If your product team works in two-week sprints, how do you balance and prioritize each launch? In other words is a "release" always a "launch" and how do you differentiate and treat each?

I would suggest bundling the two week sprints into a larger quarterly release cycle so you can benefit from a bigger, impactful story. If you are hitting your customer base with new features every 2 weeks, I can guarantee you they are going to be fatigued, saturated, and less likely to engage. People are suffering from cognitive load, so cut through the noise and surface the features that matter on more sustainable and customer-friendly cadence. 

In terms of release and launch terminology: a release is product-owned (normally consists of getting a product/feature into production for general availability. While a launch is formal marketing of the feature. Development complete = release. Market ready = launch. They are very different motions.

Good question! Mindset shift suggestion: Every release, or update, or upgrade is a launch. BUT there are different tiers of launches which enable us to provide a very low level, but consistent level of support. It's not the job of PMM to create fanfare around every single update, but it IS our job to create understanding around each.

Getting ready to ship v0.1.13? You don't need a parade or a linkedin post, but you do need to make sure your audience understands the changes. Have your product or docs team be responsible for updating the changelog, or set a reminder to ping them every two weeks for what's new so you can do it yourself. Optimize for reducing questions around anythign that launches—both internally and externally. If you don't expect a lot of questions, even better!

For larger product marketing teams, there's a whole function around "release marketing", which aims to showcase the added value consistently. Activities might include a "weekly wrap-up" or "what's new in [product]" monthly update via social media channels, newsletters, community forums, and/or a dedicated space on the company website.

For example, Confluence has a dedicated webpage for these types of updates: https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/features/whats-new, and you can see screenshots and summaries of new feature releases.

Compass has the "Compass Communique", which is a regular email update detailing new features in this beta product: https://www.atlassian.com/software/compass

And Jira Software shares short updates on Twitter to make people aware of new features, integrations, and UI changes: https://twitter.com/Jira/status/1660664543352111104 and https://twitter.com/Jira/status/1658520714092195842

To differentiate between a "release" and a "launch", we look at several criteria (I'm coming from a SaaS lens):

• Is this a net-new capability, or incremental improvement on an existing capability? Is this driving feature parity across products and/or cloud vs. data center?

• How novel is this release in the market? Is this a rare capability or is it ubiquitous and brings us to parity with a competitor?

• What is the potential market size for adoption? Is this targeted at a niche subset of users, or will this have broad impact across our user base?
  

• Will press, analysts, influencers, etc. have interest in sharing, promoting, and/or amplifying content around this capability?
  

• Does this tie into a broader story and/or more related features coming soon/recently released?
  

• Do we have any other big moments coming up that might impact how this message is received/when we announce (ie: earnings call, user conference, industry event, pricing changes, Magic Quadrant/Wave placement, etc.)?
  

Depending on the answers to those^^ questions, we'll determine the level of "launch" that a new feature/capability receives. Most of our teams have a tiering system that includes criteria about impact, novelty, audience, etc. and the associate activities.

The big key is that product marketers have to be ruthless in their prioritization, and sometimes that means telling product managers that a feature does not rise to the level of a full "launch". This is not just about time or budget management, it's also about reputation management and credibility with your audience.

If every single feature rises to the level of "full-scale launch", you miss the opportunity to truly wow your audience when you have a differentiated capability. They become numb to the barrage of messages about "THE BEST NEW THING EVERRRRRR", when it might just be fixing a bug or realizing feature parity with your own products!