AMA: Spotify Head of Product Marketing, Fan Monetization, Alex Wagner Lavian on Product Launches

A good product launch starts with a deep understanding of the customer – who you are building for, their needs/pain points, how to reach them. Building a phased research plan is key — it's important to gather insights to shape both the product value prop and the marketing plan. I find that a lot of teams run research early in product development, but I highly recommend building a testing plan to validate your positioning and creative concept. Concept testing and will help future proof your GTM plan by ensuring you are communicating the value prop in a compelling way that maximizes conversion with your customer base.

As you build out your GTM plan a key component will be defining the audience and the goals/KPIs. These two components will play a big role in shaping your channel and budget plan. Breaking this down further, if you are trying to convert existing customers to use your product owned channels may be more effective than paid, particularly multi-touch campaigns that involve both in-app messaging and CRM. If the goal is to drive both awareness and adoption with a broader audience, paid channels can be very effective. Paid social + influencer campaigns are a great way to maximize reach and build credibility at scale by placing your brand/product into cultural conversations, experiential activations create hype and generate press, traditional media like TV or audio ads boost awareness amongst large audiences.

Great question. Defining the product roadmap, setting launch criteria, and landing a launch date should be a collaborative process between PMM and Product. Together its key to consider a number of key factors: 1) What is the broader product roadmap for that quarter/half? How does this product fit into the broader plan/portfolio? 2) What is the value prop for this specific product? Have you validated product-market fit? 3) Do you and the team feel confident that the product is ready for primetime? No P0 bugs still open? 4) What does the marketing roadmap/calendar look like across the org/company? 5) Externally is this a good moment to breakthrough? Will customers be engaged? (look out for holidays, etc). Working through these considerations will help you back into a launch date, a marketing brief, and a GTM plan. While the initial launch day is great to build momentum and generate buzz, building a phased GTM plan with a steady drumbeat of tactics post launch will help sustain momentum and adoption to maximize impact.

When building a tiered product it's important to define the goals of the entire package and each tier. Once you set goals, you'll want to segment your target audience by tier to map benefits to each level. Each tier should have clear benefits and ideally one “hero benefit” to serve as the hook to get customers to sign up for the offering. While the tiers should feel distinct they should also feel connected so that customers feel motivated to earn/pay more to move to higher tiers. A clear example of this approach is building a good/better/best model where the base benefits get increasingly richer as you move to higher tiers. Once benefits/pricing is set a GTM plan that includes varied tactics and messaging will be key with flexibility to market the entire package + targeted campaigns for each tier.

It's important to define metrics and KPIs pre-launch typically as part of the marketing brief or GTM plan. Based on the goals you’ve set you’ll want to work with XFN teams like product/marketing analytics to set up a measurement plan or dashboard to track progress against these goals. It can be beneficial to track progress early on, a few days post launch and/or 1-2 weeks post launch so that you can adjust your marketing tactics if needed to accelerate or decelerate adoption. Exact metrics will vary for each product/business but a few standard metrics to keep in mind are: 1) product adoption 2) channel performance - open rates/ctrs 3) product retention.