AMA: RingCentral AVP of Product Marketing, Esther Yoon on Product Launches

I'm going to break this out into two questions: How do you tier launches?Launches are tiered based on business impact (yes, I know, very "captain obvious.") My whole point here is that I make a judgment call based on data, company goals, competitive landscape, market opportunity.  For example, is this a feature/product/capability that is going to move the needle for your brand, competitive positioning, sales revenue, PR coverage, analysts?  I like to tier based on business impact, but another wa ...Read More

Hands-down, Zoom Hardware as a Service. The messaging and positioning were quite simple, definitely the easiest part... the hard part was steering a purely SaaS company to launch hardware solutions in just over a quarter. I come from a hardware background, so it wasn't necessarily attributed to lack of experience. It was the new operations, sales infrastructure, accounting framework, and things of that nature that made it the hardest product launch I've done to date.  Calculating how you account ...Read More

Audience. Know your audience. It's cliche. I'm still going to say it again - KNOW your audience. What/who influences them? Where do they get their information? What does the buying journey look like?  Prioritization comes down to your goals and any testing you've already done. This is more of an integrated marketing / campaign question, but an awareness play is very different from a mid to bottom funnel play.  Ah-ha moment: Sometimes, the reality is, the budget dictates the channels. That's okay ...Read More

Every company has a different PMM philosophy so it's really important to dig deep into this whenever you're interviewing.  On my team, where I run core product marketing for RingCentral's flagship, I view product marketing's role as the nucleus for messaging strategy. Here are the 4 areas of where I ask my PMMs to spend their time and energy on. Everything outside of this falls as either a favor, gap, or distraction. Research (PMM is owner)These are activities that are designed to generate insig ...Read More

I only have one that I can think of that holds true for all types of products:Write a mock PR to have a clear understanding of the message you (and your team) want to land. Ah-ha moment: Your mock PR can be over the top! Do a kick-off and readout your PR with superlatives galore. Shoot for the stars! Write something that legal will DEFINITELY not approve - the best this, the most amazingest that. Use the PR to get your GTM squad excited... the review cycle will water it down, but at least you'll ...Read More

I like to have the flexibility to do both. But, if you see it as this or that, the latter ("Faster search is here") is designed to be a delightful surprise, the former (monthly cadence) is more of a type of predictable FYI. These decisions should be driven by lots of different aspects such as your org's overall email / customer comms strategy, feature implementation needs (will the large enterprise admin need 2 months to deploy this feature across their global org?), velocity of features/release ...Read More

For iterative releases, I spend the most time around developing and optimizing the operational rhythm. It's about effectively managing velocity and continuously refining workflows. For launches, I spend most of my time on the positioning, messaging, and hero assets to make sure it's steering the company in the right direction.Ah-ha moment: Using iteratitive release cycles do refine operations pays massive dividends for bigger launches. It's like going to the gym and working out... Use iteratitiv ...Read More