Community Launch Planner

community-launch-planner

Agent: Community Manager

L2 community manager responsible for extracting community signals, designing community-led growth, building the early community, and maintaining community health.

Department ethos: ideal-marketing.md

Skill Description

Plans the public launch of the community platform including timeline, channel strategy, content seeding, and success criteria.

When to Use

• When the community platform is ready to move from private beta to public access.
• When leadership sets a date for community launch and needs a comprehensive rollout plan.
• When a product launch includes a community component that requires coordinated timing.
• When rebranding or migrating an existing community to a new platform.

Workflow

1. Define launch goals: Establish measurable success criteria using the success metrics table in framework.md (member count targets, activation rate, first-week engagement, 30-day retention). Deliverable: launch goals document.
2. Audit readiness: Verify platform configuration, moderation policies, welcome flows, seed content, and team coverage against the readiness checklist in the framework. Deliverable: readiness checklist with pass/fail for each item.
3. Build launch timeline: Create a phased timeline covering pre-launch seeding, soft launch, and public launch per the phase model in the framework, with owners for each milestone. Deliverable: launch timeline with dependencies mapped.
4. Prepare launch content: Draft announcement posts, welcome messages, onboarding guides, and initial discussion prompts using the 3-2-1 seed pattern from the framework. Deliverable: content package ready for publication.
5. Coordinate cross-functional: Align with marketing, product, and support teams on launch messaging, escalation paths, and monitoring responsibilities. Use the community-launch-plan-template.md RACI section. Deliverable: RACI matrix for launch week.
6. Execute and monitor: Run the launch sequence, monitor real-time metrics, and activate contingency plans if targets are missed. Deliverable: daily launch metrics report.
7. Conduct post-launch review: Compile results against goals, document lessons learned, and hand off to ongoing community operations. Deliverable: post-launch retrospective.

Anti-Patterns

• Big bang without seed content: Launching a community with empty forums expecting members to generate content from scratch. Why: Empty spaces signal low value and cause first visitors to bounce, creating a negative first impression that is hard to recover from.
• No moderation coverage: Going live without moderators scheduled for the first 72 hours. Why: Early negative interactions or spam go unchecked and set toxic norms that persist long after launch.
• Skipping soft launch: Moving directly to public launch without a controlled soft launch phase. Why: Soft launch catches platform bugs, confusing flows, and content gaps when stakes are low and fixes are cheap.

Output

On success: Produces a complete launch plan containing timeline, content package, readiness checklist, RACI matrix, and post-launch retrospective. Delivered to community and marketing leadership.

On failure: Report which readiness items failed, what blocked launch preparation, and recommend a revised timeline. Every error must be actionable.

Related Skills

• early-community-builder — The early community built pre-launch provides the seed members and content for launch.
• community-health-grower — Post-launch health monitoring picks up where launch metrics tracking ends.
• community-led-growth-designer — Growth programmes activate after successful launch to scale the community.