How do you balance launch communications with an ever-changing roadmap?

This is always challenging your target audience and press have limited attention spans - so over-communication is never the answer. I would ask questions like:  What is going to be most impactful in furthering your broader company objectives? Is there an opportunity to bundle multiple features/releases in order to tell a more compelling story, based on what you know about customers, competitors, and market trends? Are there scaled channels, e.g. monthly newsletter or blog, where bundling launch ...Read More

At fast-moving startups, the product roadmap is often fluid. When you're facing a decision about whether to push out a launch or even deprioritize a launch, let the customer be your guide. Think about what features and capabilities they care about most, and prioritize your launches based on this. Not every feature will need a marketing launch - tiering your launches will be really important here (and establishing a tier for the launch in collaboration with your product counterpart), so you under ...Read More

That is something I think every PMM team struggles with! From an internal perspective, one thing that has really helped with this is having a tiger team of cross-functional leaders (PMM, PM, PMO, Eng, Sales) that meets bi-weekly to discuss roadmap items and any GTM launch dependencies. We use Jira to track any date changes and can see how often we're missing dates. I always want to make sure that PMM is not the cause of missing a launch date so I will work to ensure our content and comms are rea ...Read More

Staying on top of the Product team can be really challenging. Project management tools like productboard can help, but there will always be last minute changes. A few ways to handle this: At Klaviyo, we actually have smaller launches every month and a big launch once a quarter. The bill of materials for these launches is largely similar, allowing us to have a highly replicable process. That way, if a feature is slotted for the May launch but it slips to July, no worries, it can go in the July la ...Read More