AMA: Intercom Group Product Marketing Manager - Solutions, Christine Sotelo-Dag on Product Launches

This question resonates deeply. The biggest way to have an impact as a product marketer is to align your initiatives to focus on bringing to life the voice of the market internally and the voice of the product externally. The top 4 ways to do this are: Customer & Market Insight: Be the subject matter expert. Know your customers and market. Product Strategy: partner closely with product to bring market insight as input into product strategy and roadmapping. Positioning & Messaging: develop effective positioning and messaging that resonates with your target audience. Go-to-market Strategy: define how you will bring product/features to market - and what the KPI's are you need to align to.

On average our PMMs sync with their PM counterparts on a weekly cadence. At Intercom the ratio of PMM to PM is usually 1:4. Quarterly meetings include roadmap review sessions (2-3), usually a few weeks ahead of the following quarter. Annually PMMs are feeding into the product's winning strategy which consists of defining the next years overall strategy within a product and/or solution area. Leading up to a launch calendars will fill up with GTM syncs across the various marketing teams, and an increase in adhoc meetings with product counterparts to review and revise. And last but not least, product marketing is listening in on sales calls on an ongoing basis an on average spends about 1hour per week there, at minimum. 

This is a great question. Managing stakeholders is such a huge part of the product marketing role - and it can quickly become unweidly if not managed properly. I think the cadence is really personal to what kind of lead-time your team has running up to a launch and the size of your teams, etc. But I can give some insight into the key milestones where we are solict stakeholder feedback with clear guidelines on 1. what kind of feedback we're looking for 2. timeline 3. setting expectations around how feedback will be incorporated: - Messaging guide complete - Campaign concept & creative direction defined (for larger launches) - Channel owners define their activation tactics - LP wireframe (near-final copy and page outline/structure) - Final campaign assets - Pricing & Packaging decision - 3 weeks prior to launch full End-to-End review There may be a few other key moments but these are usually the most cross-functional and need the most alignment across sales, marketing and product. 

This is a common challenge across every product marketing team. It is a delicate balance in ensuring the market and your customers are aware of what you've built, while not overwhelming them with too much noise. A few things that we've seen work well are releasing smaller tiered launches in a quieter fashion with either a change-log/product update or very targeted customer communications, and resurfacing these releases in some of the roundup activities we do. For example, we release quarterly blog posts and webinars that highlight our recent releases - these are always very popular with our audience. Another tactic that we've leveraged is bundling releases. In this case, it only makes sense to bundle releases when the two (or more) features work together to tell a bigger story. This doesn't always equate to product holding back on shipping, often times features can release quietly - and are only promoted once all features are generally available. 

Typically when we have long beta's it doesn't significantly change the way we create our GTM strategy. For our largest launches we're usually starting to kick off launch planning about 18-20 weeks ahead of launch, and smaller releases are closer to 8-10 weeks. Long beta's are actually ideal so there is ample time to get customers using the new product/feature and time to see quantifiable results that can be leveraged for marketing assets (testimonials, quotes, etc). Significant product changes between beta and launch can be difficult to navigate. One technique we've used to mitigate this risk, is to commit to 'product ready dates' where product commits to UI complete with ample time for marketing to create assets. If that date needs to pushed out due to beta feedback, then the launch will risk being delayed as well. 

There are probably a few useful frameworks you can implement off the bat: 1. Establish a clear tiering framework - what constitutes a tier 1 launch versus a tier 3 or 4, what is the desiered business outcome of each, audience, associated GTM tactics for each tier, etc. Aligh with your product team on this framework. 2. Create a GTM Strategy template - that outlines how you plan to take the feature to market. It should include details like announcement date, tier, target audience, goal, messaging guide, and more. 3. Create a GTM milestones template - that details all the milestones leading up to a launch, including the DACI for each milestone and the timeline assocaited with each milestone. These 3 templates/frameworks could take you a long way, and should be created with contribution from your product counterparts. 

