Welcome to your Build and Launch playbook! This playbook offers our latest perspective on how to take your payroll product to market and set a strong foundation for accelerated growth right out of the gate. We’re beyond excited to support you on your payroll journey!

Go-to-market, Support & Operations, and Research & Development. You should assign a Lead to each workstream in addition to an overarching Payroll General Manager to drive execution. If you’re working directly with an assigned Check team, you will have corresponding Check Workstream Leads available for support throughout the entire process.

Build and Launch. During the Build phase, workstreams design the foundation of your payroll product and the workflows required to launch and support it. During the Launch phase, workstreams execute their plans, putting their workflows to the test by taking your initial subset of customers live.

A common theme throughout this playbook is the concept of moving efficiently and getting to market quickly to unlock learnings. As a result, we keep launch simple and recommend a "controlled release" to five to ten customers. Completing two payroll runs for this subset will provide the feedback you need to test assumptions and plan for broader releases. We encourage each Workstream Lead to take an iterative approach as we prepare for launch, and aim to refine the product and flows through continuous learning from feedback and performance data.

The goal of this workstream is to lead GTM activities for your payroll product. Bringing a new product to an art and a science. As such, we recommend following your organization’s existing product launch process, and relying on Check’s enablement to accelerate discovery and planning. If you do not have an existing new product launch process, we advise starting with the GTM responsibilities below.

Go-to-market

A successful GTM workstream will act as the core launch driver by setting payroll objectives and keeping R&D and S&O in line with those goals. Partners that do not prioritize GTM risk launching without a cohesive strategy. From our experience, this often results in teams having to pause their plans while they return to complete foundational work.

The goal of this workstream is to build and scale your payroll support and setup functions. S&O will focus on how you will onboard and setup customers, manage ongoing support throughout your payroll journey, and strategize how you will scale your teams and processes. You’ll be closest to the process, translating feedback to your R&D team and continuously improving your workflows. A successful S&O workstream will facilitate a smooth payroll launch and act as the voice of the customer.

The goal of this workstream is to build and scale your payroll product. Our primary goal is to get to market quickly to unlock learnings and accelerate your payroll journey. As a result, your product won’t satisfy the needs of every single customer at launch. Not only is that expected, that is preferred. From our experience, the most successful payroll offerings launch with a product that supports the needs of a subset of customers with simple requirements and layer in complexity as the business matures. A successful R&D workstream will control scope to ensure a timely launch and provide strong post-launch roadmap planning.