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

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 t ...Read More

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' ...Read More

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 cus ...Read More

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 la ...Read More

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 as ...Read More

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 fo ...Read More