How do you manage small product releases that don't warrant a big splash, but are important for users to know about? What kinds of activities and deliverables do you use?

In my experience, this is one of the toughest things as a PMM. You always see the potential upside for making an announcement, and you can spin a story out of anything / convince anybody why something matters. But really, you need to exercise a lot of restraint to avoid overloading your sales teams (in B2B companies) and customers with the sheer volume of releases. I like to group features into regular channels (e..g monthly newsletters and webinars) so customers can appreciate the feature veloc ...Read More

For almost every feature launch, you have to evaluate the amount of market- and customer-facing activities it makes sense to do. For features that don't warrant a market launch (i.e. they aren't a differentiator, don't support a strategic partnership, or open up opportunities for new business) but DO warrant customer communication and customer-facing team readiness, it's still important to have launch tiers. Is this something that adds value & could enable up-sell or upgrades? Is it a major ...Read More

I count these as “Tier 3” launches which I define as: Relatively small product updates that a subset of your current customer base will care about deeply. You are spot-on that they’re important for users to know about. Usually, it’s a specific group that needs to know about it. For example, we usually treat launches for our admins as tier 3. They’re vitally important for admins in the enterprise, and they do reinforce our overall enterprise message, but admins are a relatively small percentage o ...Read More

Managing small product releases requires a thoughtful and targeted approach to ensure that important updates or enhancements are effectively communicated to users. While these small product releases [ considered as Tier 3] may not have the same scale as major launches [Tier 1, 2], they are crucial for maintaining user satisfaction and driving adoption. Here are some activities and deliverables that can be used to manage Tier 3 releases ( click here for detailed internal and external comms and en ...Read More

This question is a good reminder that not all product releases are launches. On a related note, I had a team member who constantly worked on product deprecations, which aren't viewed as traditional releases, but equally as important in terms of communicating to end users and sometimes, buyers. Here's what I would prepare: A product release brief. This is an internal master document that contextualizes everything about the product/feature release. It includes: A description of the release Target ...Read More

Not everything needs a full-scale Tier 1 or Tier 2 launch, but that shouldn't stop you from communicating effectively important changes for Tier 3, just make sure you're not overshadowing or reducing the impact of what's more important.The framework is the usual: understand who'd be impacted the most understand how big of an impact it would make understand how this release fits within your other launches / comms. Could it be paired with another one for example to avoid overcommunication? Could i ...Read More