AMA: Gusto Former Head of Product Marketing, Emily Ritter on Product Launches

Ultimately you’re working to drive revenue (in one way or another), which comes from feature awareness and/or usage.Revenue is a lagging indicator so your launch plan should include metrics that can ladder up to revenue and be measured in a more immediate time frame. Some measure of awareness - page visits on launch day (and subsequent time period) can be one measure Some measure of conversion - depends on where the feature impacts your funnel. If it’s a entirely net new product, hand raisers on ...Read More

In a previous role, it had been awhile since the team I was working with had shipped anything. We were heading into the holidays and I was starting to worry about demonstrating momentum, especially as our sales team worked to hit their quotas. A ton of small features were in the works but nothing that was going to cut through the noise of holidays etc. I convinced the team to do a “12 days of Christmas” release schedule (which we ended up making non-denominational of course). Starting Dec 1 we r ...Read More

We aspire to do this with absolute excellence -- with rapid A/B testing and optimization. Come join our team!! That being said, here are some observations (I polled folks on my team to contribute based on what they've seen in their careers as well). Bottom line, pricing projects are hard--and can be messy! Pricing is all about balancing tensions. You might have the most perfect spreadsheet pricing model in the world. It might even be the best deal for your customers. But if it’s too much work to ...Read More

A bit of an “it depends” answer. Sometimes people use betas for QA: does the feature we built work end-to-end? Other times betas can help you determine if you’ve hit product-market fit with your product. And everything in between. It’s best to get super aligned cross-functionally at the KICKOFF (or early in the development process) about how alphas and betas fit into the overall timeline, project strategy, and what the objectives and go/no-go decision are up front. Determining all that at the be ...Read More

It really depends on what stage your company is at, how your customers consume information from your company, your ship cadence, and what you’re trying to accomplish with the launches.If you’re early stage, your audience is B2B, highly engaged, it might make more sense to communicate smaller upgrades more regularly. It shows momentum and drives engagement.If you’re later stage and shipping stuff all the time, a big quarterly launch might be more about tying a bunch of features together into a st ...Read More

Small: tight, thoughtful FAQs. Keep it simple. Prep a concise one-pager that delivers the facts and moves on.Large: think about enablement as a mini bootcamp program rather than a one-and done. Work with managers in advance to get their input on what their teams might need. Do in-person trainings with role playing exercises that help confirm learning. Create a temporary slack channel for launch questions (also helpful for reporting bugs :wink: ). Make sure they know how this compares to the comp ...Read More

Great answers all around. Here's what I'd add: * You deliver a product/feature that people actually want* You position your product in a way that gets the right people to try it (which they then adopt because of pt 1)* You deliver against whatever higher level objective you’re trying to achieve for your company (increased ACV, capture new market share, increase conversion rate within current market, etc)BONUS: you learn something you can apply to whatever you launch nextPS note on pt 1: you’re l ...Read More

The heyday of product launch PR is behind us. Ah, the good ol’ days. ;)These days you need truly innovative product stories and/or proven business impact to get solid coverage. Customer or human interest stories can help, as can data-driven storytelling. Think about how to use PR in these ways post launch, especially if your product or feature isn’t particularly newsworthy on its own.It’s hard to rely PR for any but the biggest brands, but professional audiences are more reachable through trade ...Read More

Seek out underrepresented groups, listen to what they’re saying—and not saying—and amplify their voices to be even louder internally. Never stop thinking about your work as an ally. Be thoughtful in how you represent your customers in your marketing materials. Be honest. Work to educate yourself so others don’t have to.At its core, this work is all about customer empathy. All kinds of people run businesses, and almost all people who run businesses have the same fears that keep them up at night. ...Read More

This is an area we’re looking to get better at. We think that being able to send relevant messages in context, will help us be a guided partner to small businesses as they look to take care of their teams (and ultimately raise awareness and drive adoption of the valuable new things we ship). We have a home-built notification tool. As our product has grown in complexity, we have needs for more tailoring. Have used Intercom in the past and found it to be very effective for in-app communication (an ...Read More