AMA: LogDNA Director of Product Marketing, Alissa Lydon on Product Launches

Just like in marketing, sales enablement is all about knowing your audience. At the top level, that means understanding what motivates them (i.e. closing more deals, expanding existing customer base, etc.), and tailoring your enablement to help them understand how a new product/feature will help them achieve those goals. To refine this, I like to bring sales stakeholders into the enablement creation process so they can advocate for their team's needs. The side benefit of this is that it gives your enablement program a better chance of success. Additionally, remember that there are different audiences within a revenue org. It's not just salespeople, there are often technical sales and customer success personas. In some cases, I find it helpful to break enablement into those smaller groups to cater to their specific needs. For example, sales aren't as interested in the technical nuts and bolts of a product or feature, but for technical sales it is crucial they understand the inner workings to build effective demo stories. For that reason, I often have separate "technical enablement" sessions to best meet those needs, as opposed to trying to lump everything together and risking the chance of losing people along the way. Finally, I think we sometimes forget that humans all learn in different ways, and none of us fully understand something the first time we learn it. For those reasons, I try to find ways to present information in different ways, and not be afraid to repeat myself in various forums. For example, some people might learn best visually with slides, others might be auditory learners and love a podcast-style training session. And no matter the mediums you use, be sure to share them widely across various channels (email, Slack, sales enablement platforms, etc.).

One word: retrospectives! For me, the success or failure of a single launch isn't as important as what we learn along the way. However, in every company I have been at this has been the hardest thing to implement consistently - especially in high-growth organizations where it feels like you are sprinting from one project to the next and don't have time to look backward. But make it a priority to sit down with all of the stakeholders from the launch (preferably as one group), and take the time to talk through how they thought it went. A good framework I learned for guiding this discussion is answering three key questions: * What should we start doing? * What should we stop doing? * What should we continue doing? The more you can bake this into the launch process, the more you set yourself up for even more success in future launches, and not just from a process perspective. Taking the time to have these conversations builds trust with your cross-functional partners, and makes them feel like part of the process. This results in stronger partnerships moving forward, which is what launching is all about!

I always tell my PMs that the earlier PMM is looped into feature development planning, the better. Of course, we want enough lead time to prep for a successful launch. But even before we think about the launch, PMM should bring their insights to the table when the team is in the planning stages. This allows us to bring feedback from the field and customers, as well as share any market or competitive trends we have discovered. 

Let the data tell the story of your ICP! Use your existing customer base as a starting point. Take your best customers and look at them in aggregate - what patterns emerge across industries, company size, tooling adoption, maturity indicators, etc.? From there, you have a great base to help inform outbound targeting efforts. If you're starting from scratch, then lean on internal expertise across the org (Sales, Product, Exec) and market data to build your hypothetical ICP. From there, you can validate with external research, or test via ABM programs. In either case, it's all about finding a diverse set of data sources, letting that data guide you to a hypothesis, and continually testing and iterating.

For organizing and keeping track of launch activities, I created templates that I have carried with me from company to company. They contain all of the best elements from past launches (both my own and other PMMs I have learned from). And frankly, there is nothing fancy about them - they are mostly just spreadsheets! It's not to say that there aren't tools that can help streamline processes - I've seen launches effectively organized in Trello and Asana, for example. But what I like about my collection of self-made templates is that they are easily customizable and flexible to fit my immediate needs. I also feel connected to them, which helps me feel confident in implementing them. However, as important as templates are to provide a single source of truth, I believe that the real trick to ensuring continual alignment is to find spaces for constant communication. For many PMMs this usually means weekly (or even daily) launch standups. For me, I've found success in ritualizing a weekly "What's Shipping" call with all of the key stakeholders in the org (Product, Sales, Marketing, Success, etc.). This is a standing meeting where we check in on all launches in flight, review the launch plan spreadsheets, perform retros post-launch, and more. If we don't have any launches to talk about, we don't have the meeting. But by creating a constant touchpoint, it builds a habit within the org that we are always thinking about launches. As a result, everyone feels more confident with how launches is progressing and can pass on relevant information to their teams so everyone is in the know. In short, it's all about constant communication!

For new products and major features, I find it invaluable to go through a complete messaging exercise. This is an iterative process that involves collaboration with Product, Marketing, and Sales. I've developed a template for this over the years that combines the things I liked most from the past messaging exercises. While this list is not exhaustive, these are the things I have found are most valuable to building messaging that resonates not only externally, but also internally with the teams that need to market and sell the product: * Define worldview - What is the problem we are seeing in the market that necessitated the creation of this product/feature? * Define solution - What have we built that helps solve the problems defined in our worldview definition? * Positioning statement - How are we differentiated from similar players in the market? * Competitive value - A deeper dive into the competitive landscape, how we compare at the feature level, and our differentiated value. * Messaging matrix - This is the holy grail of how to message to various personas. This includes a mapping of value props, key messages, and features/use cases to the challenges faced by different personas. I often abstract this out into its own asset (which I call the Value Framework) that acts as a kind of cheat sheet on how to message to various personas.

There are two levers I think about when deciding how we should measure launch success: * Are users successfully adopting the product/feature? * Are we successfully attracting users to adopt the product/feature? The first bullet point is all about the product experience, and speaks to the partnership PMM must have with PM to effectively measure usage and engagement. Product might have north star metrics that you can align with, or sometimes it requires identifying new usage metrics and partnering with PM to instrument them. The second is all about marketing and sales, mainly how PMM enables those teams to create and execute campaigns that resonate in the market to meet revenue goals. There are a ton of metrics you can attach to (website visits, trial sign-ups, conversion/win rates, number of paying customers, etc.). You can see how all of these KPIs would get overwhelming, so I don't recommend trying to attach to all of them in a launch. This is where launch tiers can help guide you. Is this a major new feature that we think will open up new personas, use cases, etc.? You'll want to prioritize KPIs around funnel metrics and ARR numbers (new business, upsell/cross-sell). How about a smaller update that improves the user experience? Rotate more towards product usage and adoption. Of course, these are simplistic examples. But sometimes it's good to start from that perspective, rather than try to boil the ocean with too many KPIs for a launch.