How do you manage launches when the product team has a difficult time sticking to timelines?

This can be a huge challenge, and I certainly feel for you. Overall, I think it comes down to open and transparent communication between Product and Product Marketing, and the organization at large. Overall, I think there are a few things you can do to get ahead of this: Transparent Roadmap - This will depend on the culture of your organization and how transparent you can be, but ideally the more the better. If you can keep a roadmap that everyone has access to and contains key timelines it will ...Read More

I would bake in as much buffer time as you can in your marketing timelines. If they have a track record of not shipping on time, I'd start assuming that. If your product partners get upset about that, explain the marketing dependencies that you can't deliver results when timelines are always in flux.  This is super frustrating and I feel your pain. Perhaps you can also find other leaders who sympathize and don't want resources to go to waste to help you make your case and begin to shift the cult ...Read More

Working from a place of positive intent, some R&D teams may not realize that launch activities are as much work at building a new product/feature. They don't see all the planing and activities that go into it.  Whether or not you have program managment function: build a clear project plan for gtm activities, circulate it and create rituals to ensure it's on track. If you break down any GTM delivery into talks, it'll naturally create trip wires.  ex/ team needs final UX to build help docs and ...Read More

This is pretty common. In my previous life as a PM and now as a PMM, I don’t try to manage the product team and the schedule. I try to get ahead of these challenges by announcing new capabilities while they’re in development and positioning it as “coming soon”, then continuing the drumbeat all the way from the beta release to general availability. This allows us plenty of flexibility when it comes to timelines shifting.It seems to be a common pattern across our industry too. You’ll see companies ...Read More

It's very common -- particularly in modern software companies -- for product teams to move timelines based on engineering constraints, customer feedback in the beta-testing process, and more. All product marketers wrestle with this situation. So, realize you're not alone! I recommend explaining what's in it for the product-engineering-design team. Do they want much-anticipated recognition for and usage of the product they've toiled for so many months on? Then, let's set a date. Do they want a lo ...Read More

Managing product launches when the product team struggles to stick to timelines can be challenging but it is a common thing to navigate through. Here are some things I do to make sure everyone's on the same page: Chat with the product team early on: Figure out their timeline and make sure we're all on the same page about what's important, what can wait and how to deal with delays. Build in some extra time: Things don't always go according to plan so it's good to have some extra time in case of d ...Read More

While I don't want to discount the personal thrash this puts on you, I’d suggest you quantify the impact in a manner that is around the health of the business. Showcase that there is an opportunity cost to the inability to stick to timelines. Example: When you have a regular cadence in communication, do you see list sizes growing and can you maintain a standard conversion rate? Compared to when you have lapses in communication are you seeing adoption suffer?  How you’ve described this seems to m ...Read More

Same! In my case, I was also dealing with phased launches--bits of the solution released every few weeks. And I understand why–when you're working with a developer audience there's less appetite for a big splashy release, and more interest in a phased roll-out of a given feature or product just to get hands on it ASAP and iterate as quickly as possible. That was tough to get used to. I would start by finding out a little more about what's causing those delays in product.If it's intentional, to p ...Read More

Apply agile sprint thinking to launches. You can do this by creating themes just like agile has a sprint (my team is moving to quarterly message themes). These themes encapsulate at a high level the features that the product team is working on.   This approach has a couple of benefits. First, your product folks should appreciate agile, which will make them more likely to buy in and maybe meet a few more of those deadlines. Second, you get to execute a launch with some flexibility. Communicating ...Read More

Your product team is not unique! I've never heard of a product team that sticks to deadlines exactly. The best lesson I've learned on how to mitigate this in enterprise software is that you can launch a product many times.  There are different ways to do this: pre-announce at your conference with a preview/waiting list, beta launch, general availability launch, internal re-launch with your sales team with new training and collateral, momentum launch with PR on usage and metrics...it goes on. If ...Read More