AMA: Facebook Head of Product Marketing, VR Fitness, Media and Work, Susan J. Park on Multi-year, Transformative Product Launches

Success = Changed the behavior of the customer to embrace the transformative shift. For every successful launch, we were able to change the behavior of the customer, and the customer created a habit to use that experience. We think about metrics that will show a behavior shift of the customer, not just general revenue or product adoption uplift. For example, retention numbers on the new product matched with growth will show if this is a change in behavior, or if it's simply a blip due to strong marketing. ex) When we launched Spotify Video Ads we tracked the contribution of revenue coming from the new product as well as repeat customers, not just overall revenue growth of the company. The company was gaining users all of the time and launching new markets, so we had to isolate revenue growth. After 1 year we had diviserfied our revenue so video accounted for 25% of our ads revenue for 30+days, which was a HUGE change shift and the number was growing. Ensure you have a behavior metric of what you want to drive, and build the goals of your launch based on that metric. Failures = Launches with no change behaviors, and led to confusion or spreading thin of resources that do not drive business benefit. I've launched a few of these, and these actually tend to be rolled back or deprecated. I have managed several deprecations in my career as well. There tends to be be deprecations that are in or out of your control. Understand what factors are in and out of your control, and that will also help you make the right decisions on how to move forward. In control: When I see failures that were in the product team's control it's due to a really poor alpha or beta test where you didn't recruit enough diversity into the beta or didn't really dig deeper into understanding the why the product. A strong, fast feedback loop to customers built with challengers (people you want to drive adoption with and who don't use your product) and cheerleaders (people who love the product) will give you earlier indications of this before you invest a huge amount of resources into a launch. They will give you the ability to pivot, and make the product better. Out of your control: I've seen failures occur when the product was amazing and it was too early to market, and too late. Otherwise, a company or executive team ran out of funding and needed to divert resources. A lot of these are out of your control, and isolating the goal and expectations can also help your team move quickly in the analysis.

Feature launches can be a snoozefest. If it's just a feature launching, is it worth publicizing this to the customer? Every launch should have is a packaged story of WHY you're telling the customer about it and how it's going to change their behavior. If it's not worth a big hoopla, don't burn resources on it. It's easier to tuck it into a release OR try to package it up with 2-4 other feature launches so you can create a real bundle into what a customer would want to know about. Usually if you're advocating for no marketing support, it's the product team that doesn't like this. The product team wants to tell the world about the great and exceptional work that they've done. But if you give product a full GTM for every feature launch, when you have a big, transformational product to launch, it won't land as well since you're burning resources. Sometimes the product marketer's role is to say no to marketing because it's not the right thing, and you must build the case to say why not, or be creative to make it bigger.

PART 1: DOCUMENTING AND TESTING PRODUCT BENEFITS The product's team job is to lay out the Minimum Viable Product and the ideal scenario and technology of what's available. A strong product marketer can take the minimum product specifications, speak to potential customers and figure out which product benefits resonate most with them, then build the marketing plan from there. If you're having problems getting the main idea, show them the benefits of a prototype and how it can help shape their product vision. Understand the WHY there is an issue in getting the product benefits so you can adjust and help the product team accelerate. ex) In some of less-resourced smaller products where we didn't get prototyping support or documentation, we called in a favor with a UX person who was a whiz in Keynote to show the product flow, then I road-tested it with some sales teams and customers, got our main value props and build an idea of positioning from there. In the past, I've had my product marketing team take on the heavier lift of documentation on details when we need to ensure we have the latest information. Sometimes have to be scrappy to get the job done. PART 2: GO OR NO GO ON LAUNCH As for not launching some features/improvements or repairs, or any time you're trying to influence a product team you need customer feedback and data on why the customer isn't ready. The product, especially a software product, will never really be fully "ready." So you're conducting more of a trade-off, calculated risk discussion. This framework is one that I recently came across that I'm stealing because it operationalizes what we do on launch decisions and timing. DURABLE DECISION FRAMEWORK - Goals: Why are we doing this? - Assumptions: What facts, constraints, and projections are we assuming? - Options: What are the different choices? What are the pros and cons? - Decider: Who is responsible for making the decision? Most of these decisions the product marketer is not the decider, but your role is to complete a very thorough understanding of the customer, the market and the product state to understand the trade-offs. Build them options vs trying to convince them of one avenue and you'll build a stronger relationship, and you may brainstorm something even stronger. For example: Our team had to make a decision to launch a major product during the heights of COVID-19 and a lot of noise in the industry. Our main PMM on the project built a decision/trade-off framework and then we aligned on the right date with the fewest risks. That type of alignment takes more time, but results in a team that's better aligned against the full picture of the launch risks and can build better plans to mitigate and deliver a strong product to market. 

