AMA: Iterable Former Director of Product Marketing, Jeffrey Vocell on Product Launches

This is a great question. I think there are a few ways of testing messaging effectively: * Ask one rep, or a small team, to position your product in a specific way. This is a very clear feedback loop, and you'll see what works and what doesn't really quickly. Depending on the size of your company you may not be able to do this, but if you can have a rep from sales position your product on a call for a few customers, you'll get clear feedback and reactions. * A/B Testing. Typically this can only happen post-launch, but if there are screens within your product that you can control messaging on - see if it's possible to A/B test those. As long as they get a good amount of traffic you can get some really valid results from this without spoiling the message externally. * Market Surveys. Market surveys are my "go to" resource for this in testing various messages and seeing what people think. It's very clear feedback, but you need to ensure you're reaching the right people. * Customer Interviews. If you have a "Customer Advisory Board" or something similar, it can be a great group of people who love your company and product and will give you honest feedback about new messaging. Hope this helps! 

I feel like the answer to this could be it's own book. 😊 Ultimately, a PMM should be the "quarterback" of a launch and should be driving success at each stage. From the moment you hear about a large launch coming you should focus on: * Aligning the team around that product * Communicating clearly and effectively * Sharing information about what the product is, and why it matters * Holding team members responsible for their part in the launch * Organizing feedback, and day-of launch activities * Doing a retrospective on what worked well, and what needs to be improved from the launch In my answer below about product launch templates, I mention the four phases of a launch - and the bullets above tie into all of those. At each phase that looks different, for example, with phase 1 it means determining what research needs to be done, collaborating with the teams necessary to execute that, and then sharing your learnings with the appropriate team internally. Ultimately it's the same for every part of your launch.

It depends on the launch, but I will usually do a mix of these: Customer Research: Talk with existing customers, or survey your existing customer base (or a segment of it) if a solution your launching is directly related or adjacent to an existing product you have. If you need deep insight into the pain points a customer is facing a 1:1 conversation would likely be best. There’s no magic number of conversation to have - but once you start noticing trends in a lot of answers you can generally stop. In my experience it’s usually between 10-15, but can be more or less. If you are launching your first product, or entering a totally new market - refer to the other research types as well. Stakeholder Research: Talk with internal stakeholders across teams. Ideally people who are customer-facing and hear feedback from customers day-in, and day-out. They can be a wealth of knowledge and give you really good feedback. Analyst Research: If you work with Analysts they can be a great resource for insight into questions coming-up from buyers, and help you consider different product directions or messaging. Market Research: Using various tools like QuestionPro, or SurveyMonkey, you can reach people in your target market that are not existing customers. This can be a fantastic resource to get broader insight into the pain points and challenges your buyers face, what they’re looking for, and trends in their business. For a really large launch, I will usually do all four of the above and will lean very deeply into market research, and customer research. As launches get smaller, I will scale back the amount of research. Also, I’d be remiss not to say if there are analyst reports or industry reports already published - read them! Use a filetype search in Google to dig-up some reports, look on sites like G2 or TrustRadius for actual user reviews to learn what people are experiencing (and potentially where your solution fits in). Lastly, look at what your competitors are doing. I want to be clear that I don’t advocate for following competition, but you should be aware of what they’re doing and how they are talking about their company/product so you can differentiate your company. Some of these “passive” methods of research can fill gaps, or replace some of the options above as well.

I think I eluded to some of these in the answer below on tracking the success of a product post-launch, but to summarize: Product Launches: * Awareness: PR mentions, organic social traffic, product page traffic, social conversations, etc. * Interest: Growth in leads, MQLs, demos or key "middle of the funnel" metrics for you business. * Impact: Revenue, and retention. Growth/Maintenance: like to look at two categories here: * Product Usage: it could be basic usage, or usage of a specific part of your app/platform, but I like to dive into a lot of these metrics after a launch. * Revenue & Retention: How is our sales volume of the product, what is retention like? * NPS: Are current customers happy using our product (this can help drive review campaigns, which can ultimately build more visibility) Cadence largely depends on your sales cycle and your customers. Quarterly is likely a good start in growth/maintenance mode, unless you have a really short sales cycle. One way to help force this is doing an internal "QBR" where the PMM is responsible for producing and presenting on key growth metrics and marketing activities for that product line.

Good question. I typically look at 90-days post launch as the end point. Ideally all of the key teams within marketing - like product marketing, content, brand, social, demand gen, customer marketing, and others are all working together to plan integrated campaigns. There should be some natural alignment between these campaigns and your launches to carry the momentum past the 90-day mark. That being said, it’s important to be aware of what’s happening in the market. If a particular feature or product in your organization becomes really relevant - it’s worth thinking about how to drive success from that. At HubSpot I remember when Google announced they were going to use SSL as an indicator for search rankings, so I worked with multiple teams to build a web tool that would check to see if a site had SSL. Once we determined that, we could proactively educate and inform marketers about why it mattered, and drive interest in the CMS (which included a free SSL certificate).

