AMA: Facebook Head of Product Marketing, VR Fitness, Media and Work, Susan J. Park on Multi-year, Transformative Product Launches

Success = Changed the behavior of the customer to embrace the transformative shift. For every successful launch, we were able to change the behavior of the customer, and the customer created a habit to use that experience.  We think about metrics that will show a behavior shift of the customer, not just general revenue or product adoption uplift. For example, retention numbers on the new product matched with growth will show if this is a change in behavior, or if it's simply a blip due to strong ...Read More

Everything is a trade-off discusssion. If you launch a big bet before a product is "there" there will be risks, but if launching the product comes with acceptable risk and you can still hit the metrics you want to hit, you can do it. I've recently stolen this durable decision framework and find it excellent. As a product marketer, we're rarely the sole decision-makers on whether to push the launch button. But if you want to drive alignment around the launch, this is how I would approach.    DURA ...Read More

Build fast feedback loops with cheerleaders and challengers How you build your feedback loops will determine your product trajectory. You need to ensure your recruiting the right customer type, but also go out of your way to try and include cheerleaders (people a bit more on the cutting edge) or challengers (later adopters who don't like change). Both will become vital in terms of your trade-offs for when to launch the product and to understand your true value proposition of the product. Obvious ...Read More

A tech company should always think about having transformative bets. These big bets are what will create a diversified company with multiple things they are good at in order to continue to grow in size and scale. Multiple bets are nice, but many companies can't afford them. So shoring up the right market intelligence to predict the shfits will be key to ensure resourcing to execute well on a bet. It's in times like these where product marketing in the research and priortization phase can really ...Read More

Behavioral metrics. If you've changed the behavior of your customer base to to something else, you're succeeding. If not, and you haven't been able to retain or continue a habit-forming change, go back to the drawing board. It's important to ensure you have these metrics lined up even into beta so you're measuring change, not just revenue our core output and you can explain WHY.   Retention is the easiest thing to measure across this. But I like to pair metric + and activity. So 30-day sustained ...Read More

Feature launches can be a snoozefest.  If it's just a feature launching, is it worth publicizing this to the customer?   Every launch should have is a packaged story of WHY you're telling the customer about it and how it's going to change their behavior. If it's not worth a big hoopla, don't burn resources on it.  It's easier to tuck it into a release OR try to package it up with 2-4 other feature launches so you can create a real bundle into what a customer would want to know about. Usually if ...Read More

PART 1: DOCUMENTING AND TESTING PRODUCT BENEFITS   The product's team job is to lay out the Minimum Viable Product and the ideal scenario and technology of what's available. A strong product marketer can take the minimum product specifications, speak to potential customers and figure out which product benefits resonate most with them, then build the marketing plan from there. If you're having problems getting the main idea, show them the benefits of a prototype and how it can help shape their pr ...Read More