How can you align product launch iterations with the overall product vision and strategy?

Preparation is extremely important for this. To build a plan, to understand what is important to each and every stakeholder, and to keep communication flowing so much that everyone feels on the same page. It sounds like something too good to be true but believe me, it's possible. Understand your stakeholders, some people prefer to be informed of everything and others just want to be informed at a high level as long as their goals are met. Knowing this will help you communicate better and create different types of levels of reporting that make each stakeholder feel at ease. Plan ahead and show everyone the critical path and dependencies, what are the essential functionalities that no one can live without, and then plan the optional ones.

Speak often about your vision and strategy. You'd be surprised how many times you uncover misalignments when having these conversations. The better you can facilitate a dialogue about the change and outcomes you want to see in the world as a result of your products, the more likely it will be that your whole team is working in the same direction.

Once again, the Gantt chart is extremely helpful here, it can show everyone at a glance what needs to be in place (stage 1) to build on top of (stage 2), and then test and iterate, enhancing the existing infrastructure. If everyone sees the plan early and signs off on it, the risk of surprises is minimized to the incidentals or things you could not plan for, and if you leave a time buffer for emergencies or unforeseen events (20% - 25% is a good ratio for me) you will probably solve them, and deliver on time.

I like to use design thinking to help ideate and imagine ways to accomplish your strategy or goals (this includes grouping similar ideas and looking for common trends that can all be solved similarly). Then, refining the most promising ideas by working through divergent and convergent cycles of thinking is essential. To put it another way, you work backward from your vision/strategy, and then when you figure out where you're starting, you map out how you incrementally reach your end goal, stacking all of the ideas from your design thinking strategy into a stairway to success.

Good tips to keep in mind: A lot of times, documentation is seen as something "that must exist to keep a record" but it can be much more than that. Documentation when done right, is more than a boring Excel sheet, it's a storytelling tool that shares the journey of a project toward completion. Some creative ways to make documentation more interesting can be: 1- A roadmap that highlights the "critical path" ahead and leaves room for proper testing and unforeseen events. Explaining at a high level how things are related and why the critical path is the main guide. 2- Backlog: The product backlog is often and sadly used as "the place where old wales go to die" check your ticket and user stories often, keep them updated and relevant.

Regardless of the tool you use for planning, make sure that what you do take up in an iteration has relevance for your vision and strategy. If you can't answer the question how what you're doing is supporting the vision and strategy it likely isn't the right thing to build. So make it a habit to always look at your plans for the coming iteration through the lens of "how is this helping me achieve my vision and strategic outcomes?"

As part of your planning phase, you should be defining your goals and how you will be measuring them. Figure out how you will be collecting feedback, plan any surveys or interviews, and define any analytics that you will be measuring (and if any events or properties need to added or updated) well before launch so that you can start collecting and analyzing feedback quickly.

Check with your team often, and make the calls short and relevant (no one likes the one-hour updates every week). A 15-minute call can be effective for a quick temperature check, and if there is an issue that requires attention, set up another meeting for it. . The meeting agenda is your friend, it can keep things interesting and keep you on track, if it's not on the agenda, try to discuss it at the next meeting. If it is urgent, park it and set up a follow-up session immediately but only with those that need to be there. Do not have meetings that can be emails, have Teams groups/Slack Channels specific for issues or quick communication to keep people on the same page. These tools are your friends, modernize your comms and use them

Keep stakeholders informed, check with users, and with your devs, use A/B tests, polls, and small release updates to select groups of users, and check for feedback. Use these opportunities to improve your processes and add an increment of value to your product on each release. Leave a sprint or 2 every number of months for tech debt and support. Do NOT accumulate tech debt. Please hear me on this, it can come back and knock you down when you least expect it: Like when your CEO is presenting to investors, or live at a conference and your product is live on the website on the screen).

One time our CEO was presenting live in front of 5000 people at an auditorium and in front of millions online. We had worked double shifts for 2 weeks to stabilize everything because we had 2 years of accumulated tech debt. And we needed to fix it, because our CEO loved to improvise live when presenting, and we could not hold her to a script. Everything went well and the hard work of the team paid off, the platform behaved perfectly and we succeeded, but all the stress from the previous 2 weeks could have been avoided. Learn from our mistakes, and use all these tips to improve your processes and succeed. All the best in your journey!