AMA: LinkedIn Director of Product Marketing, Andrew Kaplan on Product Launches

You need to pick a couple core beta success metrics or exit criteria that you and Product agree on. In our world, these metrics tend to boil down to some sort of business impact metric (like did we hit our revenue or customer adoption targets in the beta; are beta customers indicating X% greater willingness to pay now that they've used the product?), and a customer-value metric (is the product improving customer ROI or a key outcome by Y%, did it achieve our CSAT or NPS targets, etc?) For our la ...Read More

We try to take a quarterly approach to launches where we bundle new product releases together along a common theme that’s relevant to a specific group of customers. (For example: helping you measure your ROI with LinkedIn Ads, or helping you build your brand with video on LinkedIn.) We tend to announce multiple launches together in a single blog post, email, sales training, webinar, press outreach motion, etc. This is a great way to get more market attention rather than have many individual laun ...Read More

Great question! Here are some metrics we use in LinkedIn Ads for our customers, who are generally brands and agencies advertising on LinkedIn: Product adoption (as a % of revenue) Incremental sales or deal flow (difficult to measure but doable with the help of a capable finance partner) Customer-value or customer success metrics: Incremental improvement to customers' cost per qualified lead, opportunity pipeline, or other core campaign performance metric CSAT or NPS of the product you just launc ...Read More

A common mistake is not optimizing for people's limited attention. In a competitive or noisy market, you need to stand out. One effective way to do this is by attaching your product or brand to a thought leadership idea that is highly relevant to your customers and the core customer "job to be done" your product is addressing. But more than that, you need to articulate your message in a way that causes people to sit up and pay attention. Sometimes this means getting a little bit contrarian or pr ...Read More

Sometimes when we release a big product, it's not yet ready for the limelight of a major marketing launch. Why might that be? You don't yet have externalizable customer value proof points or success stories you can share with the market — like finalized case studies, testimonials, approved stag-sig data points on how much your product helps your customers. You might want to save the big marketing moment for when you have these amazing stories and proof points in an approved shareable format. But ...Read More

We do semi-annual planning with our product partners. This allows us to sit down with them and anticipate what they plan to launch and when and build this into a schedule or a tracker for the next six months. But more importantly, it allows us to get ahead of some of the things they want to build so our team can shape their roadmap and funding decisions with our own customer and market research. PMM should not be an order taker for the product team’s launches, we should be actively shaping those ...Read More

When we have a product that meets most customers’ core needs and we have solid testimonials/case studies/proof points that point to satisfaction and customer value, we tend to stage our marketing launch. But if the product is still not quite full-featured, we might release it to all customers but still position it as being in “beta” until those remaining last-mile features are available months later. We took this approach when we launched Accelerate, our AI-automated campaign experience The key ...Read More

Few ideas here: Ensure you have case studies or wins for each target sales segment so reps can have confidence in pitching. Have reps for each segment champion the new product: pick a few reps who had early successes and have them “train” their peers on how best to sell and, critically, how the product helped them hit quota, grow budgets or expand the customer relationship. We really found that if reps believe there’s something in it for them, they’ll jump at the chance to sell the product. Spif ...Read More