How do you balance product development's desire to quickly ship products with marketing's desire to tell a compelling story/narrative? Have you had to influence release planning in order to have a more compelling narrative come launch time?

At times, waiting to announce a feature or product can lead to a much more impactful product launch. This can require patience on the organization's part. Think rolling releases vs. batched releases.

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3 Answers

Launch Frameworks Launch Messaging Launch Strategy

Stephanie Zou

Figma Vice President, Product Marketing • 6y

Most often than not, features are going to get cut in what product ships. It's probably going to be more MVP than everyone had hoped for. I'm a fan of leaning forward and telling a bigger story that includes features you plan to build, as long as you and the team are confident that it's coming soon. I know not every company or product team is comfortable with this, but I think it's such a great opportunity to talk about your vision and what you hope to be/achieve. We get asked this all the time ...Read More

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Camille Ricketts

XYZ Venture Capital Partner & Head of Marketing • 6y

We haven't run into too many traffic jams yet with this. One thing that has proven very helpful is categorizing releases into three types: minor release, notable release, big launch. We have standard marketing activities associated with all three. For instance, a minor release gets a release note update on our What's New page and a tweet. A notable release requires an email be sent to all users and more social media support. A big launch has a custom array of marketing needs attached to it depen ...Read More

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Bryan Sise

Checkr VP of Product & Customer Marketing • 6y

Great question. That’s a tension that comes up in a lot of organizations. I’ll start with what you don’t want to do :). You don’t want to slow down product velocity. You don’t want to be seen as advocating for the Product and Engineering teams to slow down the cadence of new releases they’re pushing out. (Keep in mind that I’m making a distinction between a product release and a marketing launch.)You also don’t want to miss the train. If you have set stakeholder expectations (whether explicitly ...Read More

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