AMA: Twilio Senior Director, Product Marketing, Vanessa Thompson on Product Launches

The one thing I have learned in the pandemic is that a presentation isnt just slides, its so much more than this now. Its everything about how you show up on the camera, and engage with the audience, as well as your presentation. Thinking about how to build the presentation specifically, I'd say choose an arc. There are some really common standard ones floating around in the industry. There is also a cultural aspect to which arc will go over well in your company. Watch for the typical arc your e ...Read More

Our org structure is pretty straightforward: We have PMM teams aligned to our major product areas, Messaging, Voice, Video, Email, Account Security, Flex (Contact Center), and IoT.  We also have a Platform PMM team. Because we are a developer platform, there are a number of horizontal features that our developers need, CLI, Functions, Assets, that span all of our products.  We also have Industry marketing embedded in Product Marketing. This helps us get better at an end to end offering for the v ...Read More

Because Twilio is an API-First product, getting the technical folks up to speed is a huge part of what makes us successful because they are the ones interacting with our main buyer, developers! This is a little different than a B2B launch. Generally though, there are three pillars to how I think about this:  Sales/Customer Facing team enablement - Keep your narrative tight. Make sure you are delivering no more than a 10 slide pitch and if you do nothing, you land the main product tagline, a cris ...Read More

Using a formula. Lets face it, product launches are a formula. You have a new thing, you position it, and take it to market. You can do all the research and testing in the world and you may not be successful. On the other hand, you might launch something in stealth mode, but Elon Musk tweets about it and suddenly you are everywhere (Clubhouse! Congrats to that team BTW). What I'm saying is that you can't predict everything. And the biggest mistake I see companies making is spending years with pr ...Read More

Our CMO always says, “Market your Marketing!” I love that because it's so true. The best thing we can do for our product launches is to bring the creativity and excitement to a launch. The more out of the box and memorable you can make the launch when you are sharing the launch news with your internal teams, the more excitement you will build. And in your case of company enablement, i’d also say that getting folks inside the company as excited about your launch as your prospective customers is j ...Read More

Making it memorable. One of the most memorable launches that I remember wasn't even one that my team did. It was one of our other awesome PMMs. We were launching our new CLI (Command Line Interface). If you have ever seen a developer coding, to the uninitiated, it looks like a black screen with a bunch of colored text. The PMM got black mugs and printed the date of the launch on the mugs using the same font as in the CLI. She planted the cups all around the office and then people started asking ...Read More

You don’t want a new feature to distract from the main hero product so you should think about the specific benefit customers that already use your main hero product are going to get. Of course you need to communicate the value of the feature, will your users or customers be able to do something they couldn't do before? Can they make more money? Is their experience simpler? Think about your feature messaging in the context of your hero product and that will help you figure out the main difference ...Read More