JJ Xia

AMA: Zuora VP Product Marketing, JJ Xia on Product Launches

October 1 @ 10:00AM PST
View AMA Answers
Zuora VP Product Marketing, JJ Xia on Product Launches
Top Questions
JJ Xia
JJ Xia
Zuora Vice President Product MarketingOctober 1
We roll out new pricing and packaging in conjunction with our seasonal launch cadence. (See context in question below). There are 4 milestones in every seasonal launch: * Product Readiness * Cross-functional Readiness * Internal Enablement * External Promotion There are two parts that to......Read More
2787 Views
2 requests
What is the best partnership process between product marketing and marketing when it comes to a product launch?
We have these as two distinct teams in our organization and we're seeing some confusion when we do product launches. Any documentation or words of wisdom would be helpful.
JJ Xia
JJ Xia
Zuora Vice President Product MarketingOctober 1
See answer below on “How do you think about the scope or deliverables for various launches?” Our Product Marketing org rolls into Product on the org chart, but we are every bit as part of the Marketing team too. For any launch, I think of Product Marketers as the quarterback for the rest of t......Read More
2467 Views
3 requests
JJ Xia
JJ Xia
Zuora Vice President Product MarketingOctober 1
Good question. For Zuora - which is a B2B enterprise software product - a “Big Bang” product launch usually drives awareness, not necessarily immediate adoption. It takes additional education to get a buyer to commit resources to the sales cycle and effort to adopt a new software. That being said......Read More
2054 Views
1 request
JJ Xia
JJ Xia
Zuora Vice President Product MarketingOctober 1
We break down external launch activities into one of three categories: * Market Awareness: Will it generate market buzz and/or leads? * Field Enablement: Will it help sales generate revenue? * Customer Adoption: Will it retain customers? Based on that, launch deliverables naturally fall into......Read More
2483 Views
3 requests
JJ Xia
JJ Xia
Zuora Vice President Product MarketingOctober 1
We haven't gotten big enough as a company to feel templatized, thankfully :) Our approach is – Every product launch should be a bit different because each product story is different. The story should dictate what’s included as part of the scope, not a template. Take these two launches for exam......Read More
1707 Views
1 request
JJ Xia
JJ Xia
Zuora Vice President Product MarketingOctober 1
First, every small subsequent launch is another chance to make noise for that buyer persona. So, it's a great thing that the product team continues to ship more features for that product line. We usually use every subsequent launch to highlight a different customer story, do another customer vide......Read More
1644 Views
2 requests
How do you think about the scope or deliverables for various launches?
Do you have a tiering system? What factors do you consider?
JJ Xia
JJ Xia
Zuora Vice President Product MarketingOctober 1
Over the years, we’ve evolved the launch process at Zuora. When we were a smaller company, we launched products whenever they became generally available. Now that we have multiple product lines, we standardize on 2 seasonal product launches per year – Summer and Winter. Our engineering team is co......Read More
4315 Views
2 requests