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

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 led by PMM, meaning Product Marketing should own, define, and articulate the following: * What is the new product area * Which buyer persona / company segment is a good fit * What is the messaging * What is the positioning and competitive landscape * What are some initial ideas that marketing can get involved with After the initial kickoff, we spin off into a few different streams, including: * PMM sync – different PMMs usually own various assets (e.g. sales deck, product demo video, etc) * Keynote sync with corporate marketing – how do we incorporate the launch into the next keynote * PR sync – what is the press strategy, message, and timing * AR sync – who are the industry analysts we want to preview this with and what is the schedule * Content sync – outside of product content, what other bylines or whitepapers can be produced * Campaign sync – what is the outbound campaign strategy and timeline * Web sync – how should the website be updated to reflect the new product launch

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. * The groups that are involved here are Product Management, Product Marketing, Sales Operations, Finance, Legal, and Documentation. This cross-functional group decides on the timeline and impact of the new pricing/packaging proposa. (for example, "if we need to add this to the CPQ tool, how should it be represented and when should it be updated by?") Once that's done, then Product Marketing leads the rollout. We do this during Internal Enablement for the entire seasonal launch. * The reason we couple it together is because it gets rather confusing for the field if we roll out messaging one month, pricing the next month, and competitive analysis the month after. Piece-mealed enablement hasn't been very effective for us. Instead, we anchor on a big-bang internal enablement week every season. * Once we've taught the field the new pricing and packaging, we ensure that Sales Ops also updates internal documents and tools to let the field start selling. 

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 effectively, then both orgs will be faced with a ton of questions from prospects / customers and they are only able to give generic answers. I find that this can always, and should always, be re-iterated after a Big Bang launch to ensure all teams are enabled with: * What do you say when a customer is interested in the new product? * What are the answers to common FAQs? * What content, demos, videos, etc. can I send them to give them more information? * What is an example of a customer using the product already? * Are my partners in Sales Engineering and Services ready to act if the customer wants to buy? From a customer comms standpoint, there should be continued marketing momentum after a product launch. Most people probably didn’t see / hear the first line of communications. Follow-ups can take the form of customer email communications, in-app messages, and other assets that can promote the launch from a different angle (e.g. webinar featuring a different POV, new customer case studies, etc.). My honest take would be – the best way to build a follow-up strategy is to build the product launch into a system and cadence that you already have. Some examples that we've built at Zuora are: * A "What's New" page on the website that we can keep pointing customers to. We update this for every seasonal launch. Subsequent in-app messages, email newsletters, and others channels point back to this page. * An internal Product Overview Deck that all of sales refers to for the latest and greatest product releases, updated every season as well.

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 that we do here at Zuora: * Subscribed SF Keynote Story: We have a flagship conference in San Francisco every June called Subscribed. Based on the major launch announcement of that year, we design the opening keynote story to build up to that announcement. Here’s an example of the keynote for the Zuora Central Platform launch earlier this year. * If you do end up watching it, you can see the “3 act” structure of the keynote. Act 1 talks about the larger global shift that companies are going through. Act 2 focuses on how individual companies tries to solve the challenges of that shift (“hard code and custom build their own systems…”). Act 3 reveals the answer (“that’s why Zuora built the Central Platform”). * Every year, we partner with our Marketing and Communications team to craft this end-to-end story. Since it’s the most ‘visible’ deliverable every year, it naturally sets the messaging tone for how the field and customers talk about the new product afterward. * Zuora Test Drive: Test Drive is a 14-day “free trial” of Zuora that comes with in-app walkthroughs and tutorials. * Not only is it a lead generation tool that lets prospects to get hands-on with the product, it also drives revenue by converting leads into opportunities. * For Major Product launches, we add walkthroughs / pre-built demos for the new product area into Test Drive – keeping it up to date opens new doors to target a specfic buyer persona and start new conversation for the sales team. * Customer Playbooks: For launches that are part of an add-on product, we create a playbook for our customer account management team. This allows our Account Managers to be more prescriptive and selective in educating customers on add-on products. * We do this by reviewing each customer’s existing product usage data and using indicators to identify which customers are “top candidates” for an add-on product. We arm the Account Managers with a plug-and-play presentation that highlight the relevant usage data and why this add-on makes sense for them. * As a customer, you get an extremely tailored story backed up with data rather than a blanket marketing presentation.

