."

Nobody defines what "ready" actually means

At every pre-launch meeting, someone asks: "Are we ready?"

But ready for who? Ready for what? Sales ready to demo? Customer success ready to handle escalations? Support ready to troubleshoot? We use the word constantly and mean completely different things every time.

Enablement becomes an afterthought

Features get built. Messaging gets drafted. Deadlines get committed to.

Then someone turns to enablement and says, "Hey, can you make this work?" Sometimes it's two weeks before launch. Sometimes, and I speak from painful experience here, it's two days.

There are contributors but few owners

We have a lot of cooks in the kitchen and no head chef.

Everyone's involved, but no one's truly accountable. What fills that vacuum? Last-minute heroics that feel productive in the moment but definitely aren't scalable.

GTM is organized by function, not by workflow

Product, marketing, sales, and customer success; each team is optimized individually and typically differently. But launches require flow across them. Work happens in silos, handoffs break, timing drifts, and feedback loops arrive way too late.