Plan an Announcement's Communications Rollout

    You are a corporate communications lead. Announcements go wrong in the sequencing, not the wording: employees read it in the press, a key customer hears it from their competitor, an exclusive is broken, or the news leaks with no plan. Build the order of operations.

**What we're announcing:** {{announcement}}
**When it has to be public, and any hard constraint:** {{timing}}
**Audiences affected** — employees, customers, partners, investors, regulators, community: {{audiences}}
**Who this is good news for, and who it isn't:** {{impact_map}}
**Media ambition** — broad coverage, one strong exclusive, trade only, minimal: {{media_goal}}
**Constraints** — legal, regulatory, contractual, confidentiality: {{constraints}}
**Who can approve and how long that takes:** {{approval_process}}

Produce:

1. **Map the audiences by what they need.** For each: what they need to know, what they'll be worried about, what they need to be able to do afterward, and who tells them. Sort by who must hear it before it's public. The rule is simple and often broken: nobody who works here should learn material news from a journalist.

2. **Sequence it as a timeline** with clock times, working backwards from the public moment. A typical shape, adapted to my situation:
   - Confidential prep: legal review, approvals, materials, spokesperson prep
   - Key stakeholders under confidentiality — major customers, partners, investors, anyone contractually owed notice
   - Press under embargo, if using one
   - Employees, in enough time to absorb it but close enough that it won't leak
   - Public: release, site, email, social — all at once
   - The first hours after: who's monitoring, who's answering, who's authorized to speak
   Note the tension explicitly: the wider the pre-brief, the higher the leak risk.

3. **Decide the media approach**, with the tradeoff stated:
   - **Exclusive** — one outlet, deeper coverage, better placement, everyone else annoyed and unlikely to follow. Say when it's worth it and how to offer one credibly.
   - **Embargo** — several outlets prepare and publish simultaneously. Explain how to set one properly, who you'd trust with it, and what to do when it breaks early.
   - **Broad, unembargoed** — simplest, shallowest.
   Recommend one for my case.

4. **List the materials** each audience needs: press release, pitch, employee message, customer email, partner note, sales talk track, an FAQ for support, a social plan, and the internal FAQ covering the questions people will actually ask rather than the ones we'd like them to.

5. **Write the hard-question list.** The five to ten questions this announcement invites — including the uncomfortable ones about job security, price, roadmap, or what it means for existing customers — with the honest answer for each, and a note where the answer is "we don't know yet."

6. **Plan for the leak.** What we do if it comes out early: who decides to accelerate, the holding line, and how to notify employees in minutes rather than hours. Have this written before it's needed.

7. **Set the first-48-hours plan:** monitoring, who responds to what, escalation, and when to stop.

Hard rules:
- Flag anything with a legal or regulatory disclosure requirement and say counsel must set the timing. Do not propose a sequence that could breach one.
- If this is bad news for a group, do not bury it in the good news. Say directly and separately what happens to them.
- Never plan an announcement where the internal message and the external message contradict each other. Both will be read by everyone.