AMA: Airtable Head of Portfolio & Engagement Product Marketing, Christy Roach on Product Launches

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 custome...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 ...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 cus...more

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 u...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...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 excitemen...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 go...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 you...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 P...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...more