How do you package up a bunch of small feature enhancements to tell a bigger story that will interest people?

I am a big fan of drumbeats. People are busy and it's easy to miss one large product announcement and even if your audience sees the announcement, it's easy to forget about it.    My favorite packaging approach is to have a broad theme ([your service] keeps getting better, a commitment to security or performance, helping your audience do something better, faster, cheaper...) and then announce each small enhancement as it comes.   Say you have 5 small enhancements over 12-15 weeks. Start with ann ...Read More

I'll answer this in two parts. Part 1: You've likely arrived at launching a bunch of small features to begin with because the product vision and strategy is fuzzy. Or that the strategy is to build what customers request and your release cadence is fluid. You wouldn't have asked this question if PM+PMM planned product strategy together and looked at the roadmap earlier on to develop and align on launch themes mapped to business objectives. You're asking this question because things currently work ...Read More

I personally like mixing the “packing of features into a big launch” and the “ongoing drumbeat”. What we did this year was choose 4 customer objectives for our product for the year and kick the year off with a campaign speaking to them and how they solve our customers biggest needs. We then planned one “big moment” for each objective over the course of the year, this would be a month when we would hit hard on this theme repeatedly tied to a major launch. Then, outside these 4 big months we plan ...Read More

I like Zach's suggestion of finding a good mix but there can be times when a larger story just has more impact. At the end of the day, the key thing is to think in themes, and how those themes are going to drive value and impact for your customers. If a feature or item by itself will have large impact, then why wait to share the story? But if that feature has more impact when wrapped up as part of a larger story, then packaging it as such. I wrote an overview of this very topic here: https://med ...Read More

I agree with Jack here. Ideally, new feature or product releases are planned as part of a larger story/theme you've set with PM so that you can keep referencing that theme in each new release. It can be hard to do in practice though. Getting PMs bought in is usually the hardest thing to do here, especially if you're growing quickly and need to ship as fast as possible to keep existing customers happy and convince new customers to sign. Here's a miscellaneous list that's worked at Modern Treasury ...Read More