How do you and the PMM team communicate updates and progress on your product launch to the rest of the org? What is the format? What do you report back on? Etc.

Question

Marcus Andrews · Accepted Answer

There are a number of ways we keep everyone up to date on the progress during a launch. Luckily at HubSpot we also have project managers to help us. I’ll say it, I’m not a good project manager. It’s another level of organization that I was just not born with. These people really help during this process, bless their meticulously organized souls.

We usually have a bi-weekly or weekly meeting as we run up to a launch with everyone who is part of the DARCI model. The key stakeholders. This is a series of updates and conversations about blockers.

During that meeting we usually run through some sort of doc, a BFS (big frickin spreadsheet). This sheet includes a timeline and is managed by the project manager but everyone is required to give updates. It includes a simplified red, yellow, green, view for leadership.

Slack: Open slack channels where we can @here big updates, share news, and have discussions is extremely useful.

Bryan Sise · Answer

I think the process of communicating about a launch to internal stakeholders starts with identifying the goals of the launch. As you consider launch goals and how you’ll measure goal attainment, it’s useful to distinguish between:

1) Channel metrics. These are metrics that show how many people you reached with your launch message, and how engaged they were with your message. Examples of channel metrics are open rate of an email, unique visitors to a blog post, views of an in-app message, etc. It’s good to track lots of channel metrics around a launch.

2) Business impact metrics. These are the downstream metrics such as product usage, new customers acquired, incremental revenue generated, or customers retained. You typically only want to focus on one or two business impact metrics for a launch. At the end of the day, it’s the performance on the chosen business impact goal that really indicates launch success.

It’s the chosen business impact goal for the launch that you want to include in your updates to internal stakeholders. You might be surprised at how including a business impact goal in your launch progress updates can make cross-functional stakeholders sit up, take notice, and think about how they can contribute to helping the company meet that goal.

Another tip for keeping broad internal stakeholders informed and involved in the launch planning is to use your launch team. In other answers here, I explained how, for launches of real significance (typically launch size M and above), it’s important for the PMM to assemble a cross-functional launch team. The PMM organizes and leads regular launch team meetings in the pre-launch period. Meetings may increase in frequency and have more required attendees as the launch draws closer. A launch team member is not typically the senior-most person from their function. They are a designated representative of their function, and/or a person who will create launch deliverables. Some launch team members (e.g. other marketers) will own the creation of key launch deliverables. The PMM elicits the help of these people, and establishes clear deliverable ownership. Other launch team members are responsible for representing the perspective of their function in launch team meetings, and filtering launch info back to other people in their function. Let’s say you choose a star Customer Success Manager to represent the Customer Success function in your launch team. In doing so, you are distributing the responsibility of keeping stakeholders informed. You will make it clear to the CSM that they are responsible for filtering info about the upcoming launch back to the Customer Success team after each launch team meeting.

Of course, for larger and highly anticipated launches, good old email updates still have their place, to ensure that information about the launch is making its way into all the relevant pockets of the organization. Whereas your launch team should primarily include the “doers”, your email updates can include a selection of senior stakeholders. A few tips on emailing launch progress updates to internal stakeholders:

1) Include an executive summary or TL;DR at the top. Don’t forget to mention the main business impact goal of the launch in the executive summary. If you have a request or action item for the stakeholders, highlight it in the summary, and elaborate on it down below.

2) Keep the whole email as brief as possible. Ask yourself: is this really need-to-know info?

3) Structure the email the same way every time. For example, you could have sections that cover developments and decisions since last update, emerging considerations and concerns, and requests for the stakeholders (the elaborated version of the requests that were mentioned in the executive summary).

For larger launches, build internal celebrations into your launch plan. Here are some examples of internal celebrations my teams have led:

1) An ice cream social with the whole company invited.

2) Stickers and postcards left on the desk of every employee at HQ to serve as a token of the launch. The postcards included launch messaging to teach every employee about how to talk about the newly-launching product with people outside the company.

3) Launch messages queued up in our employee advocacy platform Dynamic Signal, enabling all employees to celebrate the launch by sharing the news in their favorite social channels.

4) A post on our internal blog, thanking the Engineering team for the work they did to build the new product, and describing the technical challenges they overcame to make it happen.

Finally, as the entire launch process runs its course and once the dust settles, don’t forget to package up a recap of launch performance. The best way to do this is usually to hold a launch reflections meeting with your launch team, to discuss what went well and less well about the launch, and what the learnings are for next time. Then share the launch outcomes with the broader stakeholders you had been communicating in the pre-launch period, including key performance metrics, business impact attainment, learnings, and perhaps most important, gratitude for the contributions of people throughout the company. (Don’t forget to thank the people who built and support the product, not just the people who took the product to market.)

If things went well, celebrate it. If things didn’t go so well, own it — stakeholders will respect you more if you do.

LaShaun Williams · Answer

We communicate updates and progress two ways. For each launch, we create a Slack channel specific to that launch and the people directly involved in decision-making and execution. Whether it is private or public depends on the culture of your organization. We also have a public marketing Slack channel where we generally keep folks in the loop on marketing efforts. We share weekly updates that can include updates and progress on product launches.

Daniel J. Murphy · Answer

Slack, wiki and weekly meetings.

There's no one tool. But the approach is overcommunicate everything. Repeat information, go through a launch plan twice a week with the team, just spend time practicing and covering all the details.

The launch plan is created in an internal wiki (whole company can access and see the plan) and we're constantly sharing the plan in Slack leading up to the launch, as things change, as we get work done.

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