AMA: Unity Vice President Product Marketing, Jon Rooney on Product Launches

Your product launch strategy should be created out of answering two fundamental questions: "What problems are we solving for whom and why are we uniquely set up to win here?" "How exactly will we capture the additional value we're creating and what does that mean to our business?" Once you have crisp, clear answers to both, you can start building a launch strategy. Some launches are about introducing a new project for a new audience, which is a completely different motion and level of effort tha ...Read More

Decisions around which channels to use for a product launch should be driven by the same two fundamental questions you need to craft a launch strategy: "What problems are we solving for whom and why are we uniquely set up to win here?" "How exactly will we capture the additional value we're creating and what does that mean to our business?" Your channels are a function of who you want to reach with what message and what your want them to do once they receive that message. So if you're launching ...Read More

We've all had to launch products before they're fully baked, and while it may be nerve-racking, you can think of the exercise more of a market introduction rather than a traditional product launch. You might want to focus on building awareness and credibility through top-of-the-funnel assets like whitepapers and infographics that speak to the market landscape and the use cases that your in-development product is setting out to tackle. Setting the groundwork with any 1st or 3rd party research abo ...Read More

I always frame a "release" as an engineering event in which new capabilities or a new product (after having been deemed "complete," passing QA, Docs fully update, etc) are either ready to be made available to customers in the form of distinct Release Candidate (RC) build or, in the case of SaaS, made available to customers on a rolling basis. Either way, there's no integrated marketing support in the form of PR, AR, social, demand gen, etc - that would be a "launch" - but PMM still needs to make ...Read More

The best tool for a product launch is a single system of record that captures both the strategic "why? what are the goals?" as well as the tactical "who's doing what, by when?" in one clear, easily discoverable place. This could be a tool like Airtable, Asana, Monday or something as simple and universal as a well-structured Google doc/sheet. Whatever it is, pressure-test and socialize the plan template as much as possible with stakeholders across marketing, product, sales, customer success, etc. ...Read More

How you should measure the success of a product launch should be driven by the same two fundamental questions you need to craft a launch strategy: "What problems are we solving for whom and why are we uniquely set up to win here?" "How exactly will we capture the additional value we're creating and what does that mean to our business?" Looking particularly at question #2, you have to work backwards from what success for the business ultimately looks like. Is it about generating leads and contrib ...Read More

A product launch for an acquired product vs. a product built in-house could be very different, largely dependent on how far along the acquired product is in terms of customers and brand. In many cases, the acquired product, especially in highly-technical categories, gets scooped up early by a company looking to fill a functional or technical gap (classic "buy" over "build" decision). In that case, it's unlikely that there are many customers or much revenue to account for so it should largely loo ...Read More