AMA: Atlassian Head of Product Marketing, Jira Work Management, Chase Wilson on Product Launches

Most product marketers I've worked with are tuned in to new feature releases or creating effective comms for upcoming product improvements. For a product launch, however, it's almost always given the highest priority automatically. Most of the work is done to make sure the product itself is positioned correctly and that what we promise matches up in-product. All hands are on deck at a specified time for a large volume of page traffic and social comms.  With that said, I absolutely needed to prio ...Read More

Great question! For the Jira Work Management launch I was actually the first team hire. This was really important for the dynamic of our team and we eshewed the common "triad" for a "quad". That is to say that I helped design the product and no large decisions were made without my input, whether that was for design, engineering, or product. The same existed in the reverse, where everyone knew what the marketing gameplan was and was able to give their suggestions and thoughts.I would say that eve ...Read More

I hate to answer with "it depends", but it does! Atlassian has ~25 cross-functional teams that I worked with as the launch came closer. Some of those teams required 4 months of lead time to make sure everything was done on time! Others came in during the last few weeks. I found that it was important to cast a wide net early on and to be curious. Your curiosity will uncover more dependencies than trying to think of every possible dependent team if your org is larger. For smaller companies, I foun ...Read More

I hear this pain quite a bit. Many people would likely propose working hard to have a "seat at the table". To me this isn't quite enough. A seat at the table will give you insight into launches, but not necessarily any real sway towards changing decisions. I believe product marketers need to expand beyond the "typical" skillset to provide enough value to be taken seriously at early stages. Be comfortable pulling your own data directly from the databse using SQL, be competent at Figma / Sketch, l ...Read More

I was lucky enough to manage a sales team at my previous role and hopefully can provide some insight here that were informed by that experience. But, it may be a bit controversial! I'd say that most sales enablement campaigns deliver: Competitor battlecards Product feature talking points Positioning statements Collateral like whitepapers, decks, and one-pagers Most of this is moot at a product launch in my opinion. It's not that these aren't important, but you can quickly spend significant time ...Read More

Launch frameworks vary wildly depending on some fundamental questions: Is your company well-known or resource-rich? Are you B2C or B2B? Do you have a Freemium offering? How long do you expect the sales cycle to be? Once you establish answers to these questions you can more effectively choose: Which channels are viable Which channels are likely to be successful What channels you need to put the most effort towards Which tactics will best drive engagement through those channels When you've created ...Read More

I've seen this vary from top-of-funnel metrics down to MRR depending on the goal of the product. Aspects that I believe impact the KPI you ultimately choose are: What does this product mean for your company? Is it awareness of your company in the market?  Is immediate revenue important or can it be pushed down the road? How well do you understand user pathways from signup to product usage? How well do you understand your funnel? Do you have historic data to base assumptions on or is this a green ...Read More

This has depended fairly dramatically depending on the size of the product launch, how ready the product is for prime-time, and the scale of the company! For example, for my Jira Work Management launch we needed to make sure that: Purchasing and provisioning pathways were live Support / sales teams were enabled to answer questions Email comms were accurate and scheduled PR interviews were completed the week prior to launch Landing pages are live and priority pages were translated We had a market ...Read More