A product launch risk register pricing five ways a launch goes wrong against mitigation cost, from a calendar invite to production fixes. Free template.
Five ways a launch goes wrong, each with a mitigation priced in real money. The two best buys on the page are a calendar invite and a checklist, and both get cut from a budget before anything with a production cost does.
Marketing Intermediate Risk Register Pro engine
After you install, this is the model to open.
What Could Go Wrong With This Launch?
- In your spreadsheet, click the Sortia icon in the strip of icons down the right-hand edge. No strip? Click the arrow at the bottom-right to open it. You can also use Extensions, then Sortia, then Open Sortia.
- Click Start from a template and put that name in the search box.
- Pick the card with that name and click Load this template. It arrives on a new tab with real numbers already in it.
This one runs on a Pro engine, and every free install includes five full-quality runs on your own numbers, shared across all five Pro engines rather than five for each. After that, Pro is $199/year.
The answer
- Exposure before anything
- $82,500 expected cost of the five launch risks
- After every mitigation
- $36,700 the register's residual
- The best buy on the page
- +$7,000 net: the $4,000 sign-off calendar deadline
- The one to skip
- -$1,250 net: the $3,500 influencer backup
Five launch risks on a campaign with a $480,000 budget, priced in wasted production, wasted media and lost sales rather than as a share of the whole budget. Click Run: total expected exposure is $82,500 and the mitigations bring it down to $36,700. The structure underneath is what makes this register worth reading twice. Three of the five mitigations work on probability and two work on impact, and the difference decides what you are actually buying.
A legal read of the script before the shoot cuts the chance of a reshoot from 20% to 8%, because it catches the problem while it is still cheap to fix. A two-week pre-launch test on paid traffic cannot make an underperforming landing page any less likely, so its probability does not move at all; what it buys is finding out with two weeks left instead of on launch day, which halves the cost.
Both are worth doing and they are worth doing for opposite reasons. Now read the net-value column, which does not follow the exposure ranking. The largest exposure is the landing page at $31,500, and its mitigation clears $3,750 on a $12,000 spend. The best line on the sheet is the booked sign-off session, $7,000 clear for $4,000, and it is the best return per dollar as well as the biggest number.
Second on both counts is the platform pre-check at $3,500 clear on $2,500, the cheapest line on the page. The legal read clears $3,800 on $7,000. The one that loses money is the standby influencer at negative $1,250, which is the honest answer to a risk that is neither likely nor expensive. So the two most valuable actions on this launch are a diary entry and a checklist.
Second run, and it is the one that stops you treating any of this as a rule. Change the client sign-off probability from 0.35 to 0.20, which is what a client with a single named decision maker looks like, and rerun. Total exposure falls to $74,250 and the best line on the sheet drops to negative $1,250, exactly level with the standby influencer at the bottom, because a sign-off session that moves the odds from 20% to 15% no longer buys $4,000 of anything.
That is the correct answer rather than a glitch: you do not pay to fix a problem you no longer have. To adapt it, put your own five launch risks in, set the impacts from wasted production plus wasted media, and price each mitigation at what it costs your team in hours and fees.
The model
It arrives on a tab called Template: Campaign Risks, carrying these columns:
- Risk
- Probability
- Impact ($ if it happens)
- Mitigated prob
- Mitigated impact ($ if it happens)
- Mitigation cost
Once it is in your sheet
- The model arrives with real numbers in it and runs as it stands, so you can press the button first and understand it second.
- Change the numbers to yours. The sheet marks which cells are inputs and which hold formulas, and most labels carry a note explaining the row.
- Press the run button at the bottom of the panel. It is labeled for the tool you are in, and the result lands on its own tab, with a written reading of it beside the figures.
Never used Google Sheets? Start here goes the whole way, in seven steps, and assumes nothing.
Next question
- The pipeline says you beat target. Will you?Will the New Business Pipeline Deliver?
- Can you hold the cost per customer you promised?Will the Campaign Hit the Cost Per Acquisition?
- What would have to change for this channel to pay?What Conversion Rate Makes This Channel Work?
- The winner got more opens. Did it get more clicks?Which Subject Line Won?
- Is a pitch you probably lose still worth entering?Should We Pitch for This Account?
- Does the price cut earn back the margin it gives away?Will the Promotion Pay For Itself?
Every model like this one, and the method behind them: Schedule risk analysis.