What's the 'do not miss' piece of advice to give for PMM's for product launches?

My best 'do not miss' piece of advice for product launches to make sure that your product positioning is solid and differentiated. It needs to be rooted in specific benefits. The best rule of thumb is if your competitor can slap their name on your main message, then you need to rethink it. Your messaging, value props and benefits need to feel unique and specific to your product. What is the one thing that your product does that a competitor cannot claim. Make sure that is the focal messaging of ...Read More

As a self-professed planner, my top piece of advice is to make sure you stay on top of things with some sort of tracking mechanism, whatever works best for you. That said, no matter how much you plan, there will be some last minute change or someone who goes out sick or something that fails on the morning of, so even though I am a planner at heart, I am also realistic and know that I have to go with the flow. So my don't miss piece of advice is don't let things get to you. Plan, plan, plan but a ...Read More

This is a great question! There are three areas that I believe are crucial to launches, and to being an effective product marketer overall. The first is to really get to know your target audience. This goes beyond simply identifying who they are. It’s about deeply exploring their challenges, needs, and behaviors. During product launches, you'll encounter a flood of opinions and ideas about tactics, channels, and messaging. Using your audience as your North Star will guide you through these discu ...Read More

Make sure you are clearly aligned on an impact-oriented goal for your launch, e.g. Is this intended to help you improve win rates? Get more at-bats? Open more TAM? Then, as you work across your internal partner stakeholders, you'll more easily drive alignment behind a consistent "why" -- whether it's helping sales reps understand how this will help them hit their number, align with demand gen on expectations for pipeline/awareness efforts, and more. It also will help you track success not just a ...Read More

Find the magic in the launch. It's so easy to go through the checklist of activities and spend months getting every little detail right for a launch, that we sometimes get too in the weeds and forget to take a step back and think about that 'aha' moment that will make the launch feel magical to your ICP. Assume they'll see your email, and read your blog post and click your push notification and so on - what is it that makes their eyes light up? What makes them want to go talk about the launch to ...Read More