What’s your advice on how best to handle communicating tier 2 and 3 product releases? E.g., all of the updates that aren’t big, flashy new features?

Honestly, the less “flashy” launches are often my favorites, because these releases may have a smaller audience than a major launch would have, but if you do them right, it’s sooo fun to watch those audiences lose their minds out of happiness when they hear about a new feature that will make their lives easier!

I made some recommendations for specific communication tactics on Tiers 2 and 3 in my answer to the “not all launches are created equal” question. Generally, the name of the game with these launches is to meet your audiences where they are. That often means using your product