AMA: Zendesk Former Director of Product Marketing, Andrew Forbes on Product Launches and Release Marketing

Hey - Thanks for the question!  In my opinion, the best way of telling a great story is to really have an understanding of everything you're talking about - especially the heroes of your story. And to do that, it comes down to meeting with the people who are going to use the product you're planning to tell stories about; learning their pain points, learning what they do every day, learning how your new thing can make their lives better - and building empathy around them as a human and what they' ...Read More

This is an awesome question.  The way we've gotten ahead of it when I was at Zendesk - which has worked well - is by creating an "Operations Council" who is responsible for reviewing the operational components of a launch. This includes reviews of things like billing readiness, pricing & packaging, and making sure that we have reporting systems ready for us to track the success of a launch.  These meetings are staffed by stakeholders in each department as well as their respective leadership. ...Read More

Yes, we do! We use a number of frameworks depending on the tier (T1 to T3) of the launch. These have changed throughout the year as we've grown, but at their core they include the information below...  Core PMM Deliverables - Things like a Messaging Source Document (MSD) which outlines our buyers, their pain points, and all of our product messaging  Sales Enablement - This includes the sales enablement resources and tools, presentations to the GTM teams, and the scope of how we plan to ready the ...Read More

Great question! Yes, we have historically used a tiering system that's based on two factors: customer and business impact. These two criterion help us determine if a launch is a T1 to T3 launch.  Depending on the tier, the scope of deliverables changes quite significantly.  Here's how we break it down: T1 Launch: This launch provides a substantial financial opportunity to the business OR significantly differentiates us in the market. These launches get full integrated campaigns support as well a ...Read More

Ah, Sales Enablement. In my opinion, one of the MOST important pieces of a launch.  I have no shortage of tips, but for the sake of time, I'll keep it to four...  1. Align with sales leadership early on your enablement plans and make sure they're a part of the planning process. This will help ensure that key things that reps need to know are detailed in your plan that you may have originally missed 2. ROLE. BASED. ENABLEMENT. What your AEs need to know about a launch is different from Sales Engi ...Read More

I think it's safe to say that all product releases come with some sort of delay or scope change, it's to be expected. But, it can oftentimes impact the morale of the team if there are repetitive delays. The biggest thing you can do is be transparent from the beginning. Oftentimes, if you're working closely with your product teams, you can get a sense if things may slip and dates may change. When you get that feeling, it's important to have a conversation with your PMs about it so that you can re ...Read More

There are a lot of different ways to prioritize releases - and we're currently updating how we do it right now. If anyone else has any tips, let us know!! For the most part, we consider two things: business impact and customer impact. For instance, if something has a large customer and business impact, it's prioritized above other items as a tier 1 launch. Or if a launch has a high customer impact but a low business impact it will fall into our T2 bucket as we likely will need to do a lot of pro ...Read More

Hey - Thanks for the question!  Short answer - Early. and. often.  Get stakeholders in a room early on and set the cadence with them. When I was at Zendesk, we used a RACI model when it comes to ownership and development of launch assets. Set this and then decide when you want folks to review. My take is that it's always best to share before you're ready. Sometimes it can be hard to do because you receive critical feedback BUT that feedback helps immensely with whatever you're trying to do.  As ...Read More

This is a tough one! We've worked on so many awesome launches at Zendesk - and as the team who's responsible for our quarterly launch programs, we've had no shortage of fun launches to work on.  If I had to pick one, I would honestly say it was my first launch at Zendesk - our analytics product Explore. You could say I was "thrown off the deep-end" with this one.  I was relatively new on the PMM team but found myself in a position where I was the sole PMM working on the launch. It's my favorite ...Read More