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 business user. Like most analytics tools, it probably promotes 100% data accuracy, ‘data at your fingertips’ on any device, and dashboards that let you slice and dice data to get ‘insights into your business.’ * The launch for an analytics product is not so much as about the product capabiliites, it's about what users can now do with that tool. What was the pain before this tool existed? What is possible now? What can the average business user get out of it? * In that case, a Product Marketer might prioritize a slick demo video, a hands-on trial experience with dummy data, a press release highlighting market proofpoints, and customer testimonials to highlight how different business users are impacted by this tool. An API launch promotes a completely different story. You are now bringing out qualities such as simplicity, speed, and functional completeness for a developer-audience. * The launch for an API usually highlights how easy and complete that API is, and the result of that is less complexity for the technical team and faster turnaround for the business. * To bring that out, a Product Marketer might highlight how well-documented that API is, how it is being used by developer-first companies, and how fast it was to implement. * One great example that I've seen – during the keynote at the last Twilio conference, Twilio launched a new product called the Command Line Interface (CLI). The product value anchors on speed. Hence, the keynote featured a side-by-side competition between a developer using the CLI vs. someone not using the CLI to perform the same set of 3 tasks, all displayed live on the big screen. Of course, the developer using CLI outperforms the other by a long shot. It was a brilliant way to highlight 'speed' for the developer audience.

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 conversation to define the scope. Like you mentioned, bundling features into a bigger story is the key here. It's often too late when PMs are handing over a finished feature. Instead, PMM should be involved in the conversation early to propose a few different ways that a feature can be positioned or grouped. We do the simple Amazon exercise of "What would a press release look like?" to imagine how different groupings can change the positioning/messaging of a launch. I can't say that there is a scentific way of knowing which features to bundle together – it comes down to whether the story is rational and compelling. Sometimes it focuses on a particular audience, sometimes it anchors on an industry-level shift. However, if you think your bundling proposal can pass the Press Release test, then you have something there worth talking about.

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 includes multiple product lines, so there is a different launch scope and deliverable list per product area. In general, each product area will fall into one of two tiers – a Major Launch or a Minor Launch. The difference between a Major Launch and a Minor launch is in how much noise we want to make. Depending on how much ‘excitement’ we want to create, that determines the deliverable list. Here’s the generic launch list that we look at and the associated owner (* Asterisk indicates an activity that we’d only pursue if it’s a Major Launch): * GTM Strategy: Product Proposal (positioning, target market, etc.). Owner: PM & PMM * GTM Strategy: Product Adoption Strategy. Owner: PM & PMM * GTM Strategy: Pricing & Packaging. Owner: PMM * GTM Strategy: Product Competitive Analysis. Owner: PMM * GTM Strategy: Field Assets & Playbook. Owner: PMM * *Internal Enablement: Company-wide comms: Owner: PMM * *Internal Enablement: Sales Enablement. Owner: PMM, Enablement Team * Internal Enablement: Technical enablement (for GS, SE, etc). Owner: PM, Enablement Team * *External: Press release. Owner: PR with PMM support * *External: Industry analyst briefing. Owner: AR with PMM support * *External: Event / Keynote Spotlight. Owner: Marketing with PMM support * *External: TOFU Whitepaper, Byline, Webinar. Owner: Marketing with PMM support * *External: Customer Comms (in-app, email, etc.) Owner: PMM with Marketing support * External: Product Demo, Datasheet, Blog, Case Study. Owner: PMM with Marketing support * External: Product Documentation. Owner: Documentation team with PM support * External: Product Training. Owner: Training with PM support