Launch day has a distinct feeling. The Slack thread fills up. Someone posts a congratulations gif. Leadership acknowledges the team at the all-hands. Then everyone moves on to the next thing — while the feature sits in production, used or ignored, with nobody tracking which.

That’s a launch. It isn’t necessarily a landing.

What You Measure Is What You Get

Lisa Kamm, Head of Product and Design at Dow Jones, described the incentive problem clearly in a recent Product School talk. Early in her time at Google, promotions were tied to launches. So people focused on launches — shipped a feature, then moved toward the next role where they could ship another one. Features accumulated. Whether any of them changed customer behavior was a separate question that often didn’t get asked.

The shift she describes is deceptively simple. A launch is a feature out the door. A landing is a feature that did something: changed behavior, solved the problem it was designed to solve. One is an output. The other is an outcome. In my previous role, we were just migrating into the thoughtspace of outputs vs outcomes. I love this framing because it makes the incentive problem so clear. If you only measure launches, you get launches. If you measure landings, you get landings.

Most teams track the first while fewer track the second and almost none ask the harder question underneath: when you only measure launches, what kind of culture are you actually building?

Vaporware With Better Documentation

A launch without a landing is a complete story with a missing ending. The feature exists. It shipped on time. The demo looked great.

But if customer behavior didn’t change, the work didn’t land. It’s vaporware with better release notes.

I’ve sat in planning reviews where features from the previous quarter get listed as delivered. The roadmap cell is green. Nobody asks whether the feature solved the problem it was supposed to solve, because that question lives somewhere else — tracked by a different team, measured against metrics that were set up independently from the feature work itself. Delivery and outcome are organizationally disconnected, and that’s where product debt accumulates quietly.

The internal validation trap I wrote about in Are We Doing Good? has a launch-day equivalent. We celebrated the ship. Nobody checked if it landed.

The Most Underrated Landing

Kamm’s most counterintuitive point is about deprecation. She’s promoted people for taking features down — for cleanly removing something that wasn’t working rather than layering on top of it.

That almost never happens. The pull toward shipping is so strong that the incentive to acknowledge something didn’t land and remove it is nearly nonexistent. Deprecation looks like failure when you’re measuring launches. It looks like accountability when you’re measuring landings.

A team that can say “this feature has been in the product for two years and it’s never moved the needle, so we’re removing it to reduce complexity” has actually internalized the outcomes model. They’re owning the result, not just the output. In my experience, those teams are rare — and the ones that get there usually had a leader who explicitly celebrated that call in front of everyone else.

The culture shift isn’t technically difficult. Most teams already know the difference between a feature that shipped and a feature that mattered. The hard part is what gets celebrated, what makes it into the promotion document, what leadership names out loud as success.

If your organization celebrates launches, you’ll get launches. That’s not a criticism — it’s just how incentives work.

Of the features that shipped last quarter, how many actually landed?