For international product launches, how should HQ and local offices share responsibilities?

Great question! Far too often, major product launches end up being HQ centric, with launch events at HQ, customers on stage that are from the same city at HQ, execs that are all based in HQ etc. The irony is that for most SaaS companies, the majority of their customers are nowhere near the HQ!

During my time as a PMM at Microsoft, I was able to be part of some awesome international launch moments that reflected a non-HQ centric model, also at Salesforce I think we did a great job and internationalizing our launches. Here are some learnings from those experiences:

HQ should provides several core launch components:

• Core messaging 
• Core content & brand identity 
• Core campaign framework (including mandatory tactics)

International regions should be empowered to:

• Execute local launch events (with local speakers, local customers etc)
• Execute local campaign tactics (ie, local influencers, local analysts etc)
• Execute local media strategy (using core messaging & branding) 

Overall, I’m a huge believer in empowering international regions to drive local campaign strategies with HQ providing a Core BoM to ensure a baseline of consistent messaging & brand identity. Of course, there is a broad spectrum of how centralized vs. decentralized this model is and it may vary across organizations (ie, Salesforce World Tour in Sydney Australia is incredibly consistent with Dreamforce in San Francisco, but just enough local content & campaign promotion to not feel like a US launch event!)

I have a lot of experience with international product launches during my time at Amazon. Here's some lessons that I learned - HQ should create the playbook for how a product launch should happen, including a timeline of all the milestone activities (beta, translations, marketing assets created, legal review, PR, etc.). My role was at HQ and was to lead local offices through this playbook of launches, clarifying and constantly tweaking the playbook to help the local offices be more self-sufficient and also to consider different cultural/geo needs. The local team consisted of a staff that led each culturally-significant function - marketing was the biggest one here, along with content editors/curators. In international launches, it is important that the local office understands the main essence of the brand and is bought into it, but also for HQ to be able to adapt to local needs. After the launch, the relationship between HQ and local offices should be kept up on a regular basis and the local office is going to be challenges with providing HQ compelling data that supports their need for new features or resources. The liaise at HQ (which was me in the my example at Amazon) should be the advocate at HQ for the local teams.