Jumping the Gun Here!

So our company recently decided to roll out a new product line. It popped up very spur of the moment and its deadlines have been tight. About a dozen of us on the management team have been working our asses off to make this a reality.

Here's the short-term timeline we were working with:
5/11 - Product goes live
5/5 - Marketing efforts for the product begin
5/4 - I introduce my team to the product - training all day
5/3 - Summary meeting to confirm all details & finalize all arrangements
4/26 - Meeting to discuss final details that need to be completed over the next week & delegate who will tend to each of these details

Over the course of the past week that we've been working toward this, many questions and inconsistencies have been brought up. It was agreed that 5/3 would be the day to really pound this all out. As a result, some portions have been put on hold until this meeting.

What's happened in reality:
5/4 Morning - Beta version of the product will be released to consumers (note: my team, an integral part of it's success, will not yet be trained due to a lack of resources to enable moving training to an earlier time)
5/3 Afternoon - Summary meeting to confirm all details...details that should have been confirmed before rolling out marketing efforts
5/2 Around 5:00 - Marketing efforts for beta version of new product begin
5/2 Around 4:40 - Management team freaks out because there are necessary elements that are not complete. Any consumer who decides to purchase right away will run into problems.
5/2 Around 4:30 - Email is sent to management team announcing that marketing efforts for beta version of new product will begin in half an hour. On a side note, majority of management team had no idea that there was a beta version...let alone that said beta would be released before all details were finalized in next day's meeting.

There are two guys on the management team who are responsible for leading the implementation of this product line. Now surely, they had to have known for longer than 30 minutes that they were going to release a beta version. Perhaps if the remaining ten of us would have been enlightened as well, we could ensure that the product is fully functional for those impulse buyers who decide to make a purchase right away.

Arg.