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 package of external content, internal enablement, product documentation, internal and external communications, etc. For each launch, we would produce things like: * Gold: academy classes, product documentation including in-app announcements, customer case studies (from beta customers), customer and prospect emails, community post, pricing changes as needed, live internal training, content like updated website, updated/new pitch decks, solution sheets/one pagers, social posts, blog(s), advertising, a press release, competitive battlecard updates, and more. All based on a new messaging doc. * Silver: product documentation including in-app announcements (combined for all silvers for the month), update the monthly customer newsletter, community post (combined for all silvers for the month), async internal training, some updated content as needed. All based on an updated messaging doc. * Bronze: product documentation and a community post. Typically for launching existing products into new markets, we would count that as a Gold launch - even if it did not need an external press release. That's because the level of internal and external awareness still needed to be pretty high.

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 cross-sell or up-sell of a new payable feature is to give users a hint or a teaser by showing them the new item in the navigation but using the page or spot as a "promotion" where they are encouraged to take a self-guided tour or get a demo of the product/feature. If you have in-app purchasing you could even use it to directly contract with customers without ever leaving your product. So rather than hiding a new product or feature behind a feature flag, show them what they don't own and what they are missing! Giving them a way to buy it or contact someone to buy it of course! For non-payable products or features, tooltips, a "new" banner, a star or other image, or other ways to highlight the new feature can call attention to the new area. You can embed a short walkthrough to teach people how to use the new feature or direct them to the help documentation. Guides can be used to both announce and teach users about new features.

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? Can you have a customer quote - with ROI or metrics - in the press release? Can you highlight 3-5 use cases of how your beta customers have gotten value from your new product or feature? The most successful launches have been the ones where I could answer yes to those questions. This starts even before you build the product. Ideally the PMM is working with your PM counterpart to understand what the path to getting customer proof points is. Is there a beta program, was there a design partner you can talk to? Get with those customers early in your launch calendar so you are building those relationships so that when it comes time to ask for that quote or case study, you already know who to go to. It may sound easy but it is not. It often takes longer than you think to get those proof points so ideally start early. The most impactful launches are the ones where we knew which customers we could leverage and where we had clear value-add stories.

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 things weekly at least for the quarter following the launch. The timeframe will likely depend on your sales cycle. I like to measure things like open pipeline, opportunities created, opportunities closed (won and lost), average selling price and total ARR, win rate, active vs inactive customers (if it takes some time to turn on), number of users (and customers/accounts) using the product/feature, retention rate of those users (number that continue using it vs dropping off). You could also measure things like support cases and open tickets. Plus I also measure some internal things like who has completed enablement, how many people have used the content we created, who is talking about the feature in Gong calls, etc. Post-launch measurement is so important. Team-wise, it's obviously important to the sellers for driving revenue but also especially to the product and customer support teams so they can improve and expand the product post-launch!

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 enterprise customers, this may mean more infrequent launches like monthly or quarterly. For companies with SMB customers, you may find weekly or bi-weekly is ok. But I have never met a customer that was ok with a totally unpredictable schedule of new features appearing in the software they use!! Now that feature flagging has become more common, you do have more flexibility. Your product teams can leverage flags to show new features to only a subset of customers, like alpha or closed beta participants first, then maybe moving to a more open beta, and finally opening it up to all customers. This can help balance the desires to push product out quickly with the needs of some customers to not see changes in the products they use. You may even need to limit changes for certain industries - for example not touching your retail customers' environments in November and December. Regardless of when the feature goes live in the product, you as product marketing can still decide not to "launch" it externally until you are ready. For example, you might have a big feature that you want to save to talk about at a live event. Or you have a set of connected features that are coming out over a period of a few weeks and you want to launch a single press release and external push around the whole set to make your launch more impactful. I would definitely advocate for understanding the bigger picture before you do your external announcements even if you are making a feature live inside the product.

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 as a new product launch with those three audiences. I would ensure you have different external-facing content (both in-app and out-of-app) as well as different internal enablement. It's important to consider the internal trainings as separate as well given that each company's revenue teams will have different questions and different needs. It's often best to keep each audience (the three customer/prospect audiences and the two internal audiences) separated at first so that you can address their needs individually. You can start to combine them over time once you have a more integrated product and message.

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. Best practice when you are launching products or features that are not yet available or that have mixed availability, some available and some not, is to be clear about what is live and what is still coming. This is most important for your existing customers who have the highest risk of confusion when you choose to do a launch like this. I would use phrases like coming shortly (if it is true) or coming soon, or starting with this part of the product and then rolling out more broadly if that approach applies. You have less to worry about for this in things like a press release or website update that will be more evergreen than you do for an in-app message or community post. You could focus your customer-facing communications on the value/benefits of the themed features and identify which use cases or features they will see first and so on. The key to doing this is to build trust with your audience. Ideally you would not launch a product that is not live without being clear about its status. Sometimes however, this is not possible. For example a last minute high priority bug that holds up a GA date but you still want to do the launch to take advantage of a specific date or event. In those situations, make sure you educate your internal team as much as possible since it is likely that your external-facing communications will no longer match the actual product status and sometimes you can't fix them. As long as you are clear with your customer-facing internal teams like customer success and technical support, you can minimize confusion and potential issues.

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 owns what. Corporate marketing appreciates being brought in on messaging and positioning, especially if it is a big product launch that might affect the brand messaging too. The campaign and digital teams are your key partners for multi-channel marketing. The content marketing folks are usually some of product marketing's best friends! And don't forget your partners in crime: customer marketing! Often times they are your keys to a successful launch, especially for those silver or middle level features. Building those relationships across marketing early will ensure successful launches. And make sure you give as much as you ask for. Take the time to explain things and ask for feedback and questions. You'll be happy you did! (and actually that applies for working with most teams, not just marketing!)

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 be more strategic. It's hard to change from a feature factory to a strategic partner overnight. My advice would be to work towards it over time and make sure that you are bringing strategic things to all your conversations with your key partners in product management, sales/revenue, and marketing. This could be competitive intelligence, trends and insights from influencers and industry analysts, customer requests, prospect needs, etc. The more value you bring, the more strategic conversations you will be invited to. But it should start away from a launch.

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 customers. Try a launch where you group several features into a theme and then hold features - or at least don't externally talk about them - until you can launch a number together into a strategic, themed launch. Even if you do only one or two launches like that a year, it can help both your mental mindset as well as give your customers and the market in general something new a different to focus on. You might find that it triggers more interest than your usual time-based releases. If you can't do a themed or use case-based launch, try using some new channels, test out a new tool that generates a funky type of interactive webpage, try out some new tactics and just see what sticks. There's nothing that says each launch has to have the same exact deliverables each time. Use each launch as an opportunity to try something different. Lately some of my team has been playing around with Google NotebookLM which generates crazy realistic podcasts. There's lots of room for creativity in even the most mundane of launches. Trust your gut and test something new!

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 also plan for change. The more flexible you can be the better!