AMA: Adobe Head of GTM Strategy, APAC & Japan, Jeremy Wood on Product Launches

There are quite a few but for brevity's sake I'll keep it to a few! #1 is the lack of a 'prepared GTM' to ensure product launch success. All too many times companies will 'launch' a product simply because it's 'GA'..i.e technically ready. The problem with this is that products and solutions often need a much broader ecosystem to support true success including enablement, collateral, partners, services teams, pre and post sales components and much much more. This is before even beginning to talk ...Read More

Like many of these situations it all comes down to the overall goals and objectives of the launch. Furthermore it depends on several criteria like is this isolated to one country? Are there multiple languages/cultures to take into consideration? Is the target audience largely email based or are they part of a demographic that is more likely to be app driven etc? All of these need to factor in to your launch campaign criteria. I've done launches before where they have been as lightweight as an in ...Read More

I'll keep things 'agnostic' for obvious reasons but I "observed" a launch (not directly involved) where I felt there was very little fundamental launch tactics and activities included to support the launch. Not only that, but it was an extremely complex product/solution to take to market and something that deserved a significant amount of time to help 'translate' to the customer. This made it even more important that things like partner activation, marketing inclusion, PR/press, customer advocac ...Read More

This probably depends on the tiering (significance) of the launch or product tier. If this is a Tier 1 (significant) product being brought to market it deserves a more frequent check-in cadence which should be grounded in short, mid, and long term success metrics. Short term could be activations, sign ups etc whereas mid term will likely be more focused on revenue aligned metrics. Long term will focus on LTV, expansion, usage, consumption, cross/upsell etc etc. Messaging iteration needs to be do ...Read More

Well I'm not sure any one is more important than the other (in the greater scheme of it) but if I could only pick one I would say 'thoroughness' of your launch checklist. That is to say have you completed all the key elements for a successful launch including strong messaging/positioning, collateral, value propositions, ICPs to launch TOO, marketing alignment and activation, web updates, PR/Press, internal enablement, partner enablement and so on. There can be a lot of complexity to a launch (de ...Read More

I think the main ones end up being the tension between the companies urgency to launch a product in to market (this can come top down or just be something that has urgency within a business unit) and ensuring the 'readiness' is actually there. Similar to a previous answer on this, ensuring all the steps of a proper GTM launch have been included or recognised, the entirety of the business has been enabled and brought up to speed on the launch, and that the broader ecosystem (i.e partners etc) hav ...Read More

This is a key component to any launch in my opinion but depending on the type of launch or significance of the product or solution, you may not have access to any customer testimonials. That being said I'm a firm believer in having an Alpha/Beta process pre-GA to not only nut out any issues and concerns but to also ensure you have at least a couple of solid customers you can leverage for referenceability (even if it's only a quote!) Unless there's a compelling reason not to include customers in ...Read More