AMA: TripActions VP of Product Marketing, Priya Patel on Product Launches

Customer research is so critical to the success of a launch and the extent of it will depend on the size and scope of the launch. At a minimum, you'll want to do customer interviews to understand:- The customer problem - The value the product will deliver- Who your target segment(s) and persona(s) areThese will serve as the inputs to your product or feature messaging and positioning. If you work at an enterprise-focused company, it's sometimes not so easy to get in front of senior buyers at the ...Read More

As the driver of the overall success of a launch, typically the PMM is responsible for the overall metrics around a launch. These can drill down into KPI categories like: Sales (ARR), Product (adoption or engagement), PR/Comms (coverage), Social (likes, new followers, engagement), Web (traffic, demo requests, form submits), Sales Enablement (asset views/downloads) and Demand Gen (will detail below) KPIs. At a more mature company where there are members of the marketing team specialized in these ...Read More

This is a great question. The key here is to get involved early - in roadmap planning and product strategy - so that your role extends beyond reactively launching features. If you're at a B2B company, this means you'll want to get to know the market and your target audience really well so you can deliver insights to the rest of the organization, especially sales and product. You'll want to have a perspective on key product gaps, where the market is moving and customer needs/expectations. In term ...Read More

I've never worked anywhere where releases don't get delayed - delays happen. The best you can do is to stay in as close communication with your key stakeholders as possible - informing them of updates in real-time. You won't lose trust with your team if you're open and honest: put a stake in the ground and establish a launch date if there isn't one, so that everyone can start planning their respective workstreams and you can ensure a successful launch. But also clearly communicate that there's a ...Read More

I've worked at companies with different philosophies on this. The main benefit of a monthly or other regular cadence is predictability - i.e., everyone in your organization is aware of launch timelines and can plan accordingly. Customers always know when to expect product comms. But a con is that releases can get lost when they're bundled together and when updates become very regular or templated, they can become less interesting to a customer. On the flip side, sometimes it's not ideal to wait ...Read More

At fast-moving startups, the product roadmap is often fluid. When you're facing a decision about whether to push out a launch or even deprioritize a launch, let the customer be your guide. Think about what features and capabilities they care about most, and prioritize your launches based on this. Not every feature will need a marketing launch - tiering your launches will be really important here (and establishing a tier for the launch in collaboration with your product counterpart), so you under ...Read More

I'll start with the first question around working with your PM team to get a sense of what's launching and product benefits. If your product team does not already do this, definitely work with them to see if they can develop a PRD or some form of product documentation that outlines the problem the product is trying to solve and what the solution will be. Here's an example I found quickly on Coda: https://coda.io/@john/prd. This is an important asset that all stakeholders across engineering, desi ...Read More