How do you partner with teams across marketing to make sure your product launch is successful?

As the PMM, I like to think of us as the quarterbacks of the launch. We determine the strategy but we have to heavily rely on our partners to execute it. At Sauce Labs, we’ve worked across stakeholders to develop a Launch Checklist Template that outlines every launch activity, with designated owners to ensure alignment on responsibilities. We also hold a Launch Team Interconnect bi-weekly meeting to review the launch timeline and GTM plan, ensuring everyone is on the same page and aware of their action items. It’s essential to get buy-in from various teams and leverage their expertise in telling the launch story. And remember, product launches should be fun! They showcase how our business is innovating and delivering cool new products, so it’s really important to make it an exciting time and celebration for all teams.

The biggest opportunity to partner across marketing for a successful product launch comes down to understanding your partners' priorities. With any launch, you'll likely partner with a number of different marketing disciplines from creative, to brand, to lifecycle, demand gen, paid marketing, event marketing, and many more. Knowing where each of these teams priorities are is key to understanding how you can partner best with them and avoiding unnecessary headaches.

• Are your cross-functional partners goaled against KPIs that connect to your launch? If they are, great! Now you both have a shared interest in a successful launch. Find out how their KPIs connect to your launch so you can get them on board with a solid plan.

• Are your partners focused elsewhere with other priorities? Likely, yes! Find out how you can ease your asks within reason by getting ahead with a clear plan and reasonable delivery times.

• Communicate early and often! I like to err on the side of over communicating in the early days of sorting out a launch plan. This may be regular Slack channel updates, or weekly emails, to the entire group. Identifying who your contributors are and who needs to be informed is a good way to get started.

  • You can always dial back the xf crew as you progress and people opt-out or don't need to get the play-by-play.

  • Another tip is, just because they aren't engaging, doesn't mean they aren't engaged or absorbing the information. Unless they actually come back and say - I don't need this information, assume they do.

• Document your plan and share it out regularly for buy-in. Ask for feedback and input. This gives partners a sense of shared ownership in the success of the plan.

  • Be mindful that feedback does have an end date as your move through your launch stages and have dates for completing feedback. This is helpful to avoid spiraling feedback that never ends.

• Have contingency plans. Things change, new information is received, dates shift. Know this going in and have backup plans for various scenarios that you can pivot to if needed.

Each launch will impact different departments. Your responsibility as a PMM or launch captain isn't to take the reigns on each activity but to give guidance and support to the person/teams responsible for a particular task.

When you're putting together a launch strategy, meet with each department head or stakeholder from other departments to understand what they need each time the company needs to roll out new features or products. CS may need a talk track and hands on experience, bizops may need to create new fields in your CRM. sales will need proper enablement. Marketing will need a messaging document.

As you meet with these teams, record the tasks that are required vs. nice-to-haves. Ask for an owner from those teams and see how you can support them. Ask if there are any obstacles or prerequisites before they can start that task. Finally, you can also ask for a ballpark on how long it typically takes to complete each task.

Once these are documented, meet regularly with the teams to check on the status and if there are any challenges that you can help address.