How do you prioritize messaging adjustments post-launch, and how often do you make changes?

The behavioral shift in buliding a marketing team whose output is celebrated for small optimiziations occuring at scale is probalby the most important transformation a modern team can undertake. Moving away from the "6 month sprint to launch" and towards "the ongoing work of getting better at delivering the right message at the right time to the right audience in the right channel" is critical to better messaging. 

At Mozilla, our Agile transformation enabled a test/learn/adapt philosophy previously hamstrung by old fashioned approaches to launch marketing. But your team has to commit to the sustained ground game and we know how hard that can be inside a dyanmic org. You'll need a prioritization framework that can make the case for optimization of in-market work vs. starting on the next big thing; it doesn't have to be science, just defensible. And you need to have a cadence of planning where you can make frequent decisions about where to prioritize time and effort and ask each other where the best business opportunity lies. Two weeks sprints enable this quite well.  

In a Sales-driven motion, you'll generate incredible - if sometimes less numericized - insights by joining customer and prospect calls. Is sales using your messaging? If yes, how do customers respond? Hopefully, you've created a positioning and messaging process that invited sales and other stakeholders in and you should continue to invite unfiltered feedback on how your messaging is landing.

As I mentioned before, I always try to align positioning to where the product is going and where the company wants to be. Messaging can then roll out in several phases until it realizes this ideal positioning. Ideally, you have an understanding from research of what your prospects and customers believe are the key features and reasons to believe that deliver on your ideal value prop. With that, you can determine how often to adjust messaging as you evolve your product offering.

This is always difficult to find time for (really anything post-launch is hard to prioritize, we are all guilty of getting to launch and moving on to the next shiny object!). But one thing I find helpful is to align messaging updates with roadmap updates. Updating the roadmap is a pretty standard cadence for Product and Product Marketing, and I found that it is a natural forcing function to reevaluate higher-level messaging. Plus, you get more bang for your buck! When the sales and marketing teams are enabled, they will get the tactical roadmap and an update on how the messaging is impacted. Win-win!

In another response, I talked about the "Product Marketing Guide" -- this is intended to be an evergreen(ish) document that includes everything from foundational product positioning, to pricing, to competitive information, and a glossary of terms among other details that can be easily shared with your broader marketing team and other cross-functional partners. I encourage my team to revisit this with every launch to ensure it's complete and comprehensive. This might mean adding a few new terms to our Glossary or other light updates. Of course, some updates might slip through the cracks. All in, we'll end up doing a really detailed review of this document roughly twice a year to ensure it's up to date. On the cover page, we'll include a note of "Last Updated on XX Date" -- this helps to ensure we're keeping it fresh and signals to our cross-functional partners that this is indeed something that gets regularly reviewed and updated.