AMA: ClassDojo Head of Product Marketing, Ali McCourt Turhal on Product Launches

The biggest one I see is confusing a release with a launch. Teams ship code and call it a launch, then wonder why nobody cares. A release is an engineering event. A launch is a go-to-market event. They're not the same thing, and treating them like they are creates noise without meaning. The second pitfall is launching features instead of telling a story. Nobody wakes up excited about a feature. They wake up excited about what their life looks like after using it. The best launches I've been part ...Read More

Oh I am the biggest fan of a scrappy no budget launch. They've been the rule not the exception in my career, and some of the best performing launches I've been part of had almost nothing behind them. The first thing I'd say is that no budget doesn't mean no strategy. You still need a clear point of view on who you're trying to reach and what you want them to do. The scrappy launch forces the discipline that expensive launches often skip. You can't paper over weak positioning with paid spend. The ...Read More

t really depends on the business goal and who you're trying to reach. Those two things should dictate everything else. And regardless of objective, it's foundational to know exactly where your target audience hangs out and who influences their decisions. Without that you're just guessing at channels. If you're trying to achieve both awareness and conversion in one campaign, you need the right mix working at each stage. Top of funnel to drive awareness, and the right activities stood up to captur ...Read More

Honestly this is where most teams fall down, including ones I've been on. The launch gets all the energy and then the day after it ships everyone moves to the next thing. But launch day isn't the finish line, it's when the real learning starts. By launch you should already have conviction on your positioning. The job post-launch is watching where reality diverges from your hypothesis and acting on it fast. In B2B especially, the feedback loop is gold. What are AEs hearing in discovery calls? Whi ...Read More

Funny, I was just in a sync with my PM counterparts on exactly this. Being launch ready isn't a product question, it's a business question. The bar is whether the product can deliver on the promise you're making. Not perfect, but enough that the people you bring in have a good experience and come back.One of the best forcing functions is starting very small with an alpha then beta, and setting a retention goal before you go broader. If you can't retain the small group you have, you're not ready ...Read More

The ability to distill complexity into a single, clear idea that makes someone immediately understand why they should care. Everything else, the channel plan, the creative, the sales enablement, falls apart without that. And it's harder than it sounds. You're sitting in the middle of a product team that's been building for months, a sales team with a hundred different customer conversations, and an exec team with their own version of the story. Everyone thinks their thing is the most important t ...Read More

Never. The earlier PMM is in the room the better the launch. Not because marketing needs to drive product decisions, but because the questions we ask, who is this for, why would they care, how is this different from what they could do today, are the same questions that make products better. When PMM is brought in at the end to "write the messaging" you're essentially being asked to dress up decisions that were already made without the customer's voice in the room. The best launches I've been par ...Read More