AMA: Route VP of Product Marketing, Aliza Edelstein on Product Launches

It looks like Loom has ~250 employees (according to LinkedIn), raised a total of $203.6M in their series C in 2021 (according to Crunchbase), and was valued at $1.53B. I’m sharing this mainly for context for other readers, even though my answer to your question will be a bit indirect because the startups I joined early were at least Series B and well-funded (i.e., not super early stage or lean). The big differences between lean/small/early stage startups and bigger ones are: Budget—money will be ...Read More

General answer: Revisit how the initial launch(es) performed. Scrutinize what worked well and what didn’t. How can you leverage those learnings to improve how you plan the GTM strategy for the re-launch? Geo-specific answer: Conduct market and customer research for that geo. If you aren’t the expert in that market, find relevant experts and talk to them. What matters to that market and how they make decisions should influence which channels and messaging you use.  Example: SurveyMonkey operates ...Read More

There are two great resources I highly recommend, aside from Sharebird (which contains a true wealth of guidance): Reforge’s Product Marketing course Product Marketing Alliance I recently took the Reforge course and got a huge amount of value from it, even though my career is over a decade long. There are always so many ways to keep improving yourself and your work! Both of my suggestions above have a price tag, so work with your company to see if they’ll sponsor a seat for you.  You can also fi ...Read More

Make it as easy as possible for your customers. Cannot emphasize enough that every decision you make should be prioritizing the customer journey and imagining how it will affect them. If it feels impossible, or as difficult as switching to a competitor, figure out how to fix it. No matter how exciting the benefits are, they may not outweigh the perceived “cost of switching.” Research: Do customer research to deeply understand how the customer will approach what you’re asking them to do. Can they ...Read More

It’s a great question, and I answered this in part above. To elaborate on setting benchmarks, you’ll want to work with your cross-functional partners (across Product, Finance, Revenue, Marketing, etc.) to determine what historical performance is most relevant to compare success to. It’s much easier to do if your launch is relevant for current customers, because you should have a sense of how they’ve reacted to/adopted products in the past.  It’s much harder to do with a net new market, and you l ...Read More

This is a 3-part question, so I'm giving you a 3-part answer: 1) The best tools: I’m going to answer the “tools” part of your question by talking about four documents I find critical for successful launches: GTM overview doc—This is a pretty detailed, dense document whose only audience is really PMM and PMs. It’s the place to document the thinking for the following bullet points, and it ensures that PM and PMM are entirely aligned on what is launching, how it helps customers, how it will be mess ...Read More

First, I always tie it back to a company OKR. The launch should be in service of at least one of them. Second, I typically work cross-functionally to determine the goals. Work with the Product team to define the product usage goal: most PMs’ performance is measured by product or feature usage/engagement/adoption, so the launch should aim to drive this.  Work with the Finance and Revenue (Sales & CS) teams to define the business goal: Is a certain amount of revenue expected from the launch? W ...Read More

One of my favorite expressions is “repetition doesn’t spoil the prayer.” Communication—or lack thereof—is the element that makes or breaks launches (or really anything in any work environment or relationship). I always err on the side of overcommunicating for launches and I’m a stickler for written documentation (which is sometimes unpopular, but it’s the best way I’ve found for everyone to stay on the same page…literally). The “Launch Plan of Record” deck that I elaborated on in an earlier ques ...Read More

This is a great question and I’ll share an answer, but it’s a topic I’d encourage you to discuss with your manager if you’re looking to grow from an individual contributor into a people manager role. In addition to having advanced knowledge or mastery of domain-specific skills, I look for the following core competencies: Problem solving & decision-making: You can take a high-level business goal, identify the problem, and come up with a strategy across multiple functions and the resources nee ...Read More

I’m going to answer your question indirectly first: Going from a single product company to a multi-product company is a big shift, not just in your business goals but also in your company’s identity. It’s important to think through how this second product changes who you are, and I strongly recommend you pause before launch to think through your corporate-level messaging, which I’ve written about in a previous Sharebird AMA here (first answer). A quick example: when I joined Brex, it was a “corp ...Read More

This is a great question. When I worked at SurveyMonkey, I worked on the launch of TechValidate after we acquired them (third-party validated customer testimonials), and when I worked at Brex, we acquired Pry (financial modeling software), so I can speak with those firsthand examples in mind.  The main difference is that customer sensitivity and branding play a much bigger role.  Customer sensitivity—How the customers of the acquired company feel is critical for the short- and long-term success ...Read More