What are some of the learnings PMMs should bring in when re-launching an updated product/feature in a new geography?

Each geography is different, so don't treat geos as "one size fits all." Make sure you understand the nuances of the region you're launching in--what language resonates best in messaging? What channels might be different? How does the perception of your organization or product change based on geography? What legal requirements are different? Lean on your regional counterparts and colleagues to make sure you're really tailoring the launch for the region

Launching a feature to a new geography brings its own set of nuances. I find there are a number of pre-launch considerations as well as post-launch metrics to watch.

Pre-launch, you want to evaluate if there are market specific regulations, competitive dynamics, or customer dynamics that necessitate a change in strategy.

• Regulations: Are there legal constraints to how you launch a product to a new market?

  • For example, I regularly have to talk to our lawyers about the implications of privacy regulations in the EU when thinking about launches to that region.

• Competitive Dynamics: Are you competing with different people in a given region? If so, do they have different strengths or positioning that changes how you message, package, or price your solution?

• Customer Dynamics: Do you have different customers in a given region? Are they bigger, smaller, in a different industry, etc? All of this may change your messaging and channel strategy.

Post launch, it’s important to assess region specific adoption and customer outcomes:

• Adoption: Do you seeing different levels of adoption for given regions? If so, can you diagnose why you are having more or less success?

• Customer Outcomes: Are customers using your product differently or getting different levels of ROI? Is there something about your customers that might be driving this?

Asking these questions allows you to iterate on your go-to-market strategy such that it has a good chance of succeeding in a new market as well as allows you to diagnose how you are doing post launch and make necessary adjustments.

• General answer: Revisit how the initial launch(es) performed. Scrutinize what worked well and what didn’t. How can you leverage those learnings to improve how you plan the GTM strategy for the re-launch?

• Geo-specific answer: Conduct market and customer research for that geo. If you aren’t the expert in that market, find relevant experts and talk to them. What matters to that market and how they make decisions should influence which channels and messaging you use. 

  • Example: SurveyMonkey operates globally. We localized every written word in ~7 languages, and we localized our core pages (e.g., the pricing page) into ~28 languages. What was interesting about the pricing page was that it wasn’t just a matter of translation but rather a rearrangement and reprioritization of features and value props that mattered in a given market. I specifically remember that the German variation of the page highlighted our privacy, security, and data protection information much more than almost all the other variations—because that was more important to that market.