AMA: Spotify Director, Head of Creator Brand & Product Marketing, Sam Duboff on Product Launches

Having a documented tiering system across your full PMM organization is really important for a few reasons — it helps create consistency across marketers who might be working on different areas of your business; it creates efficiency to PMMs don't have to re-invent the wheel for each GTM; it helps set realistic expectations with product teams to know what to expect from a launch; it creates a useful internal shorthand to talk about how "big" GTM moments are; and it helps with benchmarking, so yo ...Read More

Yes, templates can be helpful, as long as they don't limit your creativity and thinking. Sometime you can get into a "rinse and repeat" rhythm with product launches and miss bigger opportunities — and a really rigid launch template can create that dynamic. One resource I've found to be effective to help other teams know how/when to plug in is a "Teams We Work With" document. Organized in phases (discovery, development, strategy building, GTM rollout), it details each of the teams that PMM engage ...Read More

Answered a question about how I think about tiering framworkers. I think the core ingredients of a successful launch really depend on your business — size, B2B vs. B2C, business model, stage, etc. — so it's hard to say. I'd say in general, I've found the most important quality is planning a launch as a PMM is having a point of view. A successful launch is opinionated, inspires people to use the feature in a specific way, and educates users not only about that feature, but about your whole produc ...Read More

Can really vary product to product — but I'd separately track product metrics you're able to drive and marketing channel performance. If you have the tech stack for it, ideally you can measure how much product adoption was driven your marketing efforts to keep yourself accountability and prove incrementality. For your marketing channels, you'll want to maintain a rigorous internal dashboard of engagement rates, open rates, performance metrics, etc. for all your launches, so you can develop accur ...Read More

Navigating a long beta period can be tough for a marketer. At worst, it can lead to you losing the opportunity to shape perception of the product and taking the wind out of your sails. When you launch the "beta," it can be hard to drive excitement given limited availability. Then by the time you "launch," it's no longer news. Usually the beta period is required for some really strong technical reasons. In those cases, I've seen some smart ways of turning a beta period into strategic part of a GT ...Read More

That sounds really challenging, but exciting to work on a product that iterates so quickly. First, I'd work with your product team and try to show the impact of bundling a few small updates at a time, rather than piecemeal. It's tough to break through if all the updates are small and are so frequent — users start to zone them out. You can better help reach product goals with bigger launch moments that can pack more of a punch — which will help the product team reach their goals, too. Can you get ...Read More