If your product team works in two-week sprints, how do you balance and prioritize each launch? In other words is a "release" always a "launch" and how do you differentiate and treat each?

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All related (40)

Director of Product Marketing, 6sense • June 21

I would suggest bundling the two week sprints into a larger quarterly release cycle so you can benefit from a bigger, impactful story. If you are hitting your customer base with new features every 2 weeks, I can guarantee you they are going to be fatigued, saturated, and less likely to engage. People are suffering from cognitive load, so cut through the noise and surface the features that matter on more sustainable and customer-friendly cadence.

In terms of release and launch terminology: a release is product-owned (normally consists of getting a product/feature into production for general availability. While a launch is formal marketing of the feature. Development complete = release. Market ready = launch. They are very different motions.

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Jodi Innerfield

Senior Director, Product Marketing, Salesforce

Tiering and t-shirt sizing a launch should be based on "how impactful is this to my customer and the company?" If it's a brand new product suite, a new offering in the market either for the company or the space, or a material investment/improvement from what exists today--that's a Tier 1, full-court press (whatever that means for your company!) Moderate improvements, new SKUs, bigger features that are exciting but not totally new and different for the company are the market are more medium-Tier launches. Smaller features and incremental updates can be covered in release marketing only, m...

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Sherry Wu

Director, Product Marketing, MaintainX | Formerly Samsara, Comfy, Cisco

The tactics behind a product launch all boil down to three strategic questions: 1. Why does this matter for the business? 2. - 3. Why does this matter for your customers? 4. Why now? These are deceptively simple, but think about all of the answers that you need to have. Having the answers to these two questions will determine This will determine the resources that you put into a launch, how you promote it, and who you promote it

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Mary (Shirley) Sheehan

Group Manager, Engagement & Retention Campaigns, Adobe

Ideally, it's a combination of the GM, product management and product marketing. The GM would set the overall business goals for the year or quarter including revenue. The PM often drives the product launch adoption and revenue goals for that product. PMM often builds the plan with the metrics to help back into those goals. The important thing is that if you see a gap, make sure that someone is owning all of these goals, otherwise, it will be meaningless to have launch metrics.

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Manav Khurana

GM & SVP Product Growth, New Relic

First the failure mode (for contrast): PMM does a kick ass job with product decks and slicks. There is a training session where some people seem to be paying attention, but most people are distracted by their day-to-day job of sales. Then when a sales person gets an opportunity, they ask the PMM or PM to come in and help. Or worse, the sales lead complains at the company QBR that her team is not enabled properly. What I think is better: Start with what's in it for the sales person... Is it higher deal value to satisfy quota? Higher win rate? Then, think through how your sales people...

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Marcus Andrews

Director of Product Marketing, Pendo.io

I think you’re asking if it’s behind a pay wall and not just a free product? If that’s the case, you need material (video!) that can act as a demo, people want to see product, not just read about it. Salespeople who can give great demos and free trials are often a really effective a launch tool.

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John Gargiulo

Head of Global Product Marketing, Airbnb

Great question. Post-launch is the most underrated parts of the cycle. You've spent months aiming the rocketship, putting fuel in the tank and blasting off - now you've got to steer. Let's break it down into three steps: 1) ANALYZE The first thing is to immediately begin watching not just usage of the product, but which parts of the product. How are people interacting with your features? Where are they dropping off? Where are they spending their time? This will give you context and clarity to move onto step two. 2) PLAN Now that you know where your hypothesis was roughly right or ...

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