Oof, I’m not sure I want to relive those memories! I think every product launch is an opportunity, there are new challenges that arise and problems to solve. I’ve led and managed a ton of launches - and in pretty much every single case there has always been some last minute changes. For me though, that’s the most exciting time - it’s when product marketers thrive through bringing everyone together in the build-up to the launch. One launch in particular comes to mind though… We were launching an all new service offering (at a SaaS company) and it was the first-time product marketing was working very closely with the services team on a launch they were driving. So all of the standard processes that had become common with launching software needed to suddenly be revised and figured out for launching a services offering. The team structure was different (there was no PM, for example) and as a result as a PMM we had to play a slightly different role within the launch and shepherding it to the market. Ultimately the primary set of challenges here came from a lack of process or structure - which has since been addressed, but it’s like the first-time riding a bike. You may end up with some scrapes on your knees, but you’ll learn a lot about what to do, and what not to do and improve for the next time.

Yeah! Look at all the ways your company communicates with the market. Talk to various people across the business - PR, CSMs, Support, and others. You will find ways to promote your product that you may not be aware of through these conversations. For creativity, I like keeping a "swipe file" of great product marketing I've seen from other companies. When I need ideas, I go to this swipe file and it helps looking at various creative copy or promotion ideas that can be built into my own launches. Also, if you talk with customers, they will generally have great ideas for how they want to recieve communications. Also, you can think about ways of breaking through the noise - virtually everyone has a blog these days, but what about sending direct mail with swag or specific items tied in with the launch to key accounts, or your advocates?

Your positioning and messaging should be written in parallel with development, and ideally should be finalized before the product goes into a wide beta. But if you're working on a larger launch, it's likely you'll need to start other activities ahead of time too like: * Video: Any video asset you create will likely have a long lead-time. It will require things like a script or outline, planning, screenshots, and a whole lot more. You should get as much of the planning for video content done ahead of time as possible. As the product then gets into beta and is in more of a "final state" you can start to record the video itself in time for the launch. * Audio: Depending on what you're doing with audio, it may not need as much time as video but it's another asset that typically requires a fair amount of time. * PR/AR: Start to think about analysts you want to talk to, or what the press release should touch on - and how to pitch to journalists. To be clear, you shouldn't necessarily start pitching to them too early, but you shoudl plan who to reach out to and what that pitch will include to make it easier as the product gets closer to release. * Website: If you need any custom animations, or new pages to be built, work with someone who manages your website to get ahead of this. They'll need specifics on what you're thinking, where it lives on the site, what the purpose is, how other pages should link to this one, and more. If you work for a medium-to-large company it's likely you have a web team that has a big backlog of requests, so get ahead of that as much as possible and get this in early. * Ads: If you are thinking about any billboards, or audio/video ads, then you will want to get ahead of those as the product is in development as well. Essentially, anything with a long lead-time should be done - or at least planned - while the product is still in development. Some things, like one-pagers and internal enablement are a bit more turn key and can be created during beta if needed.

This is something I discuss with a lot of product marketing leaders because we naturally want to figure out how to do better. I’ll offer 3 mistakes I see a fair amount - but if you have a particular challenge, reach out to me on LinkedIn and I’m happy to help. * Communication: Regardless of the size of your organiztion, you should be communicating relevant updates to all the stakeholders. In some cases, that may mean the entire company or a broader project team - or even an entire team like marketing, or sales. Oftentimes I see PMMs send an email and expect that everyone is then on the same page. Empathy is incredibly important to our roles, so understand that if you have CSMs, they are likely on the phone most of the day with customers. Your sales team is likely in meetings with prospects most of the day. So they may not have time to fully read and comprehend your email - so offering other ways and channels of communicating this can be important. * Deep understanding of the buyer/market: Product marketing is a unique group that sits at the intersection of so many teams, and as a result, often gets pulled in a lot of different directions. Because of that, sometimes it can be easy to de-prioritize listening to customer/prospect calls on Gong, or reading that latest thought leadership article, or even writing your own and getting feedback. But the act of doing these things will keep you connected to your market and is so important. Especially now with buying patterns and habits changing, the landscape is evolving quickly so it's more important than ever to do this. On Monday I spent the morning listening to some call recordings in Gong and then distilled the takeaways for my team and put them in our shared Slack channel. This is a way to ensure we're all on the same page and also learning from one another. * Considering a launch a one-time, or one-day, event: I still do this from time-to-time as well to be candid. Big launches should be more than a single day event, it should be a series intended to educate and inform the market (and reach your business goals), and ideally it starts ahead of the launch with training your internal teams on the launch as well. A lot of PMMs think of a launch at a specific day and time, rather than a series of content or events that help grow momentum and your voice in the market.

