AMA: Asana Chief of Staff, Product, Victoria J. Chin on Product Launches

It’s never too early to connect with your customers to constantly expand and deepen the strength of your product. Get insights from your customers through product usage data - where are you seeing dropoff? Form hypotheses on why through customer interviews and customer-facing teams, and validate those hypotheses through experimentation or surveys.  At Asana, adoption is a team effort. Teams such as product marketing, product, design, user operations, and for our larger customers, customer succes ...Read More

In my experiences, PMM is an inherently cross-functional role, so it’s common to have shared metrics with marketing channel owners (awareness or leads), product teams (adoption or revenue), or sales (pipeline or revenue). Also, metrics vary significantly based on your product, audience, and business model.  To set SMART objectives for a launch, I start with questions like:  How does this launch contribute to a broader company objective? To keep teams aligned and engaged, it’s important to ensure ...Read More

At Asana, customer empathy and experimentation are not only how we build our product, but who we are. I would start with deeply understanding the customer - what are their needs and motivations? What problems are is your product solving for them?  I would then connect with data science and user experience teams to review product usage data. When comparing highly engaged users to those who drop off, can you identify any demographic/firmographic differences or product usage trends among each segme ...Read More

At Asana, customers are our #1 inspiration - so deeply understanding your target audience (across existing customers and prospects) and what matters most to them would be my first priority.  What are we hearing from customer interviews, and/or customer-facing teams? What third-party research can we source based on target demographics, firmographics, and/or stage of customer journey? (consider industry analysts like Gartner, Forrester, or IDC, or for those not in tech try eMarketer or MarketingPr ...Read More

The most common mistake I see is not laying the foundation for effective internal coordination, which is critical for every product launch, and even more so for distributed teams. Despite companies’ best efforts to recreate what worked in the office in a remote setting, global workers continue to spend 60% of their time on coordination rather than the skilled, strategic jobs they’ve been hired to do (source: Anatomy of Work Index ).  Effective internal coordination requires:  Aligning global tea ...Read More

This is always challenging your target audience and press have limited attention spans - so over-communication is never the answer. I would ask questions like:  What is going to be most impactful in furthering your broader company objectives? Is there an opportunity to bundle multiple features/releases in order to tell a more compelling story, based on what you know about customers, competitors, and market trends? Are there scaled channels, e.g. monthly newsletter or blog, where bundling launch ...Read More