How are product launches different in multi-product companies?

In multi-product companies, launches are inherently more complex because they impact existing customer perceptions and can introduce portfolio conflicts.

Three key things to manage:

1. Portfolio Positioning: Be explicit about how this product complements or differentiates from others in your lineup. You don’t want internal competition or customer confusion.

2. Orchestrated Messaging: Unified messaging that connects the dots between products can amplify the value proposition. Think of your launch as one chapter in a larger narrative.

3. Cross-Team Coordination: It’s not just a PMM exercise. Get product, sales, customer success, and marketing in sync from the start. Otherwise, you’ll end up with fragmented positioning and a diluted message.

We try to take a quarterly approach to launches where we bundle new product releases together along a common theme that’s relevant to a specific group of customers. (For example: helping you measure your ROI with LinkedIn Ads, or helping you build your brand with video on LinkedIn.) We tend to announce multiple launches together in a single blog post, email, sales training, webinar, press outreach motion, etc.

This is a great way to get more market attention rather than have many individual launches competing for mindshare at the same time. The key is to ensure you can persuasively tie them all together along the same theme of customer job to be done.

Quarterly launches create a certain predictable cadence that tends to work well in a crowded, noisy marketplace.

The main difference between product launches in companies with a 1-2 products and many products is how you give context on your product launch. For multi product companies, I think product launches will need to tell how this new feature fits into the broader context of your platform.

For sales enablement, you need to be able to define your new target personas, new processes, new content, etc and make sure you are thinking about how that fits in. Do you want to trade of $5 of your original for $1 of your new product?

• Product launches in multi-product companies sometimes require a more integrated approach compared to those in single-product companies.

• For companies with a single product or a narrow offering, launches are often more straightforward—primarily focused on defining the narrative for that specific product.

• In multi-product companies, there are instances where a product launch narrative connects the new product with existing ones. For example, customers can derive greater value by using multiple products together (e.g., 1+1=3). This is especially important when the new product enhances or extends the capabilities of an existing solution.

• For example, at BILL, we offer accounts payable, receivable, and spend & expense solutions. When we launched our new Spend & Expense API, we needed to ensure it was understood in the context of our other related offering – our Spend & Expense card and software solutions.  Our messaging had to clearly articulate how customers could manage spend and expense through our core software—while also leveraging the API for greater scalability and customization.