AMA: Klaviyo Director of Product Marketing, Katie Gerard on Product Launches

Building out a launch process is actually fairly simple in concept. The hardest part is definitely getting cross functional alignment. This process can easily take 6 months in a larger organization, but I recommend being quick and scrappy and then iterating. The steps I take: * Understand what's been done before. What works, what doesn't? How do the teams in place feel about past launch efforts? * Map out your launch goals, at a high level. Why are you doing product launches at all? Are they for customers, are they for prospects? Think carefully here about nuance, when do the goals shift? Often different types of products or sized products may have slightly different goals. * What teams need to be involved? Here again you may note some nuance. It's helpful to think about past examples. So for example, at Klaviyo, when we launched SMS, we needed all the marketing teams and all the customer facing teams involved in getting the word out while Product and R&D worked to ship the feature. * Start to lay out your tiers. There are many ways to set this up, but I typically think about tiering in terms of the size of the launch. Here again past examples will help you. What types of features will you pull out all the stops for? What features will you keep fairly quiet, maybe because they're not exciting or because all your competitors already have them? How will you measure success? * Align a bill of materials to your tiers. Typically speaking, what assets will you provide for each tier? Determining this is the first step in cross functional alignment as it involves getting a commitment from each team. Also keep in mind this will definitely change a bit from launch to launch. The idea here is to give everyone their marching orders ahead of time so you're able to execute faster once the launch process is live. * Socialize, socialize, socialize. This can't be overstated enough. Present your launch plan to product, to R&D, to sales, to CS, to marketing. Get everyone's feedback, answer all the questions. Put the launch process on your internal wiki and then present it to your entire company at an all hands. * Iterate, iterate, iterate. That's it, your launch process is live! Yay! Now it's time to tweak and evolve it. It needs to fluctuate as your goals and resources change. Ta da! Ok, maybe it's not THAT simple, but I promise it's fun!

This is a great question and a super common scenario within PMM. At Klaviyo, we've played around with a lot of different launch cadences and resourcing levels for launches. Product launches tend to be more about product adoption than any short term revenue gain. Yet, everyone agrees it's important to show a strong cadence of innovation to the market. This tension is especially acute if you're talking about new functionality that's important but isn't actually opening up new pockets of revenue for your company. So how to balance the two objectives, showcasing innovation while still prioritizing revenue? Like many things in PMM, the answer is, it depends. You're always going to have limited resources, and both launches and revenue generation can be "always on" activities. Here are some questions to ask yourself if you have this challenge: * Do you have a large team and/or budget? If so, you may be able to keep resources on both projects throughout the year. Or if you're the only PMM, you may need to make trade offs based on what seems critical. * How often are you shipping features? At Klaviyo, we do a ton of launches all the time so we actually need to have a monthly launch cadence. Some companies may do quarterly launches, meaning they can spend a lot of their time on other projects that drive more short term revenue. * Where are your metrics weak? I like to keep my eye on the marketing funnel to see where holes may be developing and then push to plug them. If you're not seeing enough MQL's, you may need to work closer with demand gen. If your features aren't being adopted, you may want to lean more into product launches and trainings. * What are your top company-wide priorities? Do you need to grow fast or do you want to cement your reputation as a tech-savvy, innovative org? If the answer is both, you may need more headcount. :-D

Core elements of a good feature launch include: * The messaging. This should clearly define what the feature is, the value it brings, and how it's differentiated in the market. * Campaign coordination. PMM will often orchestrate the campaign, whether it's large or small. This includes giving feedback on marketing collateral for accuracy and coordinating activities across teams. * Prepping your GTM teams. Any team that is customer facing needs to know about features that a customer or prospect might ask about. For really big launches, internal change management can end up being a major part of the job. I've had experiences where I don't just need to prep the GTM teams, I actually need to convince them that the new product is a good opportunity for the business. Getting everyone on board is critical, because your customers won't be impressed if your team isn't.

Staying on top of the Product team can be really challenging. Project management tools like productboard can help, but there will always be last minute changes. A few ways to handle this: * At Klaviyo, we actually have smaller launches every month and a big launch once a quarter. The bill of materials for these launches is largely similar, allowing us to have a highly replicable process. That way, if a feature is slotted for the May launch but it slips to July, no worries, it can go in the July launch. * For smaller features, have a release notes page where you can post things as they ship. This will allow you to get the word out in real time, even if you can't do a bigger launch until later. * It's labor intensive, but you can plan your communications materials with some wiggle room in them. A kind of rainy day contingency. So you could have the option of shifting a date or writing a product out of an announcement script. * Announce things as in "limited availability" or "coming soon" and then collect a waitlist. I don't love this option as it's a frustrating user experience but it can work in a pinch. * Be super close with product. Assign a PMM to each PM who can help keep track of what's happening. * Don't be afraid to put some of the responsibility back on Product. We eventually decided at Klaviyo that once a feature was selected for a launch moment, it was on the PM to inform us of any change in schedule.

This will depend on your specific goals for the launch. I like to define tiers for product launches and then have a bill of materials for each tier. That makes the process easy to replicate and facilitates cross functional collaboration, because everyone knows what to expect. For example, you might define your tiers this way: * Tier 1: Large, brand new product that is opening a new market for your company. You're going to make a really big deal about this and activate all your channels, from web to PR and social. You'll train your sales and CS teams to be ready. * Tier 2: Significant update that will make your existing customers super happy. You may decide to do a blog post, social, and give sales and CS one slide. * Tier 3: Small update or bug fix. You're not going to tell the world about this, but customer support needs to know in case there are any tickets.

The biggest gaps I often see are around long term tracking of success. * Many PMM's struggle to set goals for their launch day, which makes it very hard to report on success. This is often tied back to a lack of clear strategy. Why are you doing the launch and who is it for? Maybe you want existing customers to adopt the feature or maybe you want investors to take note of your cool new product. Either way, it's much easier to set the metrics ahead of time and develop the strategy around them. Don't wait until right before or even right after your launch to define what success looks like. * The other big, related gap is forgetting to track how a product or feature is doing in the long term. A launch is exciting and it's also a lot of work, making it easy to get distracted. Fundamentally, a launch is really just a moment in time, a day that will pass one way or another. What's much more important is tracking long term metrics and adjusting your strategy over time. This goes back to the fundamental question of, why did you make the new feature in the first place? What is your company trying to achieve? Keeping these questions top of mind will ensure that your PMM team is seen as a major driver within the business.