Managing a Product Launch With Epics and Sprints in LocalPM
Managing a Product Launch With Epics and Sprints in LocalPM
TLDR: Breaking a product launch into epics and executing through sprints turns an overwhelming milestone into a series of manageable, trackable deliverables.
A product launch involves dozens of moving pieces across multiple teams: engineering needs to ship features, marketing needs to prepare campaigns, sales needs updated collateral, and support needs documentation and training. When all of this lives in a single flat task list, things get missed. When it is organized into epics and executed through sprints, the chaos becomes manageable. Here is how one team used LocalPM to launch a B2B analytics product in twelve weeks.
Structuring the Launch Into Epics
The team started by identifying the major workstreams required for the launch. Each workstream became an epic in LocalPM, with a distinct color for easy visual identification on the board.
Product Development (Blue). All feature work needed for the minimum viable launch. This included the core analytics dashboard, user authentication, data import pipeline, and reporting exports.
Marketing and Messaging (Green). Website landing page, product announcement blog post, email campaign, social media assets, and press outreach.
Sales Enablement (Orange). Updated pitch deck, product demo script, pricing page, and FAQ document for the sales team.
Operations and Support (Purple). Knowledge base articles, support team training, monitoring and alerting setup, and incident response procedures.
Launch Day Coordination (Red). The specific tasks that needed to happen on launch day: DNS switch, feature flag activation, email blast, social media posts, and the team war room.
Having five color-coded epics meant the team could look at the sprint board and instantly see whether the sprint was balanced across workstreams or overloaded in one area.
Planning the Twelve-Week Timeline
With twelve weeks and two-week sprints, the team had six sprints to work with. They mapped epics to sprints based on dependencies and deadlines.
Sprints 1-2: Focus on Product Development. Get the core features built and into internal testing. Marketing begins drafting messaging.
Sprints 3-4: Product Development continues with refinements based on internal feedback. Marketing finalizes assets. Sales Enablement starts creating collateral.
Sprint 5: Feature freeze for Product Development. QA and bug fixes only. Marketing and Sales Enablement complete all materials. Operations sets up monitoring and trains the support team.
Sprint 6: Launch preparation and launch day execution. Final testing, dress rehearsal, and the launch itself.
This high-level plan gave everyone a shared timeline without being overly prescriptive about individual tasks. The details lived in the story cards within each epic.
Sprint-Level Execution
Each sprint planning session focused on pulling the right mix of stories from across epics. The team used LocalPM's board to visualize what was in progress and ensure no epic was being neglected.
A critical practice was limiting work in progress across epics. In sprint three, the team noticed that all twelve in-progress stories were from the Product Development epic. Marketing and Sales Enablement stories were sitting untouched in the backlog. They rebalanced the sprint by pairing a developer with the marketing team to build the landing page, which was both a development and a marketing task.
Daily standups focused on cross-epic dependencies. "I need the final product screenshots for the pitch deck" was a Sales Enablement need that depended on Product Development reaching a stable UI. By tracking these dependencies on the board with clear story descriptions, the team avoided the common launch failure of discovering unmet dependencies the week before launch.
The Launch Day Sprint
Sprint six was unlike any other sprint. The team created a dedicated launch day epic with stories broken down by hour. Each story had a specific owner, a specific time, and specific acceptance criteria.
- 8:00 AM: Activate feature flags (Engineering lead)
- 8:15 AM: Verify production environment (QA lead)
- 9:00 AM: Send announcement email (Marketing lead)
- 9:30 AM: Publish blog post and social media (Marketing coordinator)
- 10:00 AM: Monitor support queue and dashboards (Support lead)
- 12:00 PM: Team check-in to review launch metrics (Project manager)
In LocalPM, each of these tasks was a story card that moved from Ready to In Progress to Done as the morning unfolded. The board became a real-time status display that everyone on the team could see.
Lessons Learned
After the launch, the team ran a retrospective focused on the launch process itself. Three lessons stood out.
First, epic-level organization was essential. Without the visual separation of workstreams, critical non-engineering tasks would have been deprioritized in favor of feature work.
Second, the twelve-week timeline with a feature freeze at sprint five prevented the last-minute panic that plagues most launches. The team had a full sprint for polish and preparation.
Third, LocalPM's simplicity was an asset. The marketing and sales team members who had never used a sprint board before were productive within minutes. No training sessions were needed, and no licenses had to be procured. Everyone just opened the tool and started working.
Learn More
Ready to plan your next product launch with epics and sprints? Check out the complete training series:
Watch the Project Management AI Playlist on YouTube
For more project management insights and resources, visit subthesis.com