AMA: 6sense Director of Product Marketing, Amanda Groves on Product Launches

Wow, great question! Given these departments are measured on very different dimensions, it's important to keep their North Stars in mind and collaborate in a way that supports individual departmental goals. Let's start with collaborating with product. I often think about our orgs as a mouthpiece (PMM) and earpiece (Product). To be good amplifers of product's "market listening", we need to connect early and often throughout the product development lifecycle. To do this, I suggest establishing milestones throughout the development process to collect, validate, and crystallize market positioning and GTM planning as you prep for general availability (launch day). The more your lean in, the more aligned your orgs will be. For customer success, it's also critical to include them throughout the product development stages - but in a different way. I often test messaging with customer success to get their reactions, or ask which customers could benefit from a particular feature to inform proactive beta groups or testimonial gathering. The biggest area of impact you can have with customer success is helping them to close the loop with customers. If you know that product is releasing a feature that has been heavily requested, or solves a big market pain point - make your customer success team the hero. Let them share the message with those customers, delivering on your promise of being pain killer to the customers' area of need. 

Define your why: * Why does this feature/product matter? (value) * What use cases does it solve for? (messaging) * How does it compare to the "old way" of doing things? (solution statement) * How does it compare to the competition? (competitive differentiator) * What does good look like for launch? (KPIs) Define your audience: * What personas will benefit from this feature? (audience targeting) * What market segment/industry is it for? (ideal customer profile) * How can my target audience get started? (activation) * What does success look like for them? (implementation) Product owns the feature up to development complete, while Product Marketing owns market readiness. Use these questions to inform market readiness and intentional, successful launch planning. 

I have, a few times! To establish a Beta program, I would work closely with customer success and product as both stakeholders are needed to keep a beta program running smoothly. Define what good looks like between your stakeholders along with ownership areas and key responsibilities. CS should help determine best fit customers/beta participants, product should validate product efficacy/capture feedback to inform performance, and PMM should orchestrate it all - connect the dots and grab authentic messaging/use cases to inform larger launch moments. Establish non-negotiables for launch with product like: beta participants must verify the feature solves the scoped use case(s). If bugs are surfaced, do they block the launch or can they be prioritized as a fast follow post launch? Also, the best way to get feedback in my opinion is live via customer insight sessions. Your product team likely has these scheduled, so I suggest riding along and asking questions. If not, work with CS to grab time with customers and if you can't get the time - use surveys as a plan b. But nothing can substitute the value of an authenticate conversation!

Over the years I created a tiering calculator to help me gauge feature impact and inform relative GTM activities. They range from Tier 1 (biggest launch type) to Tier 4 - silent/soft launches. The questions I use to size-up tiering are ...Does the feature: * Provide something our competitors don't? * Solve a new buyer pain point? * Solve a new use case for an existing customer? * Introduce new functionality that changes customer workflows? * Improve functionality or performance of an existing customer workflow? * Change the user interface? * Add new internal tasks or support requirements? Based on these answers - I'm able to map across pre-established tiers and corresponding marketing activities. 

When launching new features in products, you can influence activation by reaching your customers where they are in their journey. Whether that's in-app with embedded posts, product tours, explainer videos - or reactivate sleepy customers with targeted email messages. Best resources to learn from: your peers! Join a community like product marketing alliance and try to find mentors (I am always open to chat and coach!). Books: Story brand by Donald Miller, Obviously Awesome by April Dunford, On Writing Well by Willian Zinsser. Podcasts: The Product Marketing Insider, The Product Marketing Experts, Women in Product Marketing. Happy trails!

Challenges I've had seem to stem from lack of customer validation early in the product development process. I once launched 25 apps at once within a new "integrations marketplace" within a new product category. The problem we faced was educating the market on the value of our data within these new apps. It made sense to our users but not the buyer's who had the budget to expand usage. We spent the next several months building enablement for other key personas that we hadn't considered at the start. Moral of the story is to talk to your customer early and validate use cases to inform what's needed to activate the market. For us in this example we could've really shortened the learning curve had we better planned the surrounding market education/implentation that was needed to accelerate adoption. 

Think about cannizablization. If you don't have partner ecosystem, I would invest in a roadmap that supports product expansion via ecosystem v. traditional direct sales. This will help scale product adoption into new markets at high velocity and make your product stickier. Think about an integration marketplace play and co-selling motion.

Core ingredients can be mapped by channel/tier. Tier 1: Big launch moment, essentially we are throwing the kitchen sink at this thing! Defined as: net new innovation that increases share of wallet, share of voice, domain authority and leadership position. * Activities: webinar, press, analyst relations, emails, in-app, newsletter, case study, sales deck update, landing page, slack community message, social posts, demand gen campaign, full field training and enablement, explainer video + support article Tier 2: Features where we want to improve PMF, NPS acquisition and retetion. * Activities: customer email, in-app notification, customer newsletter, website update, full field training and enablement, help article update, explainer video Tier 3: GTM here is generally table stakes functionality and parity plays * Activities: Support article, customer email, training and enablement Tier 4: These launches consist of tech debt, betas and pixel update. Tread as Soft/silent launches * Activities: Help article update, internal awareness + enablement

I really like the story brand framework by Donald Miller. The narrative structure puts the customer as the hero of the story and your solution as the guide to their problem. The book also talks about picking a fight for your product with a focus on vilifying the issues your customers are having. This framework can be applied across stakeholders and performs very well from pitch decks to landing page copy. 

I would suggest bundling the two week sprints into a larger quarterly release cycle so you can benefit from a bigger, impactful story. If you are hitting your customer base with new features every 2 weeks, I can guarantee you they are going to be fatigued, saturated, and less likely to engage. People are suffering from cognitive load, so cut through the noise and surface the features that matter on more sustainable and customer-friendly cadence. In terms of release and launch terminology: a release is product-owned (normally consists of getting a product/feature into production for general availability. While a launch is formal marketing of the feature. Development complete = release. Market ready = launch. They are very different motions.

I track product usage out of the gate and usually shoot for 30% attach rate (adoption) within the target audience I'm serving. From there I look to our company North Stars: win rate, deal velocity, pipe gen, expansion rev to inform PMM peformance. But product activation and engagement/reactivation is super critical to initial launch measurement and performance.

It certainly depends on the launch tier along with other market factors/customer dimensions, but typically I am looking at the data to inform next steps. Did we hit our product usage target? Is the narrative landing in sales calls (listening to gong recordings)? Is the pitch deck working (checking deal velocity in SFDC)? I am continually tweaking to ensure we are landing in a place of impact and not stagnation. Aside from this, the mission critical post-launch activity should be - the RETROSPECTIVE! Get your GTM teams together to chat about what you should "start, stop, continue" so you're even better next time. It's important to look in the rearview to inform where you're headed. 

Telltale signs of success: customer buy in. If you have customers that have tested the new feature (in alpha or beta phases), informed the roadmap, and have provided use cases that the feature has solved for - you know your launch train is headed in the right direction. Even better, get commitment from your customers to use their authentic testmonials in launch assets to bring your narrative to life and bring value to similar customer profiles. This helps customers get activated quickly while building trust. Without customer participation and validation, I'd be concered about launch performance as you're relying on guesswork instead of customer hearts and minds.