I think every product marketing team should! Ultimately, at Iterable we have 3 key documents: * Product GTM Launch Plan - This is a spreadsheet that includes every team involved in a launch, what set of activities are being done, where they are in the development process, and more. It's really a central resource for the entire launch. * Positioning & Campaign Kick-Off - This document should be filled out first before everything else. It includes all of the foundational details that will help create positioning, and what should go into your launch campaign (in the spreadsheet mentioned above). * GTM Launch Process - This is a step-by-step process for how to do every single element of a launch, and what's required to move between the four phases. If a new PMM comes onto the team, or an executive is curious about how we handle launches, this document comes in really valuable. Ultimately the core GTM plan has to include every aspect of bringing your product to market - pricing/packaging, positioning/messaging, launch campaign, enablement, and promotion. And it needs to include or involve all of the teams that touch every aspect of that work as well.

It really depends on what you’re launching, where your product fits into the customer’s journey, and the broader market. Generally speaking I think really large notable product launches can be measured by all, or just some of the following: Awareness: Organic search traffic before/after launch, rise in social conversations (post launch), PR mentions, and more. Interest: Growth in leads, MQLs, demos, or similar metrics for your business. Impact: Revenue, retention, and more. Overall here’s my playbook that I hope is helpful for large launches: - Define which metrics matter for a specific launch. If it’s a really large launch, you should have executives involved in this step. - Once those metrics are defined, setup some dashboards in whatever tool you’re using. I really like Looker, but it could be virtually any tool. - Day of launch: Send an end of day recap on the launch and any early outcomes from the launch. - 7 days post launch: Send an update including your core metrics. If you launched a paid product that has a long sales cycle you may not have information about revenue impact, but at this point you should have some metrics around leads, PR, and a broader read-out of how the launch went in the market. - 30 days post launch: This should be a deeper read-out on how the launch is having impact. Ideally things like free users generated, revenue, etc. - 90 days post launch: This is the final email that should have a full recap of your key launch metrics and wins from the launch. Within each of these emails link to the dashboard that was setup so you can get the team in a habit of checking that resource whenever they want an up-to-date view on launch performance.

Yes! At HubSpot we had a template for this, and I’ve created one at Iterable as well. I think there are a few phases of a launch that include different people from your organization. Phase 1: Research - Every product launch HAS to start with research. This is a phase I find many PMMs skip, but the importance can’t be overstated - it’s where you get all the detail that will inform all your next steps. Typically this phase includes PMM, PM, Customer Marketing (if you’re surveying existing customers), and CSMs (if you’re talking to existing customers). Phase 2: Execution - Typically this is when the product team is building a product/feature, and as a PMM you should be working on positioning, messaging, launch plan, and beginning to get buy-in across teams. Towards the middle-to-end of this phase you’ll want to get Sales & Services/Support Enablement, Customer Marketing, Demand Gen, Brand/PR, Content Marketing, PM, and Analytics/BI all bought-in. Ideally you can start a cross functional meeting with a representative from each of these groups to discuss the launch. Phase 3: (Public) Beta - Generally when a product goes to public beta, it’s not too far away from a full launch. Your positioning should be finalized, your launch plan should be buttoned up, and you should be having those cross-functional meetings more frequently now that the launch is approaching you’ll need to get approval, and begin to plan actual go-live times. Phase 4: Launch - Plan a launch day “war room” with all of the key stakeholders needed from the teams mentioned in Phase 2. I’d also make sure executives are included here. Also as a PMM, you should think about what the post-launch growth plan looks like (again, for large launches). It’s very likely you’ll need help from many of the teams I’ve mentioned here so you can keep up the momentum by having this plan early and getting their buy-in.

Great questions. Product Marketing should be involved, or at least aware of, every launch in my opinion. I think it's important to establish launch levels, or some process around it though - a very minor feature update shouldn't get the same amount of time dedicated as an all-new product line. At Iterable we have extra small, small, medium, and large launches and the set of activities we do for each is different - and shared with the product team as well so they're aware. As far as tools, it's always evolving. Here are some that I use frequently though: * Google Docs/Spreadsheets: This is where a lot of the templates, process docs, and ideation for a launch takes place. We use Google Spreadsheets for our launch plan template so it's collaborative and everyone involved in the launch can hop-in and add/edit content. * Google Slides: Called this out separately because it's typically used for sharing messaging, organizing meeting agenda's, or things like that. It's definitely one of the top tools we use. * SurveyMonkey (in the past I used QuestionPro though - both are excellent): Having a survey tool will be a priceless resource as you conduct research. * Slack: We have a specific team channel for PMMs, and separate channels for bigger launches that we can easily communicate in. * Spotify/Apple Music: We all need time to get work done and focus, right? Also, it goes without saying we use our own product at Iterable to help promote launches.