How do you best structure and leverage beta releases to assist the product team (with iteration, feedback) and Product Marketing (positioning, messaging, enablement, onboarding)?

The primary goal of a beta should 100% be focused on improving the product and giving valuable customer feedback to your product, design, and engineering teams. The way to make sure it’s impactful for those teams is to get really clear up front in a beta what questions we’re trying to answer. You start a beta because you have open items that need to be figured out before you’re ready to launch a product, and you hope that a group of hand selected users can help you figure those things out. Those ...Read More

My team at Atlassian has a framework for how we launch new products that I would love to share. But before I dive into more detail I'll give you a few tl;dr tips for beta programs.  Create hypotheses that you want to test before your beta begins: Decide what you're trying to answer about your customer, product, or design via the beta program. This is important to keep your focus and ensure you come out learning something.  Great for product & marketing: Beta programs can be used to gather pr ...Read More

A bit of an “it depends” answer. Sometimes people use betas for QA: does the feature we built work end-to-end? Other times betas can help you determine if you’ve hit product-market fit with your product. And everything in between. It’s best to get super aligned cross-functionally at the KICKOFF (or early in the development process) about how alphas and betas fit into the overall timeline, project strategy, and what the objectives and go/no-go decision are up front. Determining all that at the be ...Read More

Beta releases or early access programs are a fantastic opportunity to get a sneak preview of how users/customers will interact with and use a product or feature. It is really important to capture feedback early and often and package the "so what" back to your internal stakeholder group. This includes the raw data and feedback, but also an opinionated recommendation on what should be done to address. Betas are a great opportunity to test out messaging and positioning (in A/B format or other) and ...Read More

That's an excellent question. Done right, product release stages should service not just your product lifecycle goals but also the marketing/commercial goals that go with it. Just because something is in beta, doesn't mean you shouldn't amplify it via your marketing. Similarly, just because something is now technically ready to roll out into production, doesn't mean you should force an announcement out of the gates. Just like product strives for and MVP (minimum viable product) to test the water ...Read More

This will depend on your goals for the beta. Does the product team just need to test the product for bugs or are you establishing product-market fit? If you are testing the bugs, you can run the beta for a few weeks. In this case, you likley don’t need customer feedback because you can use your own data to figure out if the product is working properly. If you are establishing product-market fit, you’ll need a few months and explicit commitment from your customers to provide feedback. I recommend ...Read More

This is actually something we're working to improve at the moment, as the process at Intercom hasn't been that standardised in the past. Historically at Intercom, betas were driven by the product team and wholly focused on collecting product feedback (often via research interviews and feedback through our messenger). As our PMMs work closely with PMs - and are often involved in sending the messages to beta participants - the feedback from these betas would be shared with PMMs and we'd use it as ...Read More