AMA: Spotify Associate Director Product Marketing, Creator Promotion, Alex Lobert on Product Launches

Building a new product launch process can seem daunting. To do this, I recommend: 1. Start small. 2. Focus on delivering value. 3. Scale once you have “process market fit” Start small. Create 1-2 simple templates and process. This will help you get wins and keep maintenance / overhead low. For example: * GTM Template: A go-to-market template that can serve as source of truth for launch activities like messaging * Launch Calendar: A document and process to collect and share upcoming launches Focus on delivering value. Does your process have “fit” with your users / stakeholders? Just like a product launch, evaluate if you are getting adoption and if those that adopt are getting value. Ask questions like: * Is your template being used? * Do people use your product launch calendar or attend alignment meetings? * Have you gotten feedback from sales that launches are better coordinated? Or feedback from product that transparency is driving better launch sequencing / helping to avoid conflicting product launches? Once you know your process is delivering value, you can think about scaling. In my experience, you will naturally start to identify areas to improve templates and process. Just be careful not to create something so cumbersome that it can’t be implemented or maintained. More meetings and docs does not mean better.

Launching a feature to a new geography brings its own set of nuances. I find there are a number of pre-launch considerations as well as post-launch metrics to watch. Pre-launch, you want to evaluate if there are market specific regulations, competitive dynamics, or customer dynamics that necessitate a change in strategy. * Regulations: Are there legal constraints to how you launch a product to a new market? * For example, I regularly have to talk to our lawyers about the implications of privacy regulations in the EU when thinking about launches to that region. * Competitive Dynamics: Are you competing with different people in a given region? If so, do they have different strengths or positioning that changes how you message, package, or price your solution? * Customer Dynamics: Do you have different customers in a given region? Are they bigger, smaller, in a different industry, etc? All of this may change your messaging and channel strategy. Post launch, it’s important to assess region specific adoption and customer outcomes: * Adoption: Do you seeing different levels of adoption for given regions? If so, can you diagnose why you are having more or less success? * Customer Outcomes: Are customers using your product differently or getting different levels of ROI? Is there something about your customers that might be driving this? Asking these questions allows you to iterate on your go-to-market strategy such that it has a good chance of succeeding in a new market as well as allows you to diagnose how you are doing post launch and make necessary adjustments.

Good internal communication is a super power of great product teams but it doesn’t happen without concerted effort. The benefits are big though. * Gets everyone in the company aligned as to how they can support your launch * Surfaces potential product launch issues / conflicts. * Recognizes the team’s effort publicly But how do you do it? Just like with external launches, you want to map out who needs to know about your launch internally and the level of information required. * Sales teams may need information to help them determine who a product is for and scripts / messaging to help sell * Other product teams might need to know generally what is launching and how to get in touch with technical partners * Executives might need to know about how this fits with company strategy and how this will affect company critical metrics like revenue. Once you map out who you need to reach and with what information, it becomes a channel strategy question. At Spotify we use a mix of * Email * Slack * Meetings * Newsletters A bit more detail on how this works at Spotify: * Email: We do product launch specific emails to a broad set of stakeholders with high-level information about the go-to-market as well as means for getting more detailed information. * Slack: We use slack especially for driving transparency with adjacent product teams as well as to celebrate successes. * Meetings: We use meetings to educate the people who need to be able to fluently talk to a particular launch. This is usually sales teams as well as key product stakeholders. * We also have a monthly meeting to share upcoming product launches. The goal of this meeting is to both celebrate and as a final check for potential downstream implications of a launch. * Newsletters: And finally we have a number of internal newsletters that we plug in to for launches. These newsletters don’t have nearly the detail of the other 3 approaches but they get high-level information to a broad set of stakeholders.

This might sound too simple but I find the best predictor as to if your launch will work is feedback from the closest people you can find to the customer. I always recommend my team run messaging and go-to-market assets by internal experts on your customer like sales teams or friendly customers when possible. This allows you to double down on what will work and pivot away from what wont. We regularly change our messaging, channel tactics, and launch timing after having conversations with internal experts. We also have a client counsel that we can take particularly high-profile launches to for feedback. I find client counsels can be great for predicting success and making iterations because they allow you to test your launch in a situation close to the real thing.

I’ll keep this one simple. To track and sequence activities, create a “Run of Show.” The Run of Show is a document that has every activity, who will do it, when, and if necessary the asset to accomplish the activity (i.e. email copy, social assets, pitch decks, etc.). I just use a table in a Google doc to manage this. However any project management tool should work like Asana or Coda.

To know if a launch is successful, we look at if people are using our product and if they are getting the value we anticipated. We informally review metrics weekly with more detailed analysis done each month. A bit more on each metric. * Usage is simple at the top line. We look at adoption and retention. Prior to launch, we set targets based on similar products or based on information learned from pilots / tests. We’re always updating our forecasts / targets based on what we learn in market though. * Value is trickier to assess. This may quantitative like analysis as to return on investment or it may be qualitative and based on customer feedback (by way of sales, user research / direct convos, or surveys). My team at Spotify has a dashboard where we evaluate quantitative metrics as to adoption, retention, and customer outcomes (these are “easier” to measure given we have all the data on streaming / fandom outcomes). Additionally, we do post launch user research as well as have a monthly meeting to discuss customer feedback to make sure we have a pulse on if new features are succeeding in market.