How do you make room for new ideas in your launch campaigns vs following a tried-and-true playbook?

I try to follow Google's 80/20 innovation model. Basically I reserve 20% of the effort (in terms of time and budget) to think of new innovative ideas. I hold brainstorming sessions or ask members to come back with at least one whacky idea. Now, this is not possible for every product launch and when you are already stretched, but I try to do this for a big launch. 

It’s a great question. As much as you benefit from playbooks and templates, too much of the same will burn out your team and dampen your impact. I’d recommend a few things to ensure you leave some room for new ideas:

• Agree to a cadence: As mentioned above, if you have a set cadence of launches, it gives you more time to plan ahead - or at least know which launches you really want to go big on versus which you are OK with a set playbook
• Make your standard communications rinse and repeat: If you do a monthly customer blog post, quarterly “What’s new” webinar, etc, make sure these are as templatized as possible. You should still experiment with variables (subject line, time of day, etc) but if you find a formula that works, your customers will benefit from knowing what to expect.
• Solicit ideas: We have a Slack channel at Vanta called #wacky-ideas. As you can imagine, there are a lot of ideas posted there that we don’t act on. But we do experiment with some of them! For instance, someone stumbled on #clintfromIT, a TikToker who does awesome IT and compliance videos. Because we leave a little room in our plans for experimentation, we did a really fun activation with him around some of our product launches.
• Measure and assess: Measure what you can - you may be surprised what works. At the very least, make sure that you have well defined KPIs for your “rinse and repeat” activities, so you can still demonstrate success even if your experiments can't be directly measured.

When it comes to thinking about how to launch something differently, I look to the main target audience I am trying to cater to and that can create inspiration for new ideas in itself. For example, a couple of years back at Zendesk we launched our WhatsApp integration. One unique part of this launch was the type of channel this was and its target audience. WhatsApp is known to be huge in countries like Brazil and India. Instead of announcing this product at our annual customer event in San Francisco (or somewhere close to HQ), we decided to launch it at our customer event in Brazil and it resonated very well with the audience. We were able to capture the interest of the audience because we decided to leave behind the playbook (of typically announcing big product launches in HQ) and instead launched it in the region where the product-market fit was the best, capturing a lot more attention and interest in our product announcement.