AMA: Atlassian Director of Integrated Product Marketing, Ashley Faus on Product Launches

Sales/partner/channel enablement is the biggest differentiator for enterprise-focused vs. startups or SMBs during the launch. I'm coming from a software-as-a-service (SaaS) lens, which means that I have the option to include a variety of self-serve tactics that make it more scalable for smaller companies to get what they need during a launch. Examples include: * Product Guides: basic onboarding, core use cases, and templates so that small teams can see fast time-to-value * Evergreen articles about practices, optimized for search (SEO), so that teams can use the tools and associated practices to be more successful * Social media prompts, images, and links so that employees can share on social media (in our case, Product Managers and Engineers are part of our target market, so enabling these folks to share means that their network of similar users sees the information from a credible source) * Community posts to engage directly with users In contrast, many larger enterprises have a longer roll-out plan, choosing to engage with a sales rep for a discount, customer success for the implementation, and/or consultants for a phased roll-out. This means that the launch timeline needs to include extra time to brief sales and partners (assets might include new battlecards against the competition and/or the market landscape, decks with case studies/testimonials, updated demo environments, message house, etc.), and the deal cycle will take longer. As for metrics, you can measure the increase in sign-ups and monthly active users for smaller accounts. You can measure the time-to-close, average deal size, and account expansion for larger enterprises.

This depends on where you are in the launch cycle. I'm coming from a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) context, which generally includes the following phases for launches: alpha, beta, progressive roll-out, and Generally Available (GA). During the alpha phase, we look at metrics like requests to participate in the alpha, feedback during the alpha phase, and acceptance of feedback sessions (written requests, meetings to talk about the product, etc.). During the beta phase, we look at metrics like waitlist signups, lighthouse customers (large customers who are willing to give us detailed feedback about pain-points and scaling), and adoption (ie: spreading across teams in beta accounts). For progressive roll-out, we'd look at product adoption metrics, like Monthly Active Users (MAU), account growth, time-in-product, and actions taken in product to see that users are seeing fast time-to-value. In the GA phase, we'd look at more traditional marketing metrics, like sign-ups or free trials, conversion to paid tiers, account growth, and MAU. We would also look at top-of-funnel metrics like press coverage, social media impressions and engagement, watch time on demo videos, referral traffic from various promotion channels, conversion from SEO articles, and the overall funnel health of conversion from traffic to product tour to sign-up/free trial. There's a mix of metrics that indicate a healthy go-to-market strategy (ie: creating and capturing the demand) and the adoption/upgrade strategy (ie: onboarding, fast time-to-value, stickiness + virality within an organization). Continuing to publish demos, guides, and use cases helps keep SEO strong and also helps new and existing customers unlock the value in the product.

We use Confluence, Jira Work Management, and Jira Software to track our launches. Free templates: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/templates/go-to-market https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/templates/product-launch We create the high-level plan of activities in Confluence, aligned to the relevant launch tier (launch tiers are our guideposts from which activities we'll do for each level of launch. High impact = all the marketing activities, lower impact = fewer marketing activities). Then, we create tickets for our relevant partners, which usually includes creative/design, webdev, paid marketing, and content creation. This allows us to tag all the owners and include relevant tickets in a single source of truth, with the status (ie: backlog, in progress, in review, done) in a single place. We also provide weekly updates via Atlas for leadership. These are short summaries about what shipped, impact, and any blockers to keep everyone apprised of the progress: https://www.atlassian.com/software/atlas

Two fundamental issues with this blame game: 1) A product or feature launch and a revenue target are two different things, with different time horizons! 2) Marketing should have a seat at the table when the revenue forecasts are created. They shouldn't be "receiving" "prescribed" revenue targets and forecasts from sales. Let's dive into each issue: A launch is generally for a new product or feature, which means that there's less precedent for adoption and revenue. Yes, we can look at historical benchmarks, adoption rates for current features and products, and the predictions made prior to launch. But ultimately, those are predictions about signups, upgrades, cross-selling, etc. That's different than an overall revenue target. You might see that signups are strong, but it takes longer than expected for an account to upgrade to paid seats. A launch might have different goals around attracting net-new customers or retaining existing customers. Both result in revenue, but the time horizons differ. And revenue builds over time for SaaS companies (the mix of net-new customers, account expansion, upsell or cross-sell, and churn), so the revenue "at launch" is not indicative of the revenue over time. Set time horizons and track the trends to make changes to the strategy and tactics, but you need to see how it performs over time. The sales forecast is usually tied to existing pipeline, with the likelihood of closing the deals in the pipeline. While most of these forecasts turn over at the end of the quarter and/or fiscal year, realistically, it's a moving target. If a deal doesn't close in Q4, it's still possible for it to close in Q1, so the "forecast" in Q1 might start higher because of lagging deals from Q4. This has little to do with launching a new product or feature. And if that deal falls through, the team would miss the forecast, but potentially make up for the revenue with a new deal. Marketing should have a seat at the table for these discussions, and leaders should set reasonable targets for quarterly quotas and long-term revenue. The revenue is a mix of factors over a longer period of time, and a single launch shouldn't "miss" in a short time period after the launch. Sales leaders should not be telling marketing about revenue targets. Leaders from across the business should come together to set the targets based on growth trends, investments in key areas, market insights, etc.

