Process Street

VP of Marketing at Process Street

It sounds like you’re in for a fun and challenging few weeks :). While they’re likely to be stressful, they might end up as some of the most memorable of your career. I would focus on “doing less” on launch day / rebranding announcement day, then activating with elaborative messages and resource...more

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?

VP of Marketing at Process Street

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 pus...more

At what point during feature development should product marketers get looped in on what's changing?

VP of Marketing at Process Street

Really early :). When the release is just a twinkle in the PM’s eye :). The way to do this is to set up a formal PMM:PMM partnering system where each individual PM is partnered with 2-4 PMs, and they all focus on the same area of the product. The PMM meets regularly with their PM partners. The ba...more

Do you have a product launch template that you use to drive product launches?

VP of Marketing at Process Street

Yes, at ActiveCampaign my team uses a document template for what we call a Launch Guide, and what at prior companies I’ve called a GTM Plan or a Product Marketing Brief. The document template is organized into sections that cover a wide variety of topics around the launch, such as the beta an...more

What are common mistakes you see Product Marketers make when launching products?

VP of Marketing at Process Street

Using launch messaging that over-focuses on the nuts and bolts of the product itself, instead of using the launch opportunity to highlight the broader value of the product line. (Or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, using launch messaging that is so high-level that customers and prospects can...more

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How do you and the PMM team communicate updates and progress on your product launch to the rest of the org? What is the format? What do you report back on? Etc.

VP of Marketing at Process Street

I think the process of communicating about a launch to internal stakeholders starts with identifying the goals of the launch. As you consider launch goals and how you’ll measure goal attainment, it’s useful to distinguish between: 1) Channel metrics. These are metrics that show how many people y...more

After an initial product launch, how do you think about the subsequent, smaller launches/updates? How does the strategy/channels/process change? How do you identify where smaller launches can be bundled into a bigger story?

VP of Marketing at Process Street

Great question; it gives me a chance to describe a concept we use at ActiveCampaign called launch size. Each of our PMMs are partnered with 2-4 PMs, and they all focus on the same product area. As the PMM meets regularly with their partner PMs, they learn about new builds/releases that are planne...more

What type of customer research do you do pre-launch to help you have a great product launch?

VP of Marketing at Process Street

For clarity, I’ll draw a distinction here between product research and product launch research. 1) Product research happens before resources are committed to build the proposed product. Product research is critical to ensure that you are, to use YCombinator parlance, “making something people wan...more

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What are some key ways to preserve "launch momentum" after the actual launch to get more customers to use said launched product or feature?

VP of Marketing at Process Street

I’m glad you asked this question because I’m a big proponent of “rolling thunder instead of flash in the pan” :). It’s easy to overestimate how closely customers and prospects are paying attention to every message coming out of your company, and think that if you make a lot of noise on launch day...more