AMA: Shopify VP Global Head of Product Marketing, Desiree Motamedi on Multi-Year Product Launches

PMs are like your close family. There are lots of heightened emotions throughout a launch—good and bad. It’s a partnership that must stay rigid because they truly are your partner in crime. Some of the best PMs I’ve worked with have challenged me and honestly, I value that. Making sure that you hear everyone’s perspectives is the only way to be sure that you’re covering all of your bases in a launch. I encourage PMMs and PMs to push each other in the right ways for this exact reason. You’ll ALWA ...Read More

Of course there are a number of things that can go wrong when launching a product, but I think the most impactful lesson I’ve learned to date is that you must be prepared for both the good and the bad outcomes of a launch. In a previous position at Adobe, I was working on the CS 5.5 launch that rolled out only a year after the previous one—we’d usually allow for about 2-3 years in between launches. We were so excited about all of the product improvements that would come out of the rollout that w ...Read More

Aligning with the product team BEFORE launch is key. Take the time to set your expectations and benchmarks. There are a variety of considerations here, of course: awareness, adoption, engagement, to name a few. In my experience, fine-tuning these benchmarks a little bit goes a long way. Acknowledge that some KPIs are super important, and that some are dependent on other KPIs, for example. Observing results from a zoomed out lense is vital, but zooming in a bit helps you answer the reason behind ...Read More

This is just timely, but we just shipped Shopify Editions. One thing that became clear for the Shopify organization is that with all of the product launches across different teams, you have to be sure to keep up with all of them—especially the ones that are rolling out on an ongoing basis. When a company is rapidly growing in their offerings, it’s a good time to consider a new approach to the way you launch products. Having a central location for everything has brought a new level of awareness t ...Read More

Everything starts with product. We make it a best practice to learn the goals of the product organization, then look at how the PMMs’ work ties back to them. Personally, I report into product, and it’s worth noting that a lot of PMMs do not. Reporting into product helps me ensure that, as a company, our goals are aligned. Practicing this flow of work enhances visibility between teams and it’s one of the main catalysts that brings our company’s vision to life. The ‘trickle down’ effect is promine ...Read More

We used to host a developer conference at Shopify called Unite where we’d speak on updated product releases either in-person or online, but as time has gone on, traditional marketing is changing. It was time that we acknowledge that and change the way we bring our products to market. We needed to find a way to give our stakeholders a reliable and consistent way to have visibility to our growth so that they understand what we’re doing for them and how we can make their lives easier. This is not o ...Read More

I like to use the GTM T-shirt sizing exercise to prepare for launches. It involves first figuring out the level of resources you’ll need to GTM, then fine-tuning the criteria needed to make it the most successful it could possibly be. At this point, you want to assess things such as product value, the degree of existing customer reach, competition/market dynamics, and risks/sensitivities. Of course there is no fixed formula and these things vary based on each launch, but giving yourself this hig ...Read More

This looks like 2 questions, but it goes back to your relationship with product managers - you need to make sure they bring you into the process very early on when they are prototyping the feature/product. You want to understand what they are trying to solve, so you can align on what the GTM could look like. You also need to have an honest discussion on why they think these small enhancements deserve a big push if you believe they don't need a bigger GTM. It goes back to the t-shirt sizing exerc ...Read More