AMA: Google Product Marketing Lead, Vishal Naik on Product Launches

I've 100% found the failed launches in my career to be more impactful towards my learning and development as any successful launch. Two jump out at me as ones that didnt go according to plan. The first, more recently, was that I launched image generation in Gemini. We had some really strong usage, but we also ran into a scenario where our product wasn't delivering on the product principles we have as a responsible AI company. So we paused the usage of specific components of the product. What I l ...Read More

I work at a company where there's a specific challenge where there's an entire press ecosystem around scooping new news. Thus we tend to make announcements and run launches when a staged rollout starts. The opposite side of this equation is you dont want to announce something and then have customers asking where the product is. Thus I tend to look at it as mitigating risk. Imagine you log into Amazon and there is a new UI on the checkout page and you dont see any news around it--you might abando ...Read More

I worked at a startup who took pride in the fact that we launched new features with every sprint. It sounded like innovation to talk about how we released X new features that year, but the reality was that customers didnt know what was a thing they needed to care about vs what was just noise. Because there's no customer that NEEDs every feature that's launched. I also worked at a large org that had three set launches a year. It felt like the magic of a specific product could easily get lost beca ...Read More

Different teams might own different channels. I tend to think that I know enough that I could probably write a good email or create a good social strategy for a launch, but im not an expert in those areas--and we have people in parallel marketing teams who are experts there. So for my launches, we have weekly XFN GTM syncs where those stakeholders are included and we walk through where we are for launch and look for status updates on key deliverables like emails, data sheets, help center article ...Read More

By the numbers. Understand your audience for each channel and where your target demo for that product is going to engage, and then show up in those areas. For example, if youre a B2B product and you're targeting end-users within your customer base, a sales pitch isnt going to get the message across--you'll also need targeted ads or emails. If youre a B2C product and youre targeting Gen Z, you might lean away from facebook in favor of tiktok (or vice versa if youre targeting Milennials) and so on ...Read More

I'm honestly not super bullish on trying to find the new flashy marketing vehicle. I interviewed at a company once who stated they were looking for some out of the box, early salesforce-esque guerrilla marketing tactics to drive their launches; but at the same time admitted they also struggled at following up with leads that they generated at events. You'll probably get the value you're seeking out of your marketing work by focusing on the tried and true promotional vehicles, but doing them real ...Read More

You have to articulate the cost. And specifically the cost to the business, not just the cost to your department. For the most part, I cant say I've worked for many leaders that would value the human element (wasted time on your part) over the business value to a last minute shift to a launch (potentially because of alignment to another launch/bundle or product readiness, etc.). While there is an opportunity cost in terms of what you cant get to because youre still focused on the launch that cou ...Read More

In my opinion, you need clearer goals of who is responsible for what, before you go into a launch. For example, our team specifically focuses launches on marketing driven trials of a product. But product retention is on Product to build a product that is good enough to keep users. So similarly, you'll want to look at what your business goal is (assuming its a revenue number) and then map across the journey to get to that number what teams come into play to hit that goal. Example: Marketing is ac ...Read More

in my opinion, each launch has its own nuance. Not every product goes to the same audience (there are likely subsets of your user base that are more or less excited by some launches than others), and so when youre looking for how to deliver value to your new launch, there is likely a part of the launch plan that you turn on for one launch that doesnt play to another. We have a framework for launches where the list of tasks a PMM can do gets broken down into four components: user insights/opportu ...Read More

One tactic that I like to employ when I dont have buy-in yet from XFN partners is to pilot something with no cost to the other team. My guess is that your stakeholders dont yet grok the value youre proposing. So in this instance, dont force your stakeholders to adhere to your launch plan. But create one anyway and measure its effectiveness. So let your team ship items when ready, but in parallel create a marketing moment for after launch. Then measure key metrics -- leads generated, product tria ...Read More