AMA: 6sense Director of Product Marketing, Amanda Groves on Product Launches

Define your why: Why does this feature/product matter? (value) What use cases does it solve for? (messaging)  How does it compare to the "old way" of doing things? (solution statement) How does it compare to the competition? (competitive differentiator) What does good look like for launch? (KPIs) Define your audience: What personas will benefit from this feature? (audience targeting)  What market segment/industry is it for? (ideal customer profile)  How can my target audience get started? (activ ...Read More

When launching new features in products, you can influence activation by reaching your customers where they are in their journey. Whether that's in-app with embedded posts, product tours, explainer videos - or reactivate sleepy customers with targeted email messages. Best resources to learn from: your peers! Join a community like product marketing alliance and try to find mentors (I am always open to chat and coach!). Books: Story brand by Donald Miller, Obviously Awesome by April Dunford, On Wr ...Read More

Wow, great question! Given these departments are measured on very different dimensions, it's important to keep their North Stars in mind and collaborate in a way that supports individual departmental goals. Let's start with collaborating with product. I often think about our orgs as a mouthpiece (PMM) and earpiece (Product). To be good amplifers of product's "market listening", we need to connect early and often throughout the product development lifecycle. To do this, I suggest establishing mil ...Read More

Core ingredients can be mapped by channel/tier.  Tier 1: Big launch moment, essentially we are throwing the kitchen sink at this thing! Defined as: net new innovation that increases share of wallet, share of voice, domain authority and leadership position. Activities: webinar, press, analyst relations, emails, in-app, newsletter, case study, sales deck update, landing page, slack community message, social posts, demand gen campaign, full field training and enablement, explainer video + support a ...Read More

It certainly depends on the launch tier along with other market factors/customer dimensions, but typically I am looking at the data to inform next steps. Did we hit our product usage target? Is the narrative landing in sales calls (listening to gong recordings)? Is the pitch deck working (checking deal velocity in SFDC)? I am continually tweaking to ensure we are landing in a place of impact and not stagnation. Aside from this, the mission critical post-launch activity should be - the RETROSPECT ...Read More

Challenges I've had seem to stem from lack of customer validation early in the product development process. I once launched 25 apps at once within a new "integrations marketplace" within a new product category. The problem we faced was educating the market on the value of our data within these new apps. It made sense to our users but not the buyer's who had the budget to expand usage. We spent the next several months building enablement for other key personas that we hadn't considered at the sta ...Read More

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 rel ...Read More

I have, a few times! To establish a Beta program, I would work closely with customer success and product as both stakeholders are needed to keep a beta program running smoothly. Define what good looks like between your stakeholders along with ownership areas and key responsibilities. CS should help determine best fit customers/beta participants, product should validate product efficacy/capture feedback to inform performance, and PMM should orchestrate it all - connect the dots and grab authentic ...Read More

Telltale signs of success: customer buy in. If you have customers that have tested the new feature (in alpha or beta phases), informed the roadmap, and have provided use cases that the feature has solved for - you know your launch train is headed in the right direction. Even better, get commitment from your customers to use their authentic testmonials in launch assets to bring your narrative to life and bring value to similar customer profiles. This helps customers get activated quickly while bu ...Read More

Over the years I created a tiering calculator to help me gauge feature impact and inform relative GTM activities. They range from Tier 1 (biggest launch type) to Tier 4 - silent/soft launches. The questions I use to size-up tiering are ...Does the feature: Provide something our competitors don't? Solve a new buyer pain point? Solve a new use case for an existing customer? Introduce new functionality that changes customer workflows? Improve functionality or performance of an existing customer wor ...Read More