Launch tiers (T1, T2, T3) categorize product ships by strategic importance and required launch effort.
Launch tiering is the product marketing practice of categorizing product ships by their strategic importance and matching launch effort accordingly. A typical framework has three tiers: T1 for flagship launches (new product, category-defining feature), T2 for meaningful releases (significant new capability), T3 for iterative improvements. Without tiering, teams either over-invest launch effort on small features (launch fatigue) or under-launch flagship releases (waste of the product investment).
Criteria: new product, category expansion, or feature meaningfully changing your positioning. 1-3 per year maximum. Deliverables: multi-week PMM lead time, dedicated landing page, press outreach, analyst briefings, launch webinar, executive video, sales enablement rollout, customer preview cohort, coordinated social. Executives are the public face. Post-launch reporting to leadership on adoption and pipeline lift over the following quarter.
Criteria: significant new capability or major improvement, but not category-changing. 6-12 per year. Deliverables: blog post, product changelog entry, updated docs, sales enablement one-pager, targeted customer email, in-product announcement, social posts. PMM involved but not full-time on this launch. No press outreach; media contacts kept for T1s to protect signal-to-noise.
Criteria: small features, quality-of-life improvements, admin capabilities, bug fixes at scale. Weekly to daily cadence. Deliverables: changelog entry, in-app what's-new note. No blog, no email, no sales enablement. Grouped into monthly product update summaries for a 'what shipped this month' newsletter to customers.
Tiers are decided upstream — during roadmap planning, not on launch day. PMM and PM agree the tier when the feature is committed to a release. Tier can be upgraded (rare) if scope grows during development, or downgraded (also rare) if scope shrinks. Locking the tier early prevents launch-week scramble and mismatched expectations between engineering (thinks it's a T2) and PMM (assumed T3).
(a) Every ship becomes a 'launch' → team burnout and audience desensitization. (b) Flagship features under-launched because they're treated like everything else → wasted product investment. (c) Executives asked to record videos for minor features → executive attention wasted on wrong ships. (d) Sales team overwhelmed with enablement docs they don't read → real T1 enablement gets lost in the noise.
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