AMA: Intercom Group Product Marketing Manager - Solutions, Christine Sotelo-Dag on Product Launches

First and foremost it is critical to make sure that Sales has plenty of visibility into what product is building, timelines around availability, and how PMM plans to take it to market (what tier/priority is the launch). For any Tier 1 or Tier 2 launch, PMM should align with Sales Enablement on  What is being built Why it's being built now Who is the audience (existing customers/prospects) What is the persona How does this compare to competition  Value pillars for customers  From there, Sales Ena ...Read More

This certainly will vary launch by launch to some degree, however every feature you launch you'll want to track some element of activation and utilization of the feature. Are customers trying the new feature, and are they growing in how they use it? These are also the metrics that you as a product marketer can have a direct impact on. There's always excitement right after a launch where everyone is glued to the dashboards watching the metrics minute by minute! And in those early days after a lau ...Read More

I've seen PMM teams organized in many many different ways, and there really doesn't appear to be any one right way. It seems to be highly dependent on the needs of the business, the business model, business size, etc. That said, what I have personally seen work well is when PMMs are able to have end-to-end ownership over a key area. Whether it be a specific product, or vertical, or product area - that ownership is critical. It allows the PMM to align to a set of KPI's that will become their nort ...Read More

Typically when we have long beta's it doesn't significantly change the way we create our GTM strategy. For our largest launches we're usually starting to kick off launch planning about 18-20 weeks ahead of launch, and smaller releases are closer to 8-10 weeks. Long beta's are actually ideal so there is ample time to get customers using the new product/feature and time to see quantifiable results that can be leveraged for marketing assets (testimonials, quotes, etc). Significant product changes b ...Read More

This question resonates deeply. The biggest way to have an impact as a product marketer is to align your initiatives to focus on bringing to life the voice of the market internally and the voice of the product externally. The top 4 ways to do this are: Customer & Market Insight: Be the subject matter expert. Know your customers and market. Product Strategy: partner closely with product to bring market insight as input into product strategy and roadmapping.Positioning & Messaging: develop ...Read More

This is a great question. Managing stakeholders is such a huge part of the product marketing role - and it can quickly become unweidly if not managed properly. I think the cadence is really personal to what kind of lead-time your team has running up to a launch and the size of your teams, etc. But I can give some insight into the key milestones where we are solict stakeholder feedback with clear guidelines on 1. what kind of feedback we're looking for 2. timeline 3. setting expectations around h ...Read More

This really has to tie back to the KPI's you set prior to launch. What were the problems you were trying to solve with this feature/launch and what was the opprotunity? Whether those KPI's are linked to leads generated, revenue, activation, utilization, retention, etc - it is very important to establish them as a cross-functional group with sales, product and marketing and pull up at a regular cadence to evaluate if you're successfully hitting them.  A successful product launch is one that is hi ...Read More

There are probably a few useful frameworks you can implement off the bat: 1. Establish a clear tiering framework - what constitutes a tier 1 launch versus a tier 3 or 4, what is the desiered business outcome of each, audience, associated GTM tactics for each tier, etc. Aligh with your product team on this framework. 2. Create a GTM Strategy template - that outlines how you plan to take the feature to market. It should include details like announcement date, tier, target audience, goal, messaging ...Read More

This is a common challenge across every product marketing team. It is a delicate balance in ensuring the market and your customers are aware of what you've built, while not overwhelming them with too much noise.A few things that we've seen work well are releasing smaller tiered launches in a quieter fashion with either a change-log/product update or very targeted customer communications, and resurfacing these releases in some of the roundup activities we do. For example, we release quarterly blo ...Read More

This answer may be two-fold. As for tools we use for launches, we find Coda to be pretty indespensible. We've designed our launch template within it that serves as a master doc for all GTM documentation associated with a launch. It centralizes all our key launch documentation from the GTM strategy, deliverables, DACI, launch activities and more. It's indepsnesible because it truly makes project management extrememly easy, and offers a ton of flexibility. The reason I say this answer is two-fold ...Read More

On average our PMMs sync with their PM counterparts on a weekly cadence. At Intercom the ratio of PMM to PM is usually 1:4. Quarterly meetings include roadmap review sessions (2-3), usually a few weeks ahead of the following quarter. Annually PMMs are feeding into the product's winning strategy which consists of defining the next years overall strategy within a product and/or solution area. Leading up to a launch calendars will fill up with GTM syncs across the various marketing teams, and an in ...Read More

If there is one thing I've learned in my time at Intercom it is to ALWAYS start with the problem statement. This is ingrained deeply into how we solve problems, and it really stems from how our product team builds product. At the core, never start with the solution - always start by outlining the problem you are trying to solve. My colleague Robbie does a great job of explaining this philosophy here. The main takeaways are:1. Define the outcome the customer wants2. Define why they want that outc ...Read More