What are the key things to consider post-launch? What standard metrics are important to track to measure success and what teams (and at what cadence) are important to connect with post-launch?

This certainly will vary launch by launch to some degree, however every feature you launch you'll want to track some element of activation and utilization of the feature.

Are customers trying the new feature, and are they growing in how they use it? These are also the metrics that you as a product marketer can have a direct impact on.

There's always excitement right after a launch where everyone is glued to the dashboards watching the metrics minute by minute! And in those early days after a launch it's healthy to do a 1 week post-launch read out, however it's defintely more important to check in on the metrics on a monthly basis - after the excitement of the launch dies down, to ensure you have the right tactics in place to continue activation and growing usage.

The key stakeholders include product marketing to represent the marketing lense, product management, product analytics, and sales. 

It's important to define metrics and KPIs pre-launch typically as part of the marketing brief or GTM plan. Based on the goals you’ve set you’ll want to work with XFN teams like product/marketing analytics to set up a measurement plan or dashboard to track progress against these goals. It can be beneficial to track progress early on, a few days post launch and/or 1-2 weeks post launch so that you can adjust your marketing tactics if needed to accelerate or decelerate adoption. Exact metrics will vary for each product/business but a few standard metrics to keep in mind are: 1) product adoption 2) channel performance - open rates/ctrs 3) product retention.

This is a great question that often goes overlooked. In high-velocity roadmap organizations, the focus tends to be on getting a product to market and then moving on to the next launch, without pausing to assess how the product actually performed.

To evaluate the success of your launch, there are several fundamental metrics to consider:

Awareness: Determine whether your target audience is aware of your product. This can be evaluated by analyzing the effectiveness of your awareness generation campaign. Metrics such as email open rates, completed sales calls, and ad impressions can provide insights. It's advisable to track this within the first month post-launch.

Usage: Assess whether your audience is actively using the product via your own data, utilizing metrics like Daily Active Users (DAU) or Monthly Active Users (MAU). Look for any spikes in usage pre and post-launch. This is a metric to track for at least three months post-launch.

Satisfaction: Understand whether your customers actually like the product. Get feedback from the sales team, customer support interactions, or conduct customer interviews. Track for about three to six months post-launch, depending on the product's complexity.

Consistently report your findings on a monthly basis and advocate for decisions to optimize if any of the metrics are underperforming. This approach ensures that your product launch isn't just about getting to market but also about making it successful and continually improving it.

Launching a product or feature is only the beginning of the journey. To maximize its impact and ensure continuous improvement, tracking feedback and outcomes is crucial, capturing valuable learnings for your cross-functional teams.

As a PMM, you can champion three key areas in this post-launch phase:

1. Listening to Your Customers:

• Proactive Feedback Gathering: Monitor user feedback across product surfaces, support channels, and third-party review sites. This helps identify areas for tweaks, fixes, or potential feature enhancements after launch.

• Unveiling the "Why": When necessary, conduct user interviews to delve deeper into the "why" behind identified issues. This qualitative data provides invaluable context for improvement efforts.

2. Tracking Product Usage:

• Identifying Early Adopters: Track feature usage post-launch and pinpoint key user segments who have embraced your new offering.

• Understanding Motivations: Interview these early adopters to understand their reasons for adopting your product feature. These insights can help equip sales and customer-facing teams with compelling narratives that can be leveraged when selling the “value” of your product to prospects and existing customers.
  

3. Evaluating Campaign Effectiveness:

• Measuring Campaign Success: Analyze the performance of your launch campaign, including conversion rates and customer acquisition costs.

Recommended Meeting Cadence

As a PMM, fostering regular communication with your cross-functional teams is vital to ensure launch learnings and strategies permeate the company. I recommend you align with cross-functional partners on cadence of meetings - a potential cadence is as follows:

Weekly or Biweekly Meetings:

• Product Team: Collaborate with your product team to discuss user feedback, prioritize enhancements, and regularly plan roadmap updates based on gathered insights.

• Customer Support Teams: Work closely with support teams (e.g., CX, account management, training, implementation) to understand common user issues and refine support resources to address them effectively.

Monthly or Quarterly Meetings:

• Analytics Team: Collaborate with the analytics team to review key business and product metrics, identifying key drivers of success and potential issues that may require further attention.

• Marketing Team: Share insights from user feedback and performance metrics to inform ongoing marketing and promotional campaigns, ensuring they continue to resonate with your target audience.

• Sales Team: Equip sellers with user feedback and competitor analysis to refine their sales pitch and confidently address customer concerns.