Three failure thresholds. Three pre-decided pivots. Agreed in writing at T-30. The pre-commit template I use with launch teams to end the post-launch debate about what counts as success, before it starts.
No fluff. Single PDF, three minutes to read. You’ll also get a short series I wrote on how to actually run the meeting.
Daily scoreboard review T+1 through T+7. The threshold below which the launch motion changes. Sustained-campaign budget reallocates. Hold above target. Pivot below floor.
The first read on whether the launch is becoming a system, not a moment. Above target, the next budget tranche releases. Below target, it holds. The team diagnoses the gap.
Full retro. Three named changes for the next launch. An owner per change. A specific date on the calendar before the next Phase 01. Without those three elements, the retro is theater.
Most teams plan for success. They build the launch deck, set the marketing budget, write the press release. Almost no one plans, in writing, before launch, what failure would look like. Or what they would do about it.
That gap costs more than people realize. Without pre-committed thresholds, there’s no shared definition of working. Three weeks after launch, marketing says it’s tracking, sales says it’s not, product says wait another month. Without writing it down beforehand, every team grades their own homework.
The Pivot Protocol does two things you can’t get any other way: it removes the post-launch debate about what counts as success, and it saves you from sunk-cost paralysis when the numbers underperform. The pivots aren’t reactive. They’re pre-decided.
The template is the easy part. The hard part is the conversation it forces. That’s the actual value of the doc. Not the format. The conversation.
Single PDF. No spam. Built from twenty years of launches at Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, and Google.
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