AMA: Amplitude Product Marketing Director, Nikhil Gangaraju on Tier1 Product Launches

If the goal is to continue the product lifecycle to new innovation and not sunset the product, then yes, we would absolutely consider a product launch late in the growth lifecycle. However if the product growth cycle is nearing its end then I think a likely approach is to start thinking about a product "sunset" or end-of-life comms

Recently we launched a new vision for digital analytics called Amplitude Made Easy: https://amplitude.com/easy This launch was an opportunity to showcase the future of the Analytics, once that's easy to get started, easy to use and easy to scale with our platform * This update is not just a few features: Our product, design and engineering teams have spent the past year completely re-imagining the Amplitude experience from setup -> to insights -> and action A key set of distribution channels and messaging included * Telling our story.. To do that we’re featuring a product keynote video, just like Apple, Google, Airbnb. ( our opportunity to go big on our story ) * we wanted to also industry experts to be part of that. So we’ve brought together some of the best experts in the industry who are sharing their best practices on our platform * We're also working with more than dozen influencers across platforms such as Linkedin, Twitter, Substack & TikTok to reach our audiences on the channels they love * We're also did largest push on Product Hunt that ever done!! And we need you to be part of that All of these tactics informed a very ambitious set of goals * We wanted to see a lift in new org signups * We wanted to improve our key competition win rates * We wanted to retain and grow engagement with existing users

The defacto tool we use for most audits are still spreadsheets ( google spreadsheets ) since they are soo versatile :) We do have a template that we can replicate across each tab that represents Go-To-Market functions such as Marketing, Pre-sales, Enablement, Professional Services, Support docs, Education The template simply consists of: -Asset -Priority -Owner -Status -URL -Notes

This really depends on a number of factors i.e. -Ability to support beta customers -Engineering capacity to scale -Commercial limitations These are just to name a few. At the end of the day, the more beta customers you have the better, since that results in more feedback, more early product-market fit and more validation. However, the limits on GTM being able to sustain are often a key factor

Never underestimate the power of influencers and your broader community, both can have a massive reach into audiences that really care about your product. In our most recent launch, we actually partnered with a number of key influencers to product user generated content ( UGC ) in the form of expert dashboard templates this drove a lot of early buzz and interest as well as folks signing up to learn more from our virtual launch events. https://amplitude.com/easy Additonally, product hunt has always been a great awareness engine for new product launches as they can drive a ton of reach in the early promotion cycle. But this requires a well coordinated effort to get people to upvote including, employees, customers and your community. Finally Linkedin has traditionally been a great channel for us as we appeal to a core set of profiles such as product, growth and analytics professionals. However we have been experimenting with other platforms such as Instragram and tiktok, however we chose to partner with influencers here to help build our profile in select communities

We have a pretty detailed NPI framework that breaks down the Product, Ops, GTM, Sales deliverables that are impacted across a tiered system of launches Tier 1 - New product that will represents significant customer and/or GTM-facing impact. This product enables us to access new markets or substantially impacts our company/product portfolio positioning. Product may be complex and requires an end-to-end GTM motion. Tier 2 - A large product or feature that is highly visible to customers and/or GTM. This affects our win rates and substantially differentiate us from the competition. Product may be complex and requires robust enablement & GTM support. Tier 3 - A feature that solves a major pain point that impacts a large portion of our users. Could help us drive adoption at one of our top customers, or is strategically aligned with company key bets Tier 4- All other new features

I think its fair to assume that initial product feedback may sometimes be mixed. so It is important to capture as much of it as early as possible. At Amplitude we use a variety of different channels to begin with -We have product feedback submissions that can be submitted on behalf of the customer by sales or customer success which we track in our PD operations via product board -We have internal channels dedicated to product pillars consisting of a Swarm of experts PD+Design+Eng that can triage any issues raised by sales or success teams -Finally we also have community monitoring across forums where we track any feedback and can respond acordingly Sales teams like any other teams are armed and well enabled on what the product is capable of and not capable of ( limitations ) early on in the product life cycle, so its important to get this right in the messaging so it can be clearly communicated to customers early in the product launch

The types of metrics you would measure are quite subjective to the Go-To-Market strategy for your business. For example if your business goal is to drive distribution and new signups your would consider things like new activations, org retention, as well as weekly account usage and key moments On the other hand if your launch is tied to driving things like product led monetization or upsells, than you want to look at things like upsells, ACVs and time to complete trials Finally if you are primarily selling into enterprise accounts via new product add-ons, this would entail a diffrent set of KPIs including attach-rates, contract value and time to implementation tl;dr Metrics are really dependent on you Go-To-Market Strategy thats associated with your launch

When looking at inputs and outputs for a product launch a great framework to use is the jellyfish framework as described here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/marcusandrews_introducing-the-jellyfish-product-marketing-activity-6932687338091278336-EeGs Effectively your inputs are all focused around the market, cutomers and 1st party data * Market trends * ICP * Jobs to be done * Competitive vendor intel * Customer Feedback * Product Data These inputs can be used to frame the positioning for your launch i.e the strategy: What are your launch goals, who do you want to target, what use cases do you want to position, How do you want to differentiate yourself to these customers? Once the position/strategy is established, the big final step is to build out the story via messaging and decide how you want to activate this message and which channels you want to drive for distribution. These are effectively your end outputs for the launch.