AMA: Asana Chief of Staff, Product, Victoria J. Chin on Product Launches

It’s never too early to connect with your customers to constantly expand and deepen the strength of your product. Get insights from your customers through product usage data - where are you seeing dropoff? Form hypotheses on why through customer interviews and customer-facing teams, and validate those hypotheses through experimentation or surveys. At Asana, adoption is a team effort. Teams such as product marketing, product, design, user operations, and for our larger customers, customer success and professional services, all contribute. PMM at Asana focuses on delivering insights from customers, competitors and the market. We use those insights to craft effective positioning and messaging, and to co-create a go-to-market strategy, which typically starts with experimentation when we're focused on improving adoption. 

In my experiences, PMM is an inherently cross-functional role, so it’s common to have shared metrics with marketing channel owners (awareness or leads), product teams (adoption or revenue), or sales (pipeline or revenue). Also, metrics vary significantly based on your product, audience, and business model. To set SMART objectives for a launch, I start with questions like: * How does this launch contribute to a broader company objective? To keep teams aligned and engaged, it’s important to ensure everyone understands how their work contributes to higher-level goals. * Does it make sense to focus on a specific stage of the customer journey, or pursue a full-funnel approach? * What unique value can marketing drive as part of this launch, and how will you attribute and measure this value?

The most common mistake I see is not laying the foundation for effective internal coordination, which is critical for every product launch, and even more so for distributed teams. Despite companies’ best efforts to recreate what worked in the office in a remote setting, global workers continue to spend 60% of their time on coordination rather than the skilled, strategic jobs they’ve been hired to do (source: Anatomy of Work Index ). Effective internal coordination requires: * Aligning global teams on a single platform for orchestration and collaboration * Establishing clarity and accountability into who’s doing what by when * Providing visibility into real-time progress across teams At Asana, we use our own product to manage launches and track progress. Product marketing launch templates make it easy for our team to get started quickly and follow a consistent process. 

At Asana, customer empathy and experimentation are not only how we build our product, but who we are. I would start with deeply understanding the customer - what are their needs and motivations? What problems are is your product solving for them? I would then connect with data science and user experience teams to review product usage data. When comparing highly engaged users to those who drop off, can you identify any demographic/firmographic differences or product usage trends among each segment? Can you identify opportunities across different stages of the customer journey, as adoption can apply to signup, onboarding, engagement, etc? Hone in on the right metrics to move and form experiment hypotheses based on your customer research. 

I think of feature launch messaging as a subset of overall product messaging. Both should stem from your company mission and brand promise, and take into account customer needs, broader market trends, and competitive differentiation. A feature launch may have a smaller target audience though, solve a certain customer pain point, or serve a specific use case. So you would typically hone in on a more specific value prop for a feature launch. 

This is always challenging your target audience and press have limited attention spans - so over-communication is never the answer. I would ask questions like: * What is going to be most impactful in furthering your broader company objectives? * Is there an opportunity to bundle multiple features/releases in order to tell a more compelling story, based on what you know about customers, competitors, and market trends? * Are there scaled channels, e.g. monthly newsletter or blog, where bundling launch announcements makes sense? * If there are different target audiences, can you target them with tailored and relevant launch comms, or pursue a different channel mix for each? I would err on the side of over-communicating internally though, to bring cross-functional partners and leadership along in your decision-making. Frequent and proactive internal communication are critical for change management. 

At Asana, customers are our #1 inspiration - so deeply understanding your target audience (across existing customers and prospects) and what matters most to them would be my first priority. * What are we hearing from customer interviews, and/or customer-facing teams? * What third-party research can we source based on target demographics, firmographics, and/or stage of customer journey? (consider industry analysts like Gartner, Forrester, or IDC, or for those not in tech try eMarketer or MarketingProfs) * What have we learned from past launches and campaigns to this audience? * Can we conduct tests with a small % of the target audience to validate hypotheses? * Based on the primary launch goal, which channels will be most impactful for this stage of the customer journey? I also ask questions like: * Where is the competition focusing, and where are they absent? * What budget and creative resources do we have available?