Product Launch Timeline
The code
timeline
title Product Launch Runway
January : Private beta invites
February : Beta feedback roundup
March : Pricing page goes live
April : Public launch
May : First case studies
June : Version 1.1 with integrations
How this template works
A launch is a runway, not a day: beta, feedback, pricing, the public moment, and the follow-through that decides whether the launch mattered. This template lays out six months of it, one event per month, in the format a go-to-market team can paste into a planning doc and a founder can read in ten seconds.
The syntax: timeline declares the type and title Product Launch Runway names it. The periods here are month names, which reads more naturally than dates for a plan not yet pinned to a year — the period field is free text, so January, Week 1, and H1 2026 all work identically. Each line is Period : Event, one event per period, rendered top to bottom in source order. The sequence is deliberately a narrative: each event is a consequence of the one above it, which is what separates a timeline from a list.
The gotchas: the colon rule first — an event like “Public launch: v1.0” breaks the line at the second colon, so keep one colon per row. Second, because order is source order, inserting a month means inserting it in the right place, not appending it at the bottom. Third, resist the urge to put two events on one line; a second Period : Event line for the same month renders cleanly, while a crammed line wraps and ruins the rhythm.
To adapt it, compress to six weeks for a small launch, stretch to quarters for an enterprise release, or duplicate the file per workstream — one timeline for marketing, one for engineering — and present them side by side.
Related templates: the company milestones timeline for the retrospective version of the same chart, the marketing campaign plan for the day-level schedule behind month three, and the customer onboarding journey for what users feel after the April row. Full reference: the timeline diagram guide.
Variations to try
- Compress to six weeks for a small launch by using week numbers as the period labels.
- Stretch to quarters for an enterprise release where each stage takes a full quarter.
