How different is a product launch for an acquired product vs built in-house?

A product launch for an acquired product vs. a product built in-house could be very different, largely dependent on how far along the acquired product is in terms of customers and brand. In many cases, the acquired product, especially in highly-technical categories, gets scooped up early by a company looking to fill a functional or technical gap (classic "buy" over "build" decision). In that case, it's unlikely that there are many customers or much revenue to account for so it should largely look and feel like and in-house launch. In the case where the acquired product has a considerable brand and customer footprint, there's a lot more to do, both operationally and from a storytelling standpoint. Operationally, there will need to be a ton of communication to existing customers of the acquired product with FAQs, next steps, any migration considerations as well as all sorts of sales ops/marketing ops back-end work (migrate CRM, SKU management, Martech stack) that the PMM lead should track closely even if you're not the responsible party to execute. On the storytelling side, you'll have to do broader framing about why and how the acquired product/company fits inside your company's portfolio (what use cases they address for which personas in which industries/verticles). Prepare for more in-depth enablement for the sales team and customer-facing roles like comms to make sure everyone can speak to the broader story.

This is a great question. When I worked at SurveyMonkey, I worked on the launch of TechValidate after we acquired them (third-party validated customer testimonials), and when I worked at Brex, we acquired Pry (financial modeling software), so I can speak with those firsthand examples in mind. 

The main difference is that customer sensitivity and branding play a much bigger role. 

• Customer sensitivity—How the customers of the acquired company feel is critical for the short- and long-term success of the acquisition. Often, the key business metric for an acquisition is to accelerate growth—whether that’s new users, paid upsell, cross-sell, a higher price point—and so it’s important to take great pains to ensure that the announcement and subsequent actions will feel especially good for the acquired company’s customer base. Disillusionment or churn would be a worst case scenario. Customers of the acquired company will have a lot of FAQs, such as “will you continue to support the products I rely on? Will the functionality stay the same? Will my main points of contact change?” It’s important to manage this change and help them understand what to expect so that they’re confident their business needs won’t be interrupted. You are working to build trust and loyalty.

• Branding—The acquired company will either fully adopt or partially adopt the brand identity of the acquirer as the integration of the two finalizes over time, and this has more complexity because it’s a merger of both a front-end (the brand) and a back-end (the product). Think: will the acquired product function as a standalone product with a separate login forever, or will it be folded into the acquiring company’s techstack? Will the UI change to be uniform with the other products? Will the logos be merged, or completely swapped out? In some ways, an acquired product launch can be similar to a partner marketing launch, except the dynamics are different (covered above).

The messaging is a bit easier for the acquiring company’s customer base, because it’s often a no-brainer value add, potentially only relevant for some use cases of the existing customer base (i.e., not relevant to ALL customers), and it demonstrates a position of strength and a commitment to continually improve the offering—all things that can only be considered “good news.”