How do you manage the internal communication of releases?

We communicate product releases via a number of channels: On-demand training for sales & cs, in-app messaging for customers, live Q&A day training for sales & cs, customer email, and monthly customer newsletter. It's important to stick to a consistent communication process and release cadence so your customers and GTM teams know when to expect new innovations from your company. If releases are random, your CS and Sales teams, and most importantly, your customers, can't keep up with them. If so much is coming out all the time, your customers don't know about the new stuff. And worse, your cs teams doesn't know either and then cannot answer customers questions! At Drift, we have a monthly release process. This means that we release features on the first Wednesday of every month. A week of ahead of release, we train the CS & Sales teams and arm them with customer facing slides they will need. We also include in-app messaging on release day and include it in a monthly customer newsletter roundup.

Good internal communication is a super power of great product teams but it doesn’t happen without concerted effort. The benefits are big though.

• Gets everyone in the company aligned as to how they can support your launch

• Surfaces potential product launch issues / conflicts.

• Recognizes the team’s effort publicly

But how do you do it? Just like with external launches, you want to map out who needs to know about your launch internally and the level of information required.

• Sales teams may need information to help them determine who a product is for and scripts / messaging to help sell

• Other product teams might need to know generally what is launching and how to get in touch with technical partners

• Executives might need to know about how this fits with company strategy and how this will affect company critical metrics like revenue.

Once you map out who you need to reach and with what information, it becomes a channel strategy question. At Spotify we use a mix of

• Email

• Slack

• Meetings

• Newsletters

A bit more detail on how this works at Spotify:

• Email: We do product launch specific emails to a broad set of stakeholders with high-level information about the go-to-market as well as means for getting more detailed information.

• Slack: We use slack especially for driving transparency with adjacent product teams as well as to celebrate successes.

• Meetings: We use meetings to educate the people who need to be able to fluently talk to a particular launch. This is usually sales teams as well as key product stakeholders.

  • We also have a monthly meeting to share upcoming product launches. The goal of this meeting is to both celebrate and as a final check for potential downstream implications of a launch.

• Newsletters: And finally we have a number of internal newsletters that we plug in to for launches. These newsletters don’t have nearly the detail of the other 3 approaches but they get high-level information to a broad set of stakeholders.

One of my favorite expressions is “repetition doesn’t spoil the prayer.” Communication—or lack thereof—is the element that makes or breaks launches (or really anything in any work environment or relationship). I always err on the side of overcommunicating for launches and I’m a stickler for written documentation (which is sometimes unpopular, but it’s the best way I’ve found for everyone to stay on the same page…literally). The “Launch Plan of Record” deck that I elaborated on in an earlier question is a great asset for this. It’s digestible, it’s as high or low level as the reader wants it to be (if they read past the executive summary all the detail they want is there), and it can be posted internally on a wiki, pinned to slack channels, and reviewed at regular check-in meetings.

Coordinating the internal communication for product launches calls for thoughtful planning and straightforward messaging. It kicks off with crafting a comprehensive communication plan that depicts the principal messages, communication channels, timeline, and involved parties. This game plan should be disseminated amongst all related teams to ensure alignment.

Crucial messages about the product launch, including its value to customers, features, and its alignment with the company's strategy, need to be unambiguously relayed to all team members. This can be achieved through a variety of communication means such as team huddles, internal email newsletters, slack broadcasts or posts on the intranet.

Moreover, providing routine updates on the progress of the product launch is key to keeping everyone in the loop. This not only builds excitement but also helps to manage expectations and avert any unexpected surprises.

Lastly, after the product launch, it's crucial to collect feedback from the team. This can aid in spotting any lapses in communication and honing future communication tactics.

First off, we should clarify that releases do not mean launch and vice versa. There's a distinction there that I believe we will address in another question, part of this AMA!

Am gonna be oversimplifying, on purpose.

Product releases are mostly geared towards existing customers. Your install base.

Because of that, they mostly talk about product feature enhancements, functions. You do that every month, to keep the product momentum high, show the pace of innovation and the value you're bringing to your customers.T

The second one, let’s call it the “marketing launch” is more geared towards your prospects.

Not the existing customer. You do that less often, but you increase the reach, you make this a bigger splash here, it’s a moment really led by the narrative, not so much by the product release. You do that every quarter, tops.

So if we're talking about managing the internal communication of the first one, the releases, I think there's multiple ways to do that. The most obvious one is a customer newsletter. Also distill the product news via your other customer channels like your customer community if you have one, your learning management system and academy, things like that. And of course, think about the internal enablement. The enablement piece is so so crucial. You need to enable your reps (SDRs, AEs, SEs and CSMs) on the best ways to communicate the product news and exciting releases to your existing customers.

Now let's briefly touch on the process aspect of it.

I know sometimes people have a visceral reaction to this word. Process. 

Believe me, a good process is your BFF when lauching products.

It all starts with a really streamlined process that you have to build and rally behind as a PMM.

You have to think about the cadence that makes sense for your audience. If your audience is mostly technical and they care about product features, then cadence is probably monthly. If your audience is mostly line of business and decision makers, then they don't have time and the bandwidth to absorb that much news - so you would space out your cadence of news. And do that every quarter.

I believe that one of the absolutely crucial things to include in the process is to list all the stakeholders, internal and external. And for the internal ones, you have to assign a role to each of them, following a RACI or RASCI model. This is something that we do here a lot when we think about product launches. We make them a total team sport.

PMM needs to involve people from the content team, from the sales readiness and the sales enablement team, the customer marketing team, events, demand gen, product management, Pricing and Packaging. So it's all across the board. Then when you do that, you build a Bill of Material (BOM) and you can try to break it down with the RACI for each and every asset. Clearly define who owns the production and the approval of each asset in the BOM.

I really believe that scoping this right, and doing that far in advance, is the best way to avoid any bad surprises, any last minute changes when it comes to well-executed product launches.

I segment communications into three audiences:

1. Product management

2. Project DRIs (Directly Responsible Individuals, typically marketing team members)

3. Leadership

Communication with product managers driving particular features or areas of the product occurs regularly, typically on a weekly basis. I use these meetings to remain aligned on positioning and messaging, accuracy in deliverable development, product/feature readiness, and timelines. I see this ongoing communication as foundational to the other pieces of the puzzle.

After formally kicking off a launch plan, I also like to meet with project DRIs on a weekly basis to communicate product updates, any potential changes to the timeline, surface dependencies and blockers, and maintain alignment on goals, deliverables, and timelines. This approach has helped me effectively manage the project coordination and wrangling needed to pull everything together for launch day.

For larger scale releases, I include a leadership GTM review in my process. I like to run these meetings prior to kicking execution off with DRIs. During GTM reviews, I develop a slide deck that outlines my GTM plan and includes context on the why behind my decisions. It is reviewed with the product manager leading development and sometimes the engineering lead prior to leadership review to ensure alignment on timelines, dependencies, and potential trade offs (if needed).