AMA: Twilio Senior Director, Product Marketing, Vanessa Thompson on Product Launches

This is a tough one because every PMM at every company operates differently. If there are things that you are personally responsible for delivering, then measure those things first. Blog post views and/or Sign-ups are two key ones. Some other ancillary ones you can measure are PR coverage, and pipeline generated.

Using a formula. Lets face it, product launches are a formula. You have a new thing, you position it, and take it to market. You can do all the research and testing in the world and you may not be successful. On the other hand, you might launch something in stealth mode, but Elon Musk tweets about it and suddenly you are everywhere (Clubhouse! Congrats to that team BTW). What I'm saying is that you can't predict everything. And the biggest mistake I see companies making is spending years with products in beta testing and they never make it to GA or a formal launch because of nervousness around the launch. I spent years working with IBM on their new email experience. The user experience was awesome, I personally liked it a lot more than Microsoft Exchange and Gmail. But the team took years to bring it to market, and by the time they finally did, the bottom had fallen out of the IBM email business, so it didn't matter.

Our CMO always says, “Market your Marketing!” I love that because it's so true. The best thing we can do for our product launches is to bring the creativity and excitement to a launch. The more out of the box and memorable you can make the launch when you are sharing the launch news with your internal teams, the more excitement you will build. And in your case of company enablement, i’d also say that getting folks inside the company as excited about your launch as your prospective customers is just as important, if not more important!

Because Twilio is an API-First product, getting the technical folks up to speed is a huge part of what makes us successful because they are the ones interacting with our main buyer, developers! This is a little different than a B2B launch. Generally though, there are three pillars to how I think about this: * Sales/Customer Facing team enablement - Keep your narrative tight. Make sure you are delivering no more than a 10 slide pitch and if you do nothing, you land the main product tagline, a crisp value prop, and the benefits. This is easy to overlook, because it can feel like a routine formula. I've found that for the most successful launches, we spend the most time getting the tagline right and that flows into everything else. Differentiated benefits, etc are important, but if your launch isn't memorable, then that doesn't really matter much. * Technical team enablement - We like to have our PMs talk to our technical teams (solutions engineers, technical account managers, developer evangelists). This way, its technical expert to technical expert. We can support the PMs to deliver a ‘narrative’ if they need support there, but this is relatively self contained and our role in this forum is more of a program management one. If we do need to step in, it's usually when we need to make sure the value prop is coming through clearly with the PM in the demo and talk track. * First-look Hackathon - This is a bit of a wildcard but i'll throw it in. We used to do these pretty regularly when we were smaller, but it's a great way to bring in sales teams, and customers that might be interested in your new product. If you have a target audience in mind and you already have some customers in this space, engaging the account teams and getting the customers excited about an early access hackathon, is a great way to accelerate early launch excitement.

You don’t want a new feature to distract from the main hero product so you should think about the specific benefit customers that already use your main hero product are going to get. Of course you need to communicate the value of the feature, will your users or customers be able to do something they couldn't do before? Can they make more money? Is their experience simpler? Think about your feature messaging in the context of your hero product and that will help you figure out the main differences.

The one thing I have learned in the pandemic is that a presentation isnt just slides, its so much more than this now. Its everything about how you show up on the camera, and engage with the audience, as well as your presentation. Thinking about how to build the presentation specifically, I'd say choose an arc. There are some really common standard ones floating around in the industry. There is also a cultural aspect to which arc will go over well in your company. Watch for the typical arc your executive team uses when presenting, because it's likely they have a preferred arc style even if they don't know it. Map your presentation to their preferred style, this will reduce your friction when trying to communicate new ideas. Better Mouse Trap Arc (Problem, poor alternatives, ideal solution) “I get your pain” “the alternatives suck” “we have the best answer” “this will give you real results” Challenger Sale Arc (Challenge customer’s understanding and educate them) Warmer -> The Reframe -> Rational Drowning -> Emotional Impact -> A New Way -> Your Solution Nancy Duarte Arc (Journey to bliss, based on famous speeches like MLK’s ‘I have a dream’) What is: current state, What could be: future state

Making it memorable. One of the most memorable launches that I remember wasn't even one that my team did. It was one of our other awesome PMMs. We were launching our new CLI (Command Line Interface). If you have ever seen a developer coding, to the uninitiated, it looks like a black screen with a bunch of colored text. The PMM got black mugs and printed the date of the launch on the mugs using the same font as in the CLI. She planted the cups all around the office and then people started asking what they were. Then the cascading communications went out about the launch. Then the mic dropped and then folks knew what was happening. This was back when we were in the office, but I thought it was a really fun and creative way to run a launch.

Our org structure is pretty straightforward: * We have PMM teams aligned to our major product areas, Messaging, Voice, Video, Email, Account Security, Flex (Contact Center), and IoT. * We also have a Platform PMM team. Because we are a developer platform, there are a number of horizontal features that our developers need, CLI, Functions, Assets, that span all of our products. * We also have Industry marketing embedded in Product Marketing. This helps us get better at an end to end offering for the verticals we are targeting. Our PMMs operate relatively independently on feature launches, but the main initiative we convergeon is enabling our sellers on use cases. We went through a big effort last year to train our field teams on the nine major customer usage patterns we see in the field. Every month we deliver a new use case content bundle to make sure we are keeping our content fresh. This is a great opportunity for PMMs that don't usually work together to build a narrative that is centered around a holistic customer problem.