First and foremost it is critical to make sure that Sales has plenty of visibility into what product is building, timelines around availability, and how PMM plans to take it to market (what tier/priority is the launch). For any Tier 1 or Tier 2 launch, PMM should align with Sales Enablement on * What is being built * Why it's being built now * Who is the audience (existing customers/prospects) * What is the persona * How does this compare to competition * Value pillars for customers From there, Sales Enablement works with PMM to determine what the best ways to enable the Sales teams. Some tactics include: * Live trainings that cover positioning, messaging, competitive landscape, demo, pricing, etc * Recorded training + testing with tools like Workramp * Techinical training for Support or Technical sales reps - usually in partership with Product * Assets: Pitch slides, customer testimonials, business claims, one-pagers, feature comprison sheets, etc Regardless of the tactics used, the key to success is aligning with Sales (either via sales leaders or the sales enablement team) on the what, why, who, and how - to build a successful enablement plan together. 

Whether we're looking at our high-level product messaging, solution messaging or feature level messaging - we follow a messaging framework that remains consistent. * What is it (short desciprtion & long description) * How does it work? * 3-5 Key benefits * Differentiators * Target audience * Claims & proof points

I've seen PMM teams organized in many many different ways, and there really doesn't appear to be any one right way. It seems to be highly dependent on the needs of the business, the business model, business size, etc. That said, what I have personally seen work well is when PMMs are able to have end-to-end ownership over a key area. Whether it be a specific product, or vertical, or product area - that ownership is critical. It allows the PMM to align to a set of KPI's that will become their north star in how they plan their GTM strategies. It is also helpful if the ratio of PMM to PMs is managable - no more than 5 PMs to 1 PMM. From my perspective, ideal PMM org has full stack PMMs aligned to the product side, a PMM owning partnerships, APIs and wider ecosystem, a PMM dedicated to Sales Enablement/Competitive landscape (usually in larger orgs), and a dedicated PMM for pricing & packaging.

Any GTM presentation should probably include some variance of the following: - Intro to the problem you're solving with this feature/product - Why you're solving it now (the opportunity) - What you've built - The target audience - Messaging: Key value drivers / benefits (for each audience) - KPI's - GTM strategy / campaign approach (how will you bring this to market?) - BONUS: any social proof or claims derived from beta

This answer may be two-fold. As for tools we use for launches, we find Coda to be pretty indespensible. We've designed our launch template within it that serves as a master doc for all GTM documentation associated with a launch. It centralizes all our key launch documentation from the GTM strategy, deliverables, DACI, launch activities and more. It's indepsnesible because it truly makes project management extrememly easy, and offers a ton of flexibility. The reason I say this answer is two-fold is because Coda is only one part of the solution. I think all product marketing teams should have a solid tiering framework that is used to align on how product and features will be brought to market, and a solid launch template that is reusable and flexes depending on the size of a launch.

This certainly will vary launch by launch to some degree, however every feature you launch you'll want to track some element of activation and utilization of the feature. Are customers trying the new feature, and are they growing in how they use it? These are also the metrics that you as a product marketer can have a direct impact on. There's always excitement right after a launch where everyone is glued to the dashboards watching the metrics minute by minute! And in those early days after a launch it's healthy to do a 1 week post-launch read out, however it's defintely more important to check in on the metrics on a monthly basis - after the excitement of the launch dies down, to ensure you have the right tactics in place to continue activation and growing usage. The key stakeholders include product marketing to represent the marketing lense, product management, product analytics, and sales. 

This really has to tie back to the KPI's you set prior to launch. What were the problems you were trying to solve with this feature/launch and what was the opprotunity? Whether those KPI's are linked to leads generated, revenue, activation, utilization, retention, etc - it is very important to establish them as a cross-functional group with sales, product and marketing and pull up at a regular cadence to evaluate if you're successfully hitting them. A successful product launch is one that is hitting or exceeding those KPIs. 

If there is one thing I've learned in my time at Intercom it is to ALWAYS start with the problem statement. This is ingrained deeply into how we solve problems, and it really stems from how our product team builds product. At the core, never start with the solution - always start by outlining the problem you are trying to solve. My colleague Robbie does a great job of explaining this philosophy here. The main takeaways are: 1. Define the outcome the customer wants 2. Define why they want that outcome 3. What's wrong with how they are currently solving this problem It might be helpful to suggest such frameworks to your product team, and this should also help in informing how you build your marketing plan (identifying customer pain points, the audience, etc). This framework could also help in the last point you make as well, around suggestion to NOT do some launches. WIthout clear problems-to-be-solved, it makes it easier to suggest to not do something. As far as working remotely, don't be afraid to share thoughts in working docs, and allow space for working asynchronously.