How do you balance product development's desire to quickly ship products with marketing's desire to tell a compelling story/narrative? Have you had to influence release planning in order to have a more compelling narrative come launch time?

Most often than not, features are going to get cut in what product ships. It's probably going to be more MVP than everyone had hoped for. I'm a fan of leaning forward and telling a bigger story that includes features you plan to build, as long as you and the team are confident that it's coming soon. I know not every company or product team is comfortable with this, but I think it's such a great opportunity to talk about your vision and what you hope to be/achieve. We get asked this all the time by our customers. We love your features, but tell us more about your POV! 

We haven't run into too many traffic jams yet with this. One thing that has proven very helpful is categorizing releases into three types: minor release, notable release, big launch. We have standard marketing activities associated with all three. For instance, a minor release gets a release note update on our What's New page and a tweet. A notable release requires an email be sent to all users and more social media support. A big launch has a custom array of marketing needs attached to it depending on the story we want to tell. This way, we're able to plan for big launches far in advance so marketing is not blocking product once it's ready to ship. And marketing is able to respond quickly to smaller ships because only a couple levers need to be pulled to tell the story. 

Great question. That’s a tension that comes up in a lot of organizations. I’ll start with what you don’t want to do :).

You don’t want to slow down product velocity. You don’t want to be seen as advocating for the Product and Engineering teams to slow down the cadence of new releases they’re pushing out. (Keep in mind that I’m making a distinction between a product release and a marketing launch.)

You also don’t want to miss the train. If you have set stakeholder expectations (whether explicitly or implicitly) that “this is an important release from a marketing perspective, and we’re planning to have go-to-market comms and assets ready on the day of release”, you don’t want to be the guy who’s not ready with those comms and assets when release day comes.

Here’s what you do want to do:

1) Learn as early as possible about upcoming releases, by establishing strong lines of communication with PMs (see my thoughts on PMM:PM partnering in other answers).

2) As you learn about upcoming release, assign launch sizes to them (see my thoughts on launch size in other answers). Explicitly and broadly communicate to internal stakeholders what the assigned launch sizes are for each release. This sets their expectations around the level of marketing support each release will be given. Where applicable, also explicitly and broadly communicate: a) For which releases you’re planning to have different timing for the marketing launch announcement than for the release go-live itself. b) For which releases you’re planning to bundle them up into a larger marketing launch.

An additional note about A above: in terms of timing the marketing launch and the release itself differently, I’ve often found it’s effective to have a basic announcement to current customers on the day the release goes live (so they aren’t surprised or confused by seeing something new), but then the bulk of the outbound marketing activity aimed at prospective customers is saved for a later date.