What product launch metrics should B2B SaaS product marketers be accountable for?

Ultimately, it's about product adoption measured by MAU and product revenue over different time intervals. 

To get there, I'd suggest looking at the following metrics with your marketing team:

- Unique visitors to your product page (on the marketing site and in your product) day of launch and in the subsequent weeks/months

- Conversions to hand raisers (number of people who want sales engagement), demo requests, free trials. 

Your launch plan ideally has a model of awareness (via ads, PR, emails, social) to page visits. Tracking those is important for the individual channel owners. 

Hope this helps.

Manav.

Ultimately you’re working to drive revenue (in one way or another), which comes from feature awareness and/or usage.

Revenue is a lagging indicator so your launch plan should include metrics that can ladder up to revenue and be measured in a more immediate time frame.

• Some measure of awareness - page visits on launch day (and subsequent time period) can be one measure
• Some measure of conversion - depends on where the feature impacts your funnel. If it’s a entirely net new product, hand raisers on your landing page might be this conversion metric. Trial starts, or first time use might be others.
• Close Rate, Pipeline, and Contract Value might be other key metrics that ladder up to revenue.

Within a quarter I want to see organic interest (either from customer base or market expansion) - ie opportunity creation!

This is a tough one because every PMM at every company operates differently.
If there are things that you are personally responsible for delivering, then measure those things first. Blog post views and/or Sign-ups are two key ones. Some other ancillary ones you can measure are PR coverage, and pipeline generated.

In my experiences, PMM is an inherently cross-functional role, so it’s common to have shared metrics with marketing channel owners (awareness or leads), product teams (adoption or revenue), or sales (pipeline or revenue). Also, metrics vary significantly based on your product, audience, and business model. 

To set SMART objectives for a launch, I start with questions like: 

• How does this launch contribute to a broader company objective? To keep teams aligned and engaged, it’s important to ensure everyone understands how their work contributes to higher-level goals.
• Does it make sense to focus on a specific stage of the customer journey, or pursue a full-funnel approach?
• What unique value can marketing drive as part of this launch, and how will you attribute and measure this value?

One of, if not THE most direct indicator of a strong product marketing output is product adoption. If PMM’s high-level responsibility is to translate product features into customer value points, measuring the onboarding and usage rates of your products is a critical litmus test for any product marketer. The other key areas also include content and win rates.

• Onboarding data: At the onset of a contract, are customers using the product as much as you think they should? Are they using all the features available to them? If they aren’t, is there collateral that can help them understand how to maximize the usage of their new platform? The first quarter of a customer’s engagement with a tool is a strong reflection of product marketing’s ability to showcase the product to those who are already bought-in (and likely more engaged with your marketing materials than prospects).
• Feature adoption: Similarly, when product marketing creates messaging around new features or cross-sell options, how quickly is that translating to adoption? Are customers signing up for beta programs at a high volume, and are their renewals increasing in price over time? Keeping an eye on how new offerings are performing can be indicative of appropriate messaging around them.
• Churn rates: While product marketing might not directly help a customer accomplish their goals, throughout the market there are competing product marketers that are making a compelling argument to leave your brand for theirs. If your messaging doesn’t instill trust in your customers, they’ll be more willing to evaluate other options. It’s the product marketers job to ensure that customers know you’re innovating and can solve their needs better than the rest of the market. Changes in churn rates signal a lack of trust in the product and, ultimately, the messaging supporting it.
• Usage of assets: content views, shares, downloads, etc.: This metric is more around the growth of your brand’s authority and influence which is important for product marketing teams. Being an authoritative figure in your space makes customers more trustworthy of your products. Content marketing is a large part of both growing that influence and growing organic traffic. Potential customers do a lot of research.  If leads are using and engaging with the expert content you create, that means your brand is authoritative and trusted. If your marketing assets are overlooked and not engaged with, they make not be interesting enough or resonate with your target customers.
• Win Rate and Win rates in target market: Win rate is a basic, very straight forward sales metric that can determine how your product marketing team is doing compared to competitors, substitutes, and if your messaging is winning with customers. Your win rate is how many customers you win when given the opportunity. It can be in the form of an impression, demo, sales pitch, etc. You can also break down losses by “losses to competitors” and “losses to no decision”, etc. This can give you a good idea of how well your product and message do against competition and other options. You can also break down the win rate by target market to understand if your product and message perform better in specific target markets and how you can change to improve.

This depends if you're a product marketer vs industry marketer but Ill try to answer both. Product marketers need to care a lot about product adoption. That is the biggest driver for any sort of KPI. You need to look at:

• Conversions - website, form fills, campaigns that are ran
• Pipeline - topline pipeline growth
• Attachment rates - new logo and cross selling
• Product recognition - how its perceived in the market
• Product ASP - the sales price, keep a close eye on this

Industry marketers on the other hand look at: 

• Industry/Segment ARR
• Industry/Segment ASP
• Pipeline
• Win/loss

I measure the same regardless of the type of delivery. Customer Life Time Value, Close Rate, Pipeline Growth, and Average Length of a Buying Decision are example metrics. 

The answer is, as always, it depends :)

Is the PMM the owner of the launches at the company?

If yes, their KPIs can be process related; i.e. snags in as well as successes (think low volume of support tickets that were created due to the launch, campaign readiness, sales and support readiness, etc.).

In either way, instead of thinking about a set of KPIs that don't change for each launch, I like the approach of setting org-wide KPIs for each launch that are relevant for that specific launch.

So for example if you're launching an enhancement, the key outcome you're after is adoption among current customers. That can trickle outside of product usage to email CTRs (=messaging hits the spot), guides completion rates, demo hand raisers (depends on your GTM motion).

If you're launching a new offering, the key outcome could be awareness. That can also trickle down to different areas: website traffic, demo requests/signups/interactive demo views, sales ability to perform demos (demo environment, collateral, etc.).

PMMs can impact so many KPIs, I'd focus on setting the right ones and aligning with teams on ways to measure them in the short and long term rather than on fixating on specific ones they own every launch.