How do you tier your launches, and what KPI's do you assign to each tier?

Having a documented tiering system across your full PMM organization is really important for a few reasons — it helps create consistency across marketers who might be working on different areas of your business; it creates efficiency to PMMs don't have to re-invent the wheel for each GTM; it helps set realistic expectations with product teams to know what to expect from a launch; it creates a useful internal shorthand to talk about how "big" GTM moments are; and it helps with benchmarking, so yo ...Read More

I've tried so many tiering methods! One that's working really well for us right now is something we made up based on the audience that "needs to know": Go Big, Tell Sales, Tell CS. Every quarter, we propose one story line to put in the Go Big bucket (typically several capabilities that ladder up to a unified story). That gets 80% of our efforts -- or at least, that's the goal! That's what we rally our marketing team around in terms of PR, social, analysts, content. If there are additional capabi ...Read More

I'm going to break this out into two questions: How do you tier launches?Launches are tiered based on business impact (yes, I know, very "captain obvious.") My whole point here is that I make a judgment call based on data, company goals, competitive landscape, market opportunity.  For example, is this a feature/product/capability that is going to move the needle for your brand, competitive positioning, sales revenue, PR coverage, analysts?  I like to tier based on business impact, but another wa ...Read More

Most product marketers I've worked with are tuned in to new feature releases or creating effective comms for upcoming product improvements. For a product launch, however, it's almost always given the highest priority automatically. Most of the work is done to make sure the product itself is positioned correctly and that what we promise matches up in-product. All hands are on deck at a specified time for a large volume of page traffic and social comms.  With that said, I absolutely needed to prio ...Read More

There are so many good responses to launch tiering here. I am going to focus on KPIs in my response here I broadly categorize launch KPIs into three parts - Engagement, Adoption and Revenue 1. Engagement KPIs - measure engagement with launch content. Anything from # attendees, # visitors, # viewers, blog visits, email open rates/CTRs, PR pickup, social engagement (e.g. retweets) by channel. Irrespective of launch tier, super important to measure engagement of content leading up to the launch, ac ...Read More

Introducing a well-defined tiering system within the PMM organization presents a myriad of advantages, encompassing enhanced consistency, improved efficiency, clear expectations, and effective communication. For me, you can adopt a three-tiered approach to categorize launches, which is determined by a matrix aligning with the insights shared by @Teresa Haun, specifically focusing on business impact and market impact. For a more tangible understanding, click here to examine the matrix I use, wher ...Read More

I’ve seen many methods out there but what worked best for me in past companies was a category structure based on customer impact (taking into account existing and potential customers). The lowest would be a functionality improvement and the highest would be a game changer in the market. The way I think about KPIs is not by tier, it’s by launch. Your goals might be very different between launches even in the same category—or similar for some even in different categories. A PMM leader I respect on ...Read More

I've done this a few different ways in the past. One way is by partnering with Product Management to grade a release item and then assign a launch level to a release based on a grade (is it new/innovative, is it going to match the market, impact to customers, impact to the market, etc.). The product team will launch the feature if something doesn't fall into the launch level threshold. When that happens, we will collect data and look for opportunities to package the feature into a future release ...Read More

I've created tier systems for many companies now and one nuance I've picked up is it's important to consider your audiences and shape a tier system around them too. For example, in my current company we have very distinct buyers vs users. I found it important to recognise this in my launch planning as some launches are more impactful for buyers while others are more important for users. This might seem like a small difference, but it actually requires very different internal enablement since buy ...Read More

This question is very similar to this other answer so I'm sharing my answer from there here too: At Zendesk, we use a launch template that includes key workstreams and teams to engage for different tiers of launches. We use two criteria to determine the tier of a launch: business impact and market impact. For business impact, we assess how much the launch benefits existing and new customers, including whether it makes a material difference in whether they select Zendesk or a competitor. For mark ...Read More