AMA: Figma Senior Director of Product Marketing, Stephanie Zou on Product Launches

For me, the most helpful thing is to talk to customers. Here's an example of something I recently did to help inform messaging that hopefully sparks some ideas for you.  When I first started at Figma, I wanted to better wrap my head around what "collaboration" meant. The word "collaboration" is so generic. Everything is "collaborative" and works "better together". So I wanted to get to the bottom of what parts of Figma's collaboration capabilities do customers really care about.  Caveat: I'm not ...Read More

Here are a few questions I would ask... 1. What’s the goal for your launch? Is it a new product/feature that’s going to bring in more revenue or new signups? Is it a catch-up feature to nix competitive objections? Or is the goal about product usage? Your tactics should serve that goal. Example: Let’s say you’re launching a new feature that’s on your Enterprise plan, like Figma’s analytics launch. The goal was two-fold—to make sure we see a certain % of regular feature usage among our Enterprise ...Read More

Philosophically, I'm a fan of a "full-stack" PMM model where they look after their product area end-to-end. We have one product at the moment, so our PMMs are aligned by areas within our product. One of our PMMs look after our Editor, Prototyping, and Community product areas—essentially making sure Figma works amazing for today's designers and the next generation of designers. The other PMM looks after our Collaboration, Enterprise, and Design Systems product areas. In other words, how does Figm ...Read More

Launching the Figma Community. Some quick context: Figma Community is a space where individuals and brands can create a public profile and publish design files to the world, so anyone in the world can inspect, remix, and learn from their work.  A couple of things made it hard...  It’s a novel concept. No design software has built something quite like this before within their product. Designers can now share a design file on the Web. Anyone in the world can go to inspect that file, learn how it’s ...Read More

I think one of the best parts of being a PMM is you get to bring a bunch of different people/teams together to work towards a common goal. I’ve probably done more launches than I dare count and manage people who’ve managed people who’ve done even more launches than me. I guess the launches that I remember most are the ones where we worked well together on. Product announcements are great moments for your company because it brings people together and it’s an exciting and celebratory milestone. I ...Read More

At all the companies I’ve been at, the one consistent segmentation lens has always been company size. Bigger company = more people = more licenses you can sell.  Other lens can be the types of customers they serve, type of business (e.g. subscription, marketplace), industries, role/departments, and more.  Unfortunately, I don't have time to go in-depth in segmentation here, but one piece of advice is to keep it overly simple and don't overcomplicate things. I've seen so many overcomplicated segm ...Read More

I believe that it’s the PMM’s responsibility to make sure your internal teams are informed about a release. If your internal teams aren’t well-versed in what’s new, how do you expect your external customers to be? Some things we currently do:  Setup Slack channel(s) for release updates and launches that everyone at the company can join and follow along Enable sales, support, success (basically any customer-facing team) at an opportune learning time (their time zone, not Monday mornings or Friday ...Read More

The answer you’ve probably heard many times before (but I will say it again because I believe it): I believe PMM should be a critical partner to product as early as the product requirement definition stage (or however way you kick off planning).What value can PMM add so early on? You can add value in so many ways! Write the story you want to tell when you launch, so product builds a compelling enough feature. Lend your expertise on the competitive landscape. Define the various use cases and best ...Read More

Email me at [email protected] and let’s talk more so I can better understand your use case? 🙂 In general, I’m a fan of rolling thunder launches (aka a collection of feature releases that are launched at different times but ladder up to one umbrella message). Most of your customers are going to miss your announcements. Rolling thunders help you hammer a message home over the course of multiple releases. So let’s say a customer only catches a couple of those announcements, they’ll at least get the bi ...Read More

Most often than not, features are going to get cut in what product ships. It's probably going to be more MVP than everyone had hoped for. I'm a fan of leaning forward and telling a bigger story that includes features you plan to build, as long as you and the team are confident that it's coming soon. I know not every company or product team is comfortable with this, but I think it's such a great opportunity to talk about your vision and what you hope to be/achieve. We get asked this all the time ...Read More