I’m not a competitive swimmer, but lately I’ve had the chance to observe how much time swim coaches spend on leaving the wall. Whether a dive, flip-turn, or strong push, it’s an important moment in the race. If poorly executed, it takes a lot more energy to gain your momentum mid-swim than it takes to get things right at the outset.

Twilio’s Customer Onboarding team coaches customers through the launch phase of a new Twilio product so that they can get “off the wall” and swim. We’ve seen that having a well-planned implementation strategy can accelerate time to a successful launch – and we’ve also seen the costs to customers working to remediate a problematic launch. A “successful launch” means, for example, that your solution can deliver messages to inboxes and SMS to handsets right from the start.

In this article, I will share the common steps in the Twilio …