Page 1 of The Hard Launch

CHAPTER ONE

LACEY

It goes like this: a hard-working team is nearing the finish line on a big project after toiling for ages. They’re presenting their work to the entire company for the umpteenth time, trying to build awareness and excitement for the upcoming launch.

Then, an executive happens to look up from his phone for once during the All Hands meeting. This executive decides he has opinions about what the team has built. After tons of work and customer interviews and user behavior analysis, this guy wakes up and pays attention at the very last minute, for just long enough to suggest they change what they built.

We call it a Swoop and Poop: they fly in at the last minute and shit on everything.

I’m standing up here in the large conference room in front of everyone, all nineteen of us employed by Lettercat, smashed into this one room. I’ve completed the walkthrough, and now I’m reminding them that, as the product manager, I do the talking, but this has been a true team effort to build. And then I hear it. It’s coming from the back of the room.

“Um. Lacey?”

All seventeen heads in front of me swivel to look at him. Jude Mulholland, Lettercat’s founder and CEO, our fearless leader, stands near the door in his usual jeans and company tee, shoeless, his arms folded across his chest. He has a few too many days of stubble on his face and he needs a haircut: just zero effort. Meanwhile I’m over here looking adorable-yet-professional in a skirt, wearing a shirt with actual buttons on it. Plus, I got my bangs trimmed ahead of this presentation and texted my sister three different options of red lip so she could help me select the one that most successfully conveys Innovative and Skilled Product Person. But please, go ahead and interrupt me.

“Yes?” I say.

“Can you go back a couple slides? To where you show the Publish screen.”

I click back to the place in question so the large screen next to me shows the last step of the newsletter creation flow. Jude scratches his stubbly neck and studies the screen. All eyes are on him.

“So you said there’s greater engagement with newsletters that have at least one image.”

“That’s right,” I nod. All the heads turn back to me as I explain that newsletter emails with high-quality, relevant images have a thirty-eight percent higher click-through rate. That’s why my team is adding a Find My Image button that uses AI to scan the text and suggest an image based on the content.

“But you chose to make image an optional field,” he states, still looking at the screen, not me. His face is starting to go red under the stubble. How can a person be this upset over a field setting?

“Correct. We did an A/B test in beta and found it’s a barrier to publication if we require it.”

I’m using my best patient and collaborative tone, bottling up the frustration about how I’ve been up here talking about this three times this quarter, explaining this very thing. Maybe his hair was all the way in his eyes on those days. More likely he was on his phone.

“Yeah, but like this it’s buried. We need to train our customers to use the features that are going to make them more successful,” he says.

So now the man who hasn’t spoken to a customer in years is publicly telling me what they need.

I see two of my engineers, Dave and Ingrid, roll their eyes at me. I’d love to roll mine too, but it’s my job to create alignment across departments and communicate effectively with stakeholders. Also, my boss is watching this whole exchange.

“Okay,” I say. “We can definitely look into that and get something on the backlog.” This is my classic yes but no answer, designed to make people feel heard while also letting my team ship the goddamn feature.

“I think you should do it before you launch. Just pop a modal up before they publish, and put the suggested image right there. Make them say no to it instead of yes, and I bet you’ll get a lot more adoption.”

The heads in front of me tilt as they consider this, then nod in agreement. I feel the wave of approval and admiration that was lapping at my feet slosh over to Jude, who has now stolen all my team’s thunder and made me look like I’m bad at my job.

“Got it,” I say. “Anything else?”

“It’s a great feature,” he tells me. “Really nice work. Can’t wait to hear the outcomes.”

He swooped. He pooped.

I smile, though it feels like a grimace, and sit down to let Kate give the customer success update.

We’ve all returned to our desks, which are currently arranged by department. Each time there’s a shift in engineering leadership, whoever’s newly in charge decides it’s the seating chart causing all the inefficiency. If we’re sitting by department, we need to sit by project teams. Six months ago, the new CTO decided we all needed to sit by department, so here I am in the product team pod.

“Have a minute?” Glenn asks.

I’m gritting my teeth while I make wireframes of the new flow, hoping to get it to the engineers this afternoon so they can tell me how significant the delay will be.

“Sure,” I say, getting up to follow my boss into Stanhope, the small conference room. I don’t close the door behind me, because there is no door; here at Lettercat we have an Open Doors policy because we believe in transparency throughout the organization. This mostly means that we do a lot of whispering.