AMA: Gusto Head of Product Marketing, Accountants, Courtney Kubitza on Product Launches

The biggest one I keep seeing, and honestly keep having to fight against myself, is launching for the product instead of the customer. Teams often get so excited about what they built that the messaging ends up being a feature dump rather than a story about what changes for the buyer. The fix is forcing yourself to write the "press release" before the product ships. If you can't explain the "so what" in two sentences, you're not ready. The other big one: misalignment between product marketing an ...Read More

For B2B, where most of my experience lives, nothing beats warm channels: existing customer email, CS-led outreach, and sales conversations. The hardest-won lesson is that a launch to your existing customers is often more valuable than a splashy external campaign. Expansion revenue is real, and existing customers become your best amplifiers. For Tier 1 launches (major product bets), I like to invest in analyst briefings, a coordinated PR push, and targeted paid LinkedIn. For tier 2 and 3, I lean ...Read More

We launched a feature that we were really proud of, significant engineering investment, strong internal excitement, and the adoption was flat in the first 30 days. What we found when we dug in: we had nailed the "what" in our messaging but completely whiffed on the "when." Customers didn't understand what triggered the need for this feature. There was no obvious moment in their workflow where they'd think to reach for it. So we pivoted the messaging from capability-led to trigger-led. Instead of ...Read More

The first two weeks after launch I'm basically living in a war room mentality. Daily standup with product, CS, and sales to surface anything weird including support ticket spikes, deals stalling at demo, messaging that's landing flat. You find out really fast what you got wrong. At 30 days, I do a lightweight retrospective. This includes what got used, what didn't, what did sales actually say in calls? I pull call recording snippets and compare them against the talk track we gave them. The gap i ...Read More

I'll be honest about this one: timeline compression and internal alignment are the two I fight every single time, no matter how good the process is. Timeline compression happens because product launches are downstream of engineering, and engineering slips. You end up with a 6-week launch runway that becomes 3 weeks. The assets that needed customer validation get rushed. The enablement session that was supposed to happen twice happens once. Internal alignment is the other constant struggle. Sales ...Read More

This is one of the highest-leverage things you can do and it's chronically underfunded. I start recruiting beta reference customers the moment a product enters closed beta. I'm not asking for a formal case study at that point but rather permission to quote them and a standing "would you take a call" from a prospect. That lowers the bar enormously with customers. For launch day specifically, I try to have: one strong named quote for the press release, one customer willing to be quoted in the blog ...Read More

A few specific tactics that have worked: First, establish UTM discipline before launch, not after. Every asset, every email, every campaign needs tagged URLs so you can actually trace what drove pipeline. This sounds obvious but it breaks down constantly. Second, work with analytics to create a "launch attribution window" and agree upfront on whether you're measuring influenced pipeline at 30/60/90 days. Without that agreement, every conversation about impact turns into a methodology debate. Las ...Read More

Sales enablement, hands down. Everyone knows they need to do it. Almost nobody does it well under resource pressure. A good enablement program isn't just a sales deck and a 30-minute Zoom. It's a live training, a certification moment, a leave-behind that reps will actually use, ongoing reinforcement in the tools they already live in (i.e. Slack, Salesforce, meetings) and a feedback loop so you know if it's working. That full cycle requires time and dedicated attention that in-house product marke ...Read More

Honestly, the tools matter less than the discipline, but the game has changed a lot with AI, and so the answer today already looks different from the one that I would have given 9-12 months ago. Here's what my stack looks like today: Launch planning: I often do my planning in Notion or a shared doc for the master launch brief (my one source of truth.) Then, use Claude to pressure-test the brief itself. I find this feedback loop and pressure-test gets me to a sharper first pass in minutes, that u ...Read More