What was the hardest product launch you've done in your product marketing career and why?

Launching the Figma Community. Some quick context: Figma Community is a space where individuals and brands can create a public profile and publish design files to the world, so anyone in the world can inspect, remix, and learn from their work.  A couple of things made it hard...  It’s a novel concept. No design software has built something quite like this before within their product. Designers can now share a design file on the Web. Anyone in the world can go to inspect that file, learn how it’s ...Read More

I’ve had my fair share of challenging product launches in my career. The Tier 2s that you desperately want to become a Tier 1. The launches that you, as a product marketer, learn about 48 hours before the launch. Those are painful.But the most difficult have been in the areas of Trust & Safety, which I believe is one of the most critical and sensitive parts of any business. Get them wrong, and corporate reputation goes down the drain. Get them right, and your product can be a significant boo ...Read More

This was a product I helped launch more than a year ago. It was a product that had high market demand and was long overdue for the target buyers. If you reference the question I answered on 'GTM blueprint', this launch had everything in reverse. Unclear Target Segment - we didnt have alignment on who the exact segment was based on launch-day product capabilities, use cases, company size, etc. The broad feeling was the target was 'everyone', which is always a recipe for failure. Misalignment on s ...Read More

Spotify Video Ads Why: I had a new boss that did not trust me yet, nor hired me and didn't understand my Google background and I needed to gain their trust as well as the XFN team Thinking back I grew significanlty during this because I had to earn the trust of a new manager AND my XFN team to get this done. It was exhausting and trained me for the future, but I would not put anyone else through what I went through.   I have now been that new manager coming into a launch and I've learned how to ...Read More

Oof, I’m not sure I want to relive those memories! I think every product launch is an opportunity, there are new challenges that arise and problems to solve. I’ve led and managed a ton of launches - and in pretty much every single case there has always been some last minute changes. For me though, that’s the most exciting time - it’s when product marketers thrive through bringing everyone together in the build-up to the launch.One launch in particular comes to mind though… We were launching an a ...Read More

One of the most challenging product launches I’ve done was the launch of Box Drive. It was challenging for 2 reasons: 1) we were dead last to market from a product competitive perspective (and only able to launch as a public beta to start) and 2) we were going to be feature deficient (compared to the competition) at the time of the launch. All of our competitors had gone to market with very similar messaging (based on viewing their web copy and press releases) and I was struggling to find a way ...Read More

Hands-down, Zoom Hardware as a Service. The messaging and positioning were quite simple, definitely the easiest part... the hard part was steering a purely SaaS company to launch hardware solutions in just over a quarter. I come from a hardware background, so it wasn't necessarily attributed to lack of experience. It was the new operations, sales infrastructure, accounting framework, and things of that nature that made it the hardest product launch I've done to date.  Calculating how you account ...Read More