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 documentat ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 s ...Read More

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 compa ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 ...Read More