AMA: Airtable Senior Director, Portfolio & Engagement Product Marketing, Christy Roach on Product Launches

I count these as “Tier 3” launches which I define as: Relatively small product updates that a subset of your current customer base will care about deeply. You are spot-on that they’re important for users to know about. Usually, it’s a specific group that needs to know about it. For example, we usually treat launches for our admins as tier 3. They’re vitally important for admins in the enterprise, and they do reinforce our overall enterprise message, but admins are a relatively small percentage o ...Read More

Your GTM strategy for a launch starts by determining the audience and “tier” of your launch. I use a framework that has 4 different tiers: Tier 1: Large, newsworthy updates that happen 1-2x per year. These change the positioning for your overall product, will appeal to your current customer base, and will attract new customers to your product. These have full-court press by the entire marketing team and usually utilize nearly all of your channels. You should rally your team around these launches ...Read More

I think more than anything, the things we got right were the fundamentals: Product need: We were launching a product that truly solved customers’ needs. We were crystal clear in our product spec about who we were solving for and what problems we were focused on. We validated that and got even sharper in our vision throughout a clear beta, and PMM was involved in every step, so we were operating with the information we needed to run a successful launch Tight messaging: Messaging isn’t as hard as ...Read More

If you take one thing away from this AMA, it’s that you need a source of truth for your launch activities. Please don’t run a launch without one, I’m begging you. Unsurprisingly, at Airtable we use Airtable to do this. I’d recommend it, it’s worked well for us. But I won’t give you too much of a sales pitch on why since that's likely not what you're looking for. What I will say, is you need a place where you can list out every activity, the owner, the status, due date, approval activity, and ass ...Read More

Enablement is one of the most critical and often most difficult parts of the launch. The key to remember is that, usually, the product launch is just part of the overall sales process, and you need to treat your enablement as such. Very rarely will a customer-facing team drop everything for a new product line, you need to fit it into their existing flow. Here are some practices I use: Timing is everything: This sounds stupid but it’s so key. If you’re trying to train a team during the last week ...Read More

This is one of those times that PMM’s role as a “connector” shines most brightly. There are so many teams involved in a launch, and usually, they have differences in their POV on what the launch should do. I get goal ideas, questions, and suggestions from across the org, but I’ve worked to keep PMM from being a team that’s “given” goals, and instead made our team one that influences our priorities, connects work happening across the org, and leads the conversation around goal setting. There are ...Read More

This can be really hard to manage! Like everything, it really depends on the feature and product readiness. I’ve often done this is in a few stages: Early product development: We start by educating our internal teams on what we’re building, the problems we want to solve, and our target customers. That helps them understand what’s coming and often they’ll suggest good customers to add to the beta. At that point, there is nothing for a sales team to demo or show a new customer, but we will give an ...Read More

Every single launch, even the ones that made me crazy, taught me something valuable. As I’ve gotten more senior, I’ve done less of the launch coordination but I still get deeply involved in our product launches because I believe there’s nothing that encapsulates the feeling, energy, and excitement of being a PMM quite like launching a new product. If I look at the launches I’ve been a part of, there are two that stand out to me as the most impactful: The first was very early in my career, in a j ...Read More

This totally depends on the product. Some launches are meant to grow top of funnel signups, others drive expansion with your current customer base, others reduce churn or expand product stickiness. Your goals should line up with the problems you’re solving. They should also have a tie back to your company strategy. At a high level, we usually have some awareness goals around web traffic, press pickup/message pull through, and signup rate. We’ll also usually set product usage goals within about 3 ...Read More

This is something I deal with a lot. Often, for a large launch, you’ve got multiple product components that you’re bringing together for one big moment. I find that launch teams often have that "more is more" mentality, where our product teams push to get something else completed with the energy of the launch. While I love the energy, all these components can be impossible to tie together and manage as you’re getting close to the launch. As a rule of thumb, I focus on the customers we’re targeti ...Read More