The biggest mistakes are two sides of the same coin: over-saturating or under-saturating the market with the message at launch. Under-saturating is pretty obvious: you don't spread the message far enough and often enough. Some teams think that a tweet or two and a single newsletter promotion will be enough to get the word out. Or, they toss a new feature on the product tour, or a new product in the "products" section of the global navigation and call it done. But most of your market WON'T see your message the first time, so you need to share at a regular cadence to boost awareness and adoption. The flip side is a hidden pitfall: over-saturation. This happens when you spam every channel. Posting on a single social media channel 10x/day is unlikely to yield positive results. The reach and engagement per share goes down, and your followers feel like you're spamming them. The algorithm de-prioritizes the content because no one engages, and it wants to see new content. Or, you include sales-y messages over and over in your newsletter. People start unsubscribing because they thought they would receive educational content, but now, it's just the same product message again and again. Eventually, people feel like there's nothing new in your emails, your social feeds, or your event keynotes. Why tune in or follow or engage if it's just the same sales message again and again. Striking this balance requires product marketers and their partners in other crafts to pay close attention to the metrics, with a willingness to change course once a tactic goes stale. Don't start with the assumption that tens of blogs, multiple social posts each day, and a newsletter full of product-focused content will perform well. Test different channels, and when you start to see engagement, reach, and/or click-through rate drop, take a break from that type of content, or focus on optimizing vs. creating net-new assets.

For larger product marketing teams, there's a whole function around "release marketing", which aims to showcase the added value consistently. Activities might include a "weekly wrap-up" or "what's new in [product]" monthly update via social media channels, newsletters, community forums, and/or a dedicated space on the company website. For example, Confluence has a dedicated webpage for these types of updates: https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/features/whats-new, and you can see screenshots and summaries of new feature releases. Compass has the "Compass Communique", which is a regular email update detailing new features in this beta product: https://www.atlassian.com/software/compass And Jira Software shares short updates on Twitter to make people aware of new features, integrations, and UI changes: https://twitter.com/Jira/status/1660664543352111104 and https://twitter.com/Jira/status/1658520714092195842 To differentiate between a "release" and a "launch", we look at several criteria (I'm coming from a SaaS lens): * Is this a net-new capability, or incremental improvement on an existing capability? Is this driving feature parity across products and/or cloud vs. data center? * How novel is this release in the market? Is this a rare capability or is it ubiquitous and brings us to parity with a competitor? * What is the potential market size for adoption? Is this targeted at a niche subset of users, or will this have broad impact across our user base? * Will press, analysts, influencers, etc. have interest in sharing, promoting, and/or amplifying content around this capability? * Does this tie into a broader story and/or more related features coming soon/recently released? * Do we have any other big moments coming up that might impact how this message is received/when we announce (ie: earnings call, user conference, industry event, pricing changes, Magic Quadrant/Wave placement, etc.)? Depending on the answers to those^^ questions, we'll determine the level of "launch" that a new feature/capability receives. Most of our teams have a tiering system that includes criteria about impact, novelty, audience, etc. and the associate activities. The big key is that product marketers have to be ruthless in their prioritization, and sometimes that means telling product managers that a feature does not rise to the level of a full "launch". This is not just about time or budget management, it's also about reputation management and credibility with your audience. If every single feature rises to the level of "full-scale launch", you miss the opportunity to truly wow your audience when you have a differentiated capability. They become numb to the barrage of messages about "THE BEST NEW THING EVERRRRRR", when it might just be fixing a bug or realizing feature parity with your own products!

I'm approaching this question with a Software-as-a-Service lens, so this depends a lot on the type of product, launch stage (ie: alpha, beta, or Generally Available), and the level of the launch (ie: full product launch vs. feature launch or momentum "launch). In general, we want to see an uptick in entrances to the product tour and evaluations and/or free sign-ups and an indication of time-to-value within the first few weeks (ie: creating a project, attaching a repository, inviting teammates). We monitor for an upward trend in Monthly Active Users, account expansion, and feature use over time. For launch-specific metrics, we'd look at core marketing metrics for each channel. Depending on the scale of the launch, these metrics might include: * Press coverage: number of articles, message pull-through, mentions alongside industry leaders if we're a disruptor in that market, backlinks to owned product pages * Social media: impressions and engagement on owned channels (likes, comments, shares), hashtag usage (if relevant), sentiment, mentions and/or amplification of launch materials by followers, influencers, and industry experts * Landing pages: entrances, conversion rates to evaluation and/or sign-up * Paid ads: impressions, click-through rate, long-term conversion to the next step in the journey * Emails: open-rate, click-through rate * Events/podcasts/webinars: message pull-through, hit-rate for pitches, inbound invitations, session ratings * Video: total views, average watch time, referral traffic to relevant owned property, shares * Other metrics as relevant: Community forms, influencer/analyst/partner mentions and engagement, SEO trends for related terms, short- and long-term customer satisfaction scores

The biggest key is where does your audience spend time, consume content, and engage? We use a mix of in-product notifications, emails, social media, blogs, events, and press to notify our audience about new features and products. But, we adapt the format, message, and frequency, based on the audience needs and potential impact of the launch. For example, we have a large existing customer base, so we tend to see strong performance when we email them with information about new features. We're cautious about in-product notifications because we don't want to annoy someone who is already using an existing product. Constant pop-ups or notification bells distract from the core experience, so we use those selectively. I work in Agile and DevOps, so I know that most of the product managers, developers, and technical team leads I want to target are not hanging out on Instagram and TikTok, but they do spend time on Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn, and HackerNews. I prioritize content and outreach in those channels because that's where my audience is more likely to see the information. If you have historical data about past launches, industry benchmarks, and/or research about competitors in your space, you can use that to create an initial recommendation for which channels to prioritize. If you have limited budget and bandwidth, I recommend starting with one long-form channel and one short-form channel to build an audience, test the messaging, and get a baseline for your results. The specific channels will depend on your industry and audience.

I'm coming from a software-as-a-service (SaaS) lens, but the sign-up flow + onboarding experience can make or break a launch. You can have the best messaging, the best features, and the best price... but if it's hard to sign up for and use the product? FAIL. Sign-up flows that force you to invite team members or connect all of your product are often confusing for users. Onboarding that requires you to read tons of pages or feels like a one-way door is daunting. If I push this button, does that mean I can never go back? I don't know what any of these terms mean, how should I know which type of user/screen/purchase order to create? If I accidentally use my email instead of going through the single-signon flow... will I get banned? What may be obvious to you is NOT obvious to your users, and if you make them feel naive or confused during the sign-up and onboarding process, your launch will fail. It needs to be intuitive so that your users see fast time-to-value.

I recommend a tiering system for product vs. feature launches. The tiers include criteria about the impact of the feature that's launching (or series of capabilities, in the case of a full product launch), and the activities associated with each tier. For example: Tier 1: Impact: All customers, market-level, significant company revenue Activities: Press, social media (product and brand handles, personal handles), newsletters, blog (executive byline), Community series, website update, event keynote, multiple demos, paid promotion (ads, boosting social media, sponsored content, etc.), in-product notifications and/or navigation updates Tier 4: Impact: small sub-set of users, minimal revenue, limited/no market Activities: limited social media, single Community post, limited newsletter promotion The key is how much awareness and attention you want to drive to the new feature or product. If this is creating a new category and/or a new capability, you want to use pull all the marketing levers. You can also grab free templates: https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/templates/product-launch https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/templates/go-to-market

Honestly... you compensate them. It could be a spiff to incentivize short-term priority for this product, but long-term, you have to build it into the bonus structure and overall comp targets. If they're already succeeding selling your existing product, it's going to be a challenge to ask them to take time away from something that's working to get them to their quarterly quota and/or accelerators to figure out how to sell this new thing. They have to learn the product, the value props, the objections, the market, the prospect, all of it! That takes time... and that means time away from selling the thing that's paying their bills. Yes, you need solid enablement, but the real answer is money. Accelerator, spiff, build it into the quota, but you have to tie selling this product to their compensation.