Playbook Page

How Unity VP of Product Marketing, Jon Rooney, Validates Messaging To Hit Product Launch Stretch Goals

Unity Vice President Product Marketing

Summary

In this playbook, you will hear how a structured, disciplined approach to messaging can power a successful launch. In a previous role, where my team was responsible for launching a critical new product, we had to find out how to position the new product amidst expectations and biases around adjacent product categories. Analysts gave us feedback on our messaging, and we learned that our messaging and positioning would be the difference between the product dying on the vine or generating revenue.

We had a disciplined approach to iterate and validate our messaging, both externally and internally. This enabled us to nail our messaging — and launch with 18 reference customers who amplified our messaging and helped us exceed sales goals at launch and in quarter and quarter thereafter.

Who is this for:

This playbook will be useful to enterprise PMMs — especially those who are launching a second product or new product line meant to reach a new market.

What you will learn:

How to validate messaging by using external and internal sources
How to ensure that your messaging is actually used by GTM teams, rather than seeing them create their own messaging or asking PMMs to write all the copy
How to run a disciplined and rigorous process to validate, refine, and publish your messaging
How to build credibility for yourself as a PMM and for your messaging
How to maximize the impact of your messaging and achieve superior sales results.

Playbook Content

Context

When we were engaged in early planning, our company was in hyper-growth mode, and we were evolving from a largely single-product company to having a portfolio addressing different use cases for two distinct enterprise buying centers. This product was meant to drive revenue by increasing share of wallet with existing customers, as well as broaden the market perception of our company in terms of the workloads we could address (and thus the legacy competitive products we could replace).

The goals for the product launch were:

Drive net revenue with a new SKU
Increase share of wallet with existing customers by addressing adjacent use cases and displacing legacy solutions
Broaden mindshare beyond IT practitioners to provide more holistic value to IT and LOB leadership

The core team was:

Me and one other PMM

The team involved was:

The GM (executive sponsor)
Product
Customer Marketing
Customer Success
Sales

Framework

While PMMs create and own the messaging, it is not meant for us. It is an input for all the other GTM functions to do their jobs. When this is not done well, different teams all start inventing their own messaging, or they will require PMMs to write the copy for all collateral.

To prevent this, I use a disciplined approach to developing and validating messaging that follows four steps.

Set up disciplined management
Understand the product deeply
Draft, validate, and review messaging
1. Write hypothesis
2. Validate externally
3. Validate internally
4. Acceptance test
Deliver messaging with excitement