AMA: Amazon Product Marketing Leader - Fire TV, Amey Kanade on Product Launches

Great question. There could be many reasons why a GTM plan is deemed risky. Perhaps because a lot is hinging on a product launch, or a risky marketing campaign and the riskiest of all - you as a PMM are not completely on board with the product. (The later should not happen but it has happened to many us, I assume) IMO, the key is to  1. Over-communicate: Define a DRI, make sure every stakeholder is involved, follow a decision-making model such as the one I mentioned above (RACI model).  2. Plan ...Read More

I don't use a specific framework. I work at an eCommerce company now and we launch several products on our platform (300+ hardware SKUs each year). It was impossible to come up with GTM plans for each and every product, so we came up with our own framework for product launches. Tactically speaking, our framework categorized product launches in three tiers A - highest revenue forecast, B, C- lowest revenue forecast. And for every tier, we defined specific launch tasks/tactics, budget, etc. I thin ...Read More

A few tips and I would love to hear what y'all do for this. I tend to get a writer's block every time I have launched a product.  1. Inspiration from other industries: So if you are launching a consumer electronic product, check out a product launch from the say for e.g. fashion industry.  2. Competition: Not necessarily to draw inspiration, but to avoid making any mistakes your competition might have made at a product launch. A quick tactic I follow - I go back in history on the competition blo ...Read More

Great question. I have worked in the consumer electronics/Hardware industry for most of my career so my answer is going to be from a consumer product launch pov. I have seen many launch teams make the mistake of defining "launch" as the initial period usually lasting a day (or perhaps a few days) for e.g. launching a new website/product page, a PR announcement., an ad campaign, a launch event at CES, etc. From my experience, this is just the start of your launch and one should look at launch fro ...Read More

Another great question. Product launches more often than not tend to get chaotic, especially as you approach the launch date. We follow the RACI framework for decision making (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_assignment_matrix) and we make sure we appoint only 1 DRI from every team. The teams who need to be part of your communication channel typically depend on your org structure but as a piece of advice make sure that every team is equally represented (and there is no over or under- ...Read More

Short answer - Get a good project manager on your team :) But I understand you don't always have the luxury to get a proj. mgr for a product launch. In some cases, for bigger launches, I have asked for a shared proj. manager from another team (especially the product team). If nothing - you basically have to wear two hats. I find it very hard and time-consuming because it takes me away from my PMM work, but it is a key role and someone has to do it diligently. I also use proj. management tools, d ...Read More

I think measuring success is relatively easy - you have GA, Tableau and similar tools to measure web traffic, purchases, etc. I think the most difficult thing is to define success ahead of a product launch. At my current company, we had large amounts of historical data from previous product launches such as page visits, page visits from the specific channels, paid vs organic traffic, revenue from every channel, etc. So we built a forecasting model that predicted the revenue forecast for Day 1, D ...Read More