How do you tier product launches across minor and major product updates?

At Zendesk, we determine product launch tiers based on several factors: business impact, customer impact, and market differentiation. Each tier has a different level of marketing support.

• Tier 1 covers major new offerings or significant enhancements with high business and customer impact. These involve extensive go-to-market (GTM) planning, sales enablement, adoption strategies, major communications/PR, and dedicated marketing campaigns. Tier 1 launches are often aligned with major events with significant promotional efforts.

• Tier 2 covers major new features with medium to low revenue potential and significant customer impact. These involve comprehensive GTM activities but on a smaller scale than Tier 1, including announcements, demos, community events and targeted promos.

• Tier 3 is for minor updates with low business impact, affecting fewer customers. These typically involve basic updates and release notes, handled mainly by product managers with minimal PMM involvement.

I typically would use a 3 or 4 tier system for launches, which each tier being primarily defined based on revenue impact with the ability for a launch to get promoted a tier based on brand impact. 

In general it would look like this:

• Tier 1: Brand new revenue that you couldn't attain previously from some new target (usually like new markets, new departments, new segments, new verticals)
• Tier 2: Drive new revenue from your existing target market/buyers. 
• Tier 3: Accelerating existing deals. Features that won't bring in new revenue but will make it easier to close deals. 
• Tier 4: Retention of revenue, things that make existing customers happier and wanting to stay and renew

So for example, let's say something is a Tier 2 launch, helps you get new revenue in your target market, but it has a massive brand impact, you may promote it to Tier 1, so it makes a bigger splash in the market. 

Tier 4s get very little active support from marketing. These get covered in release notes, community posts, and other minor release marketing efforts. Tier 3 is usually also minor support, community posts, maybe included in a larger blog, but most important to enable sales and change any sales motions (since these features make closing easier), Tier 2s happen maybe once per quarter and usually have a campaign or paid demand plan around it, and Tier 1s once a year with a massive campaign, PR/AR, paid media, etc etc etc. 

My general tiering process looks like: 

P1 - This is a feature, update, or solution that is new, innovative and exciting and will attract new customers

P2 - This is a feature, update, or solution that will win new customers because it matches the market OR it will excite existing customers

P3 - This will keep existing customers and match the market. 

The above criteria will change depending on your organizations goals. For example, if your goal is mainly to reduce churn, you might prioritize something for existing customers higher than you would something that bring new customers. 

Overall, though, I found that having tiers like this helps to smooth out communication with product and sales teams. I will usually tier something myself and then present my analysis and reasoning to the product and sales teams to get them on board. I've rarely had any pushback.