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

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 touch Pricing & Packaging. First, getting pricing and packaging ready is part of #2 Cross-Functional Readiness.  This is when multiple groups come together to propose, align, and decide on a pricing/packaging strategy. ...Read More

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 constantly shipping new features, but from an external communication perspective, it helps to consolidate information 2x per year for customers, analysts, and press. Each of those seasonal launches include ...Read More

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 the marketing team. It’s the product marketer’s responsbility to be proactive and come up with the strategy, positioning, and messaging first. We usually kickoff the launch at a Marketing All-Hands. This is l ...Read More

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 one of the categories. Outside of the typical external launch activities (see my answer below for "How do you think about the scope or deliverables for various launches?"), there are certainly some unique ones tha ...Read More

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, a coordinated follow-up between Marketing <> Sales <> Services <> Customer Success makes all the difference here.  For example, if the launch did not enable Sales and Customer Success ...Read More

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 example – one for a new analytics tool and one for an API. (We've done both here at a Zuora, so I'm generalizing and drawing from some distant experience.)  Let’s assume the analytics product is built for a bus ...Read More

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 video, and fire up the sales team. Second, I often find that PMMs will take the product/eng identified "scope" for a smaller release and try to make that into something – rather than being involved in the co ...Read More