AMA: Google Head of Marketing, Google Maps Platform, Madeline Ng on Product Launches

It sounds like this conversation is around pre-launching products that need to go live to further the company or portfolio's narrative among your customers, or other key opinion formers in your space. I believe you can only launch a product once. Pre-launches are tricky because you get one splash, but you know you're going to try to make news again when the product is ready. Here's my general flowchart on the key actions I take. 1. Understand the goal of the launch: Pre-launches are exciting when they go well, but can be a risky move to the credibility of your company. Start by getting the facts about the launch - who is it for, why now, what does success look like - from different parts of the organization. 2. Interrogate the product readiness: Sit down with the product and engineering team and dig into the product. Is the launch going to be a customer-usable product? A demo? A video? Slideware? And what are the dates, and confidence around those dates, to get to something that can be used in the hands of an actual user? 3. Form an opinion: You are an expert in your market and your products. To achieve the goals desired, and knowing the product readiness, build an opinion of when / where / how you want to launch. Should the product go live to a large audience or a small one to start? Should it be priced or free? Should you wait until it's been tested with some users? 4. Pitch your opinion and come to a resolution: Align with stakeholders - execs, sales/support, comms, product, legal etc. - to either sell them successfully on your perspective or to come to a new conclusion based on new data that you have. Either way, these cross-functional meetings (and documentation!) will serve as a backstop on whatever you end up doing for launch. 5. Set expectations on what is needed to continue to make news after your pre-launch. Do you need to have metrics on the number of users? Do you need a big brand to use the product? Do you need to see an expansion of features or other types of availability opened up? Once you get to launch, set the right expectations with your customers. While you are trying to launch "ahead," you are still responsible for the credibility of your company to your customers. Be accurate about what the product can do, where it can be found, who it's for, and when it will be ready for use. And, finally, put your landing/momentum launch plan into action once the product is ready.

The key here is to invent the wheel once, and then modify it if and when there are changes to the type of launch. This will make your life a lot easier and more predictable, and help all the stakeholders you work with also have an easier time. We start each launch with the same playbook - a set of activities that help drive a cross-functional team across marketing, comms, product, and more to help us through launch and to landing. Within that playbook, we have different tiers of launches, and the playbook, plus an understanding of our audience, helps us modify the actual launch activities. What helps us decide the tiers? * Projected market impact - how differentiated is the product we are launching? * Revenue potential - how much value will this bring to the business? * Strategic value - how does this launch help further the narrative of our business for our audience? In terms of tracking, we use internal project management tools that help us stay on top of our timelines and have ongoing communication through milestone meetings, always on chat spaces, sheets, and of course email. Make sure there's one owner for every activity to keep it clear what the roles and responsibilities are. There's no perfect tool - you should choose the one that fits the culture of your team and company. More important than what you use, though, is who has access to it. Even when I was at a smaller company, I always found that staying ahead of your stakeholders with key milestone updates made everyone's life easier. Build in checkpoints in your launch activities to help your leadership, and even others on the team, take note of where they are and what's coming. It's a chance to celebrate all that's been done while also reducing the number of firedrills that may come your way from people asking about the status of your work.

This is a really interesting question! I work in B2B and always think about the channel relative to the goal of the message. For broadcasting a message to the widest possible audience, I find comms/PR to be a very effective way of communicating with users. If you're looking to gain reach and help reaffirm your position in the market with your users while also communicating to prospective users, there isn't really a better channel. Comms strategy can be as broad as targeting major news outlets or as targeted as niche trade publications. Impact is measured by number of articles and ideally projected audience reach. For ongoing innovation announcements, I like to establish a few tried & true places where your users know they can find the latest information. This might be a blog you maintain, or even release notes. Build the channels, stay consistent with them, and don't introduce new channels to confuse your audience. Impact is measured by views. For back and forth conversations, I find social channels as well as user communities to be the best spots to engage. You need to staff these appropriately with either people across your organization or with outside advocates of your products and make sure you are continually involved in the topics being discussed. We use X, formerly known as Twitter, Discord channels and more. Impact is measured by the amount of engagement. For deeper conversations, you can never go wrong with a customer advisory board, focus group, or other in-person forum that lets you dig into the nuance of where you're going and get reactions. If you find a representative audience, a few hours of conversation with only a few customers can get you 80% of the insight you need to create your narrative and marketing strategy. If you have these conversations with influencers in your industry, you may be able to also create a broadcast channel based on these interactions as well. Finally, you can make the biggest impact by using multiple channels at once. Just make sure to tailor the message to the channel!

My initial reaction to this question was - why would you do this? :D If you are asking a customer to make a big effort, your overall benefits should far outweigh the work needed to achieve it. So instead of "some benefits, big effort" you're really targeting "some effort, big benefits." But I think what this question is actually asking is about a breaking change, such as a forced migration or a deprecation. These are hard but necessary situations and the approach to take is to overcommunicate, reduce friction, and be empathetic. Overcommunicate: If you are issuing a change - perhaps an upgrade to a new API with a plan to deprecate the existing one - make sure you harness channels and a cadence that makes your customers extremely aware of the value of the move, and the time they have to make it. Issue a service announcement via email, put it in the product itself, communicate it via social and your blog, etc. The last thing you want is for a customer to be surprised and then have a negative reaction to you and your brand. Reduce friction: This is going to take real work from your customer. Is there anything you can do to help make it easier? Examples include creating technical guides that help your customer's team know, step-by-step, what they need to do. Or perhaps even working with service partners to create packages that could help a customer make the change without needing to use their own team. Be empathetic: To the fullest extent possible, be an advocate for your customer internally and in your narratives. If you're able to build out a longer timeline that would help your customers adapt to the change, do it. If you're able to identify key features that your customers would appreciate that require minimal resourcing internally to execute, try to advocate for them to happen. Tip the scales towards as much benefit as you can and tell that story in a compelling way while not sugarcoating the amount of effort required. Your customers are smart and should be treated as such.

Landing is everything, but can oddly become an afterthought in the eyes of an organization. It just doesn't have the same sizzle as a launch, right? But landing is where you get the business impact and that is, after all, our goal. "Standard" metrics are a bit challenging to identify because they really are dependent on your business - what was the goal of the launch, what can be measured, and what larger business objective does this launch ladder into? Here are some standard metrics I've used, and why they matter: * Usage: how much is this product being used? * Revenue: how much value are we driving for the business? * Adoption: is the product resonating with a wide audience or just a few? * Sales close rate: is there a pretty clear product-market fit? * Sales cycle time: is the product addressing an urgent need, or is it a nice-to-have? * Support ticket volume and trends: is there something that is making it hard for customers to adopt the product? Against each of these, I look at the trend lines over time and try to understand if each marketing intervention drives incremental improvements in the metrics. I often look at a month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year out but this is going to change a lot depending on how long your products typically take to adopt. Your key stakeholders start with Product and Sales but could be as wide as your leadership team or any partners you work with to sell.