How do you launch new features in products? Plus, what are the best resources to learn product marketing from? (Could be a podcast, following some good companies, books, etc)

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Director of Product Marketing, 6sense • June 21

When launching new features in products, you can influence activation by reaching your customers where they are in their journey. Whether that's in-app with embedded posts, product tours, explainer videos - or reactivate sleepy customers with targeted email messages. Best resources to learn from: your peers! Join a community like product marketing alliance and try to find mentors (I am always open to chat and coach!). Books: Story brand by Donald Miller, Obviously Awesome by April Dunford, On Writing Well by Willian Zinsser. Podcasts: The Product Marketing Insider, The Product Marketing Exp...

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Jodi Innerfield

Senior Director, Product Marketing, Salesforce

Tiering and t-shirt sizing a launch should be based on "how impactful is this to my customer and the company?" If it's a brand new product suite, a new offering in the market either for the company or the space, or a material investment/improvement from what exists today--that's a Tier 1, full-court press (whatever that means for your company!) Moderate improvements, new SKUs, bigger features that are exciting but not totally new and different for the company are the market are more medium-Tier launches. Smaller features and incremental updates can be covered in release marketing only, m...

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Sherry Wu

Director, Product Marketing, MaintainX | Formerly Samsara, Comfy, Cisco

The tactics behind a product launch all boil down to three strategic questions: 1. Why does this matter for the business? 2. - 3. Why does this matter for your customers? 4. Why now? These are deceptively simple, but think about all of the answers that you need to have. Having the answers to these two questions will determine This will determine the resources that you put into a launch, how you promote it, and who you promote it

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Mary (Shirley) Sheehan

Group Manager, Engagement & Retention Campaigns, Adobe

Ideally, it's a combination of the GM, product management and product marketing. The GM would set the overall business goals for the year or quarter including revenue. The PM often drives the product launch adoption and revenue goals for that product. PMM often builds the plan with the metrics to help back into those goals. The important thing is that if you see a gap, make sure that someone is owning all of these goals, otherwise, it will be meaningless to have launch metrics.

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Manav Khurana

GM & SVP Product Growth, New Relic

First the failure mode (for contrast): PMM does a kick ass job with product decks and slicks. There is a training session where some people seem to be paying attention, but most people are distracted by their day-to-day job of sales. Then when a sales person gets an opportunity, they ask the PMM or PM to come in and help. Or worse, the sales lead complains at the company QBR that her team is not enabled properly. What I think is better: Start with what's in it for the sales person... Is it higher deal value to satisfy quota? Higher win rate? Then, think through how your sales people...

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Marcus Andrews

Director of Product Marketing, Pendo.io

I think you’re asking if it’s behind a pay wall and not just a free product? If that’s the case, you need material (video!) that can act as a demo, people want to see product, not just read about it. Salespeople who can give great demos and free trials are often a really effective a launch tool.

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John Gargiulo

Head of Global Product Marketing, Airbnb

Great question. Post-launch is the most underrated parts of the cycle. You've spent months aiming the rocketship, putting fuel in the tank and blasting off - now you've got to steer. Let's break it down into three steps: 1) ANALYZE The first thing is to immediately begin watching not just usage of the product, but which parts of the product. How are people interacting with your features? Where are they dropping off? Where are they spending their time? This will give you context and clarity to move onto step two. 2) PLAN Now that you know where your hypothesis was roughly right or ...

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