How do you treat minor releases and enhancements in your GTM process?

These are typically small launches with functionality that maintains market position, parity, and performance. Communication channels should include but are not limited to: internal - slack announcement with positioning brief, external - cs/sales outreach template, targeted email announcement, newsletter, help docs update. 

For small piel updates, you can think of these as your soft/quiet launches that don’t require broad messaging/awareness. (Pixel changes). Communicaiton channels should include but are not limited to: internal - slack announcement with positioning brief, cs outreach comm if relevant, help doc update.

I use a framework that is based on launch tiers! Minor releases would normally fall under a tier 3 or tier 4 launch and could be defined as:

Tier 1 - Evolves the companies narrative in the marketplace

Tier 2 - Gets us to feature parity or enables us to compete in the marketplace and win new customers

Tier 3 - An improvement or enhancement to an existing feature

Tier 4 - An update to the UI, superuser flag, etc. No visible impact to the customer

For tier 3/4 (minor) releases I usually include it in our monthly newsletter, release notes, internal product enablement and a UI announcement (when applicable).

Also, with minor releases there's also an opportunity to bundle a bunch of smaller releases into a greater theme and release it in a larger way! For example, if you have a bunch of small releases in regards to your reporting, you could release these together externally for a bigger splash.

You could consider a weekly or monthly product update email, public running change log, or in-app notifications (or docked changelog) for your current customers.

For feature updates that are minor in terms of its impact to an organization and or the customer experience, my advice would be to get Product teams to work as directly with channel leads as possible.

• Product marketing should focus its time and energy on GTMs that have a certain size of organizational impact.

• The more you and your team lead can define what this threshold is upfront, and develop tiers of product launches that would warrant various levels of PMM support, the more successful the team will be.

First up, make sure you already have launch tiers in place. Evaluate against those criteria to ensure this really is a minor for your customers and not just your engineering team.

Assuming you are indeed dealing with a minor release, the next steps depend on your specific situation, business rhythm, channels, and launch schedule.

Here are some options:

Keep it simple: Publish a blog post or update your release notes and move on. This requires the least effort and therefore has the lowest impact. Choose this option only after considering the alternatives below.

Create a moment: Take a step back and consider your overall launch schedule. Are there other announcements that can be bundled together to create a larger story? By combining minor announcements into a single, more significant one, you can generate more attention and impact. You have control over the narrative, allowing you to shape it to align with your corporate objectives.

Create a Cycle: Instead of making announcements based on product readiness, transition to a quarterly announcement cycle. Similar to the previous option, minor releases can be grouped into a larger announcement that has greater impact as a whole. The quarterly cycle builds anticipation from the market and internal stakeholders for your next release. This predictability enables you to plan customer communications, events, conferences, etc. around the launch cycle. Although it requires more initial work to achieve alignment, the payoff is substantial.

I've partnered with PM to 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.). If something doesn't fall into the launch level threshold, it's an opportunity to release it, collect data, and see if it makes sense to package the feature announcement with future releases to help tell a bigger story.

Creating a process to address minor releases and enhancements is often as important as your major product launch, especially if you're in a multi-matrixed business with lots of product teams releasing constantly. The two core elements to consider boils down to: 1) customer messaging and 2) sales enablement.  

Customer Messaging: Product Marketing 101: Identify the customer problem the feature solves and message it with this as the core of the sentence. Borrowing from my PMO days, the Agile user story format makes this incredibly simple - "as a I need so I can ." Starting from there, build compelling messaging that addresses generally the context and tie back to the tone set forth in your brand style guide. This should be three sentences max, and ideally shorter.