AMA: Pendo.io VP Product Marketing, Jackie Palmer on Product Launches

Similar to many other PMM teams I think, we group our launches by levels. In my previous company we called these Gold, Silver, and Bronze where a Gold launch was something press release-worthy, a Silver launch was something meaty and interesting for existing customers but maybe not as impactful for the broader market or prospects, and a Bronze launch was something smaller which usually just needed a mention in the release notes or similar. For each of these launch levels, we created a launch pac ...Read More

This is a question near and dear to my heart because at Pendo, we use our own product to announce our new products and features in our application! Nowadays there are lots of ways to leverage in-app communications to announce new products and features. A basic way to get started is an in-app notification or announcement via a guide. You can also reserve a spot in your help center or resource center to highlight new features. One thing that has become especially popular when you want to encourage ...Read More

I think the best launches I've done tied directly to a value-add or customer painpoint. When I think back, the most impactful launches weren't because we wanted to release something at a time that was convenient for us, rather it was something that we released because it was ready and had customer proof points we leveraged in the launch. The more you can tie a product launch in to a customer example, the better. Can you bring a customer on stage with you at the event you want to do a launch at? ...Read More

This has to start from the top. Make sure your product marketing leader is connecting with the leaders of other departments like sales/revenue, product management, other marketing teams, etc. You can't expect it to happen overnight and you can't expect to hold up or delay a launch just because you want things to take a more strategic approach if you are just starting out at a company. Make sure you are doing your prep for building those relationships and then for the next launch, you can aim to ...Read More

This is a question that comes up at every company I work with or talk to. As product teams have moved towards continuous delivery, there's a desire to just launch new features whenever they are ready. This is often not the most ideal thing for customers however and we as product marketers need to advocate for our customers! I would recommend working with your product and engineering to come up with a release cadence that makes sense for your specific customers. For companies with large enterpris ...Read More

The best approach when pulling together a cross-functional team for a product launch, either cross-marketing, cross-company, or both, is to have a solid launch plan with defined deliverables and assignees for each task. Big launches that need cross-team coordination benefit from having a project manager and/or project management tools like Asana, Monday, etc. Of course spreadsheets work too! It's always best to identify the deliverables and tasks ahead of time and get alignment on which team own ...Read More

This is something many people forget about - you have to keep measuring impact after a launch! Especially if your sales cycles are longer. Yes there is the set of metrics you can track on or close to launch day like blog and/or press release views, social post engagement, click throughs on emails or ads you've launched etc etc. But then there are the longer tail metrics like pipeline/opportunity creation and product usage/adoption. For a big launch, I typically ask to see a dashboard of those th ...Read More

You might think that the two are related but in fact they do not have to be! In this era of continuous releases, there's nothing that says your launches and your product release dates have to be related at all. I have had great success with launching related sets of product features (themed together) when some of the features are still in beta or when some are not yet live. Ideally the feature release dates are somewhat close to your launch date but you can make it work even if they are not. Bes ...Read More

I definitely agree that sometimes you can start to feel like a project manager vs a product marketer. This often happens when you have consistent releases and lots of them, maybe monthly or bi-weekly vs bigger impact larger releases with more time in between. If this is something you have started to feel, I would encourage you to try a launch that has a different approach, perhaps a themed launch or a use case-based launch. Sometimes you need to change things up, both for yourself and for your c ...Read More

As a self-professed planner, my top piece of advice is to make sure you stay on top of things with some sort of tracking mechanism, whatever works best for you. That said, no matter how much you plan, there will be some last minute change or someone who goes out sick or something that fails on the morning of, so even though I am a planner at heart, I am also realistic and know that I have to go with the flow. So my don't miss piece of advice is don't let things get to you. Plan, plan, plan but a ...Read More

This is an interesting question because for an acquired product you need to address three audiences: your existing customers, the existing customers of the acquired product, and prospects net new to both companies. I would encourage you to think about creating different messaging for each of these three audiences when you launch an acquired product. I've gone through multiple M&A integrations in my career and the ones that have been most successful have started with treating the acquisition ...Read More