A tech company should always think about having transformative bets. These big bets are what will create a diversified company with multiple things they are good at in order to continue to grow in size and scale. Multiple bets are nice, but many companies can't afford them. So shoring up the right market intelligence to predict the shfits will be key to ensure resourcing to execute well on a bet. It's in times like these where product marketing in the research and priortization phase can really prove value and worth. The bets don't always work out, but have a practice of big bets in your roadmaps can increase the critical thinking and analysis of your product and get you out of the feature launch trap of a product in market for years. These are the the three main reasons why I've seen companies make really big bets: Competition Unfortunately, most companies take on big bets when a competitor has come in and redefined a space and forces a loss of customers or revenue. Sometimes there's no way to avoid this because of the amount of resources needed to pivot makes leadership wait for a real threat before they move. Diversification The company simply wants another line of business to ensure diversification around their core business. Change in customer behaviors Consumer behavior is changing so fast that a major shift is needed in order to anticipate where the consumer will go. All three of these should be line items in your market intelligence plans on how you're approaching the market and what your product team will need to do to stay relevant and maintain a strong product.

Behavioral metrics. If you've changed the behavior of your customer base to to something else, you're succeeding. If not, and you haven't been able to retain or continue a habit-forming change, go back to the drawing board. It's important to ensure you have these metrics lined up even into beta so you're measuring change, not just revenue our core output and you can explain WHY. Retention is the easiest thing to measure across this. But I like to pair metric + and activity. So 30-day sustained activity of X that is growing by Y. Yes it's more complicated to track, but then you can really diagnose what caused the changes better, and can drive better strategy for the future.

Build fast feedback loops with cheerleaders and challengers How you build your feedback loops will determine your product trajectory. You need to ensure your recruiting the right customer type, but also go out of your way to try and include cheerleaders (people a bit more on the cutting edge) or challengers (later adopters who don't like change). Both will become vital in terms of your trade-offs for when to launch the product and to understand your true value proposition of the product. Obviously you want to also recruit your target market, etc too, but try to balance out your feedback to unbias it as much as possible. Plus, nothing feels better than converting a late-adopter, so try to get a few into the beta to ensure the product proposition has potential. Support with marketing activity air cover, so the product and engineering teams have time to build for "best to market" not just first to market If you're building a long-term bet, that means there could be significant time between product changes. What do you do? You put the marketing in product marketing. You re-package, and activate solutions and drive stronger use cases and POV for your core product to ensure your eng and product teams have the air cover to go and build something big and bold, vs. nagging them with small feature launches. There will be a lot of stakeholder management to ensure your eng and product teams can build what's best, so amp up on other things to drive adoption other than product releases. Seed the marketplace with what will be coming next, and prep the market for the shift that you will make, especially if it's a non-confidential change. Teams always underestimate how long it will drive a behavior shift. For our major product launch, we seeded the market with roadmap presentations and long-term industry POVs and trends for about a year. If you're just planning the launch marketing and post-launch, you're losing valuable time. If the change isn't confidential, seed the market with thought leadership pieces, whitepapers even social media content on the direction you want to shift. It takes alignment to ensure you're working in the same direction, but when the launch comes more people will be ready, which will lead to a stronger launch. 

Everything is a trade-off discusssion. If you launch a big bet before a product is "there" there will be risks, but if launching the product comes with acceptable risk and you can still hit the metrics you want to hit, you can do it. I've recently stolen this durable decision framework and find it excellent. As a product marketer, we're rarely the sole decision-makers on whether to push the launch button. But if you want to drive alignment around the launch, this is how I would approach. DURABLE DECISION FRAMEWORK - Goals: Why are we doing this? - Assumptions: What facts, constraints, and projections are we assuming? - Options: What are the different choices? What are the pros and cons? - Decider: Who is responsible for making the decision? Most of these decisions the Product Manager, Engineering Manager, or even the Commercial Director is the Decider. Build them options vs trying to convince them of one avenue and you'll build a stronger relationship, and you may come up with a better solution with the trade-offs.