How to identify stakeholders of a certain product launch? And if the stakeholders change in the process (either some roles become less vital with launch activities pushing forward or vice versa), how to manage that?

The best way to identify the stakeholders is to identify the success metric for the launch, and then figure out who is directly responsible for hitting that metric. Typically your product manager is a stakeholder, but often you'll have a customer success/sales organization involved and also engineering. Stakeholders are also up and down the leadership chain so be sure to include the leaders of those who are directly responsible.

Stakeholder changes are inevitable so I tend to learn on documentation to help smooth over the transitions when they happen. Do you have your messaging and positioning documents ready? Your marketing strategy? If so, anyone new coming into the launch will immediately be able to understand your plan and you won't need to spend lots of time ramping them up.

Product Launch is where all the magic happens. So many stakeholders have both vested interests and points of view of how the launch should be executed, but only Product Marketing has an end-to-end view of the product, go-to-market team, and the external market, so is best positioned to champion the process. 

We've broken our launch into four phases where the first and last stages have the most stakeholders present, and the middle two have the fewest.

What we've had success with understand that some roles just need to be informed when the launch kicks off. This can be a wide range of stakeholders who just need to be informed on just the facts - what are we launching, when are we launching it, what are the goals of the launch and what behaviors do we need to change to achieve our goals. The Phase 1 work here is about strategizing - where you need the business goals and objectives understood to really land your launch. Here is a great time to confirm who needs/wants to be a part of the execution "crew" through the next 2 phases. 

With the kickoff in the rearview mirror, we narrow the audience to the people who have to go do the majority of the work to drive the launch, and we rely on our partners in Product Management, Demand Generation, Content Marketing, Sales Enablement, and Customer Success - teams that need to make sure the go-to-market team is ready to market, sell and support the change. A lot of the Phase 2 work here is about planning what to do and when to do it, and creating the content and context to equip, train and coach your teams. 

Finally, there's the launch, when you can "push the button" on getting all the things you created to market. There it's effective to bring the same stakeholders you informed in Phase 1 back to the table to share learnings and close the loop. 

We continue to iterate our launch motion, but it's becoming a strength for us as we've earned the trust of partner teams over the last 18 months. 

Product launches take a village to execute successfully! Start by defining your launch goals and plan. This will make it easier to identify your stakeholders, which can include individuals or groups that will be involved in the launch execution and/or impacted by the outcome of the launch.

At Zendesk, we use a tiering system to determine the level of effort required to support a product launch and the stakeholders that will need to be involved. For example:

• A tier 1 launch is typically reserved for brand new product offerings that will have a major impact on our customers or the business. A tier 1 launch would span many different stakeholders across product (e.g. product managers, engineering, pricing, etc), core marketing (campaigns, events, PR, SEO, brand, etc.) and GTM (enablement, pre/post solutions consultants, partners, etc.).
• A tier 3 launch may be a smaller update to an existing product with minimal impact. As opposed to a tier 1 launch, a tier 3 launch would require less stakeholder involvement. We may pull in the web team for website updates, docs team for release note updates, email marketing, etc.

As with most product launches, things are constantly changing! Involve your stakeholders early and often, and make sure to get their buy-in on the launch goals and the role they will play. Proactively and constantly communicating with your stakeholders makes it much easier to pivot if necessary as things change or challenges arise.

It's important to build up a cross-functional product launch team and follow a consistent launch process as much as possible. While you're right, the stakeholders and process certainly can change slightly depending on the launch, I've found there usually more consistency between launches than not. At my current company, we've implemented a launch process that leverages what we call a gold/silver/bronze approach. We do the fewest things for a bronze feature and the most things for a gold feature or launch but we still include the same things as for the bronze. Even when a launch is more customer-centric than prospect-centric, we're still going through the same checklist.

A tight launch process and associated checklist will ensure that you're not missing steps or stakeholders. Some stakeholders might come in later in the process but having that set launch checklist gives them visibility into that and helps them know what is expected from them and when.

Every company is different so for product launches but here are the critical stakeholders and questions to ask yourself for each that should cover 90%:

What kind of prospect or customer is this most relevant to? Who will care about it? Is it mostly prospects and if existing customers, what kind of customer?

Existing customers - could be one of or all of your personas: administrator, champion, user, billing contact etc. Could be relevant to one vertical or industry. Could be relevant to one company size (e.g. SMB vs. Mid Market vs. Enterprise). Could be relevant to a subset of customers who use a specific feature or salesforce integration

Once the external audience is clear, then you can think about which stakeholders and functions in your organization matter. You should think about these functions and these questions id ask to determine how 'vital' they are:

• Product - always unless what you're launching is a demand gen, marketing asset like a report etc.

• Sales / Marketing - will this make a big impact on your external narrative in the market? will it materially change how Sales might demo?

• Design - will we need a high volume of design assets?

• Customer Success - will this make a big impact on retention? how important is adoption of this feature for our business?

• Customer Support / Customer Education - will we need training/documentation to get ahead of customer questions?

• Implementation - will this be something implementation will need to support?

• RevOps/BizOps - will this require a change to our contract/pricing/invoices?

A kick off call with all of these functions where folks can raise their hand for how involved they want/dont want to be is important.

Building a launch process from scratch is a big lift, but early work like identifying all stakeholders will set you up for success once things get rolling. I frame product launches as "commercialization" to anchor my thinking. To expand beyond a single word, this means we're making a new product or component available for people to buy. To identify the stakeholders required to accomplish that goal, rely on your customer's process as they go from problem awareness to activation and support. This approach gets bonus from me for creating a customer-centric mindset early in the launch process. Some high-level questions to start thinking about this:

• How will customers and prospects become aware of the new offering?
• How will customers and prospects express interest in the new offering?
• How will customers buy the new offering?
• How do customers get set up and trained on the new offering?
• How will customers get help with the new offering once they are using it?

Pro Tip: When you land on your initial stakeholder group, ask the team "Who else needs to know". This simple question helped me resolve a few gaps in the past that would have caused major issues downstream.

Regarding changing stakeholders, the level of effort from different teams and functions will naturally shift over the course of a launch. Letting people check-in and check-out has led to dropped balls and miscommunications more times than I can count. Stakeholders should have enough invested in the entire commercialization effort that they want to be aware of the work going on. You can have information radiators for update communications to leaders, but silent observers don't add much value to launch project meetings.