AMA: MaintainX Former Director, Product Marketing, Sherry Wu on Product Launches

I love this question. As PMMs, deciding WHETHER to launch a product in the first place is just as important as an actual launch. When planning a launch, it's important to define hurdle criteria & go / no-go milestones to determine when you launch. You can re-evaluate your launch if any of those criteria are not met. Some of the criteria that I've looked at include: 1. Customer impact. If customers aren't able to use it, it's not the right time to launch. In your beta program, you should be asking customers if they are willing to use this feature right away. If there are barriers to adoption identified, then that should be a signal that the product is not ready for prime time. This could be due to a number of factors (the workflows don't work for their teams, they don't trust the data, they're unwilling to budge from their existing system, etc.) 2. Timing & availability. If you have a great offer, but your company can't deliver the product right away, you should reconsider the timing of the launch. If you launch pre-maturely, then you get into situations where your prospects and customers are constantly asking yourself for the thing that you promised at launch, which erodes trust in your company's ability to deliver and puts your sales & CS teams in a tough spot. 3. Internal readiness. Are you thinking about launching a product in a new geography? What does it take to support that product in that geo? Will it be a good experience for customers? If your product is translated in Spanish (for example), but you have no Spanish-speaking teams on Sales, Support or CS, it may be pre-mature to launch / enter that market.

See my answer above - the KPIs that you choose when launching a new feature of an existing product should always be tied to business outcomes. When you launch features vs products, oftentimes the business goals can be framed in terms of product adoption and cross-sell / up-sell. Here's an example. Let's say you have two products: A and B. This feature is available on Product B only. Let's say launching this new feature may entice customers who have bought Product A to add on Product B. Your goals here would be to ensure that customers who have bought Product A are using this new feature (set goals around adoption, e.g. % of Product A customers who have activated this feature within 90 days), and create pipeline for customers of Product B (e.g. $XX pipeline from existing customers, 100 accounts from existing customers with open opportunities).

I've worked at Series B startups all the way up to F500 companies. The theory behind product launches is the same - you want to align your launch to business goals. But, the HOW (the tactics and resources) and the WHO (the team) behind executing a product launch are really where there are differences. At a F500 company, you've got dedicated teams for naming, brand, sales enablement, web, social, and more. PMMs might focus only on launch messaging at a larger company, and spend a lot of time on stakeholder management and alignment. At a smaller company, you've got fewer stakeholders to get in a room, so you can move very quickly, but PMMs will often end up wearing those hats worn by other teams (e.g. writing email copy, landing page copy, thinking about naming and branding, etc.)

There are two categories of KPIs - business KPIs and launch performance KPIs. For both types, the KPIs you choose to track depend on the goals of your product launch. Let's say you're introducing a new revenue-generating product. The main business goals of the launch might be to create brand awareness for your company and create $XX pipeline for your new product, and close $XX ARR within two quarters (depends on your sales cycle). Increasing brand awareness * Business KPIs: Ask your comms team (if you have one) for any KPIs that they use. Set a benchmark there. * Launch KPIs: As part of the launch, you might decide to issue a press release, pitch industry trades journals, and create a product landing page. KPIs here might be # of views on the press release, # of successful placements with media, and # of visits to the product landing page. Create pipeline for the new product * Business KPIs: Pipeline goals should be discussed with sales and DG partners. Let's say you want to generate $500K in pipeline from 100 marketing qualified leads. * Launch KPIs: As part of the launch, you might decide to host a prospect-facing webinar and send out an email blast to prospects. Now you're looking at KPIs related to the performance of each of these tactics -- # of webinar registrants, % of webinar attendees, email CTRs, etc. The main takeaway is that your business and launch performance KPIs should go hand in hand; the most important thing to do as a PMM is to frame your goals in terms of business outcome. Think about the goals you want to hit as it relates to product adoption, pipeline, revenue, etc. Too often, PMMs can get stuck in measuring only the launch KPIs, because that's those are easier to measure. But, it's important to identify those business KPIs even if you can't immediately measure them -- it ensures that you're tying your launch to business objectives, highlights the need for better visibility & tooling that you can build in the future. 

In my experience, this is one of the toughest things as a PMM. You always see the potential upside for making an announcement, and you can spin a story out of anything / convince anybody why something matters. But really, you need to exercise a lot of restraint to avoid overloading your sales teams (in B2B companies) and customers with the sheer volume of releases. I like to group features into regular channels (e..g monthly newsletters and webinars) so customers can appreciate the feature velocity but only have to think about digesting information once a month. For small features, it's not just about the splashiness of the feature, but the impact to customers. Here are a few examples: * Planned downtime -- this is not splashy, but users should know and be informed to plan around it. Think about the channels that you have to reach your target audience. Users may be active in the product, or it may be more effective to deliver notices via email. A multi-channel approach works well here. * Small polish features / improvements to their experience -- let's say you have a small improvement that isn't going to break workflows, but is just going to improve quality of life. Oftentimes customers will discover this improvement on their own. But, it can be helpful to highlight these features in some sort of monthly newsletter, to demonstrate how your team is continually delivering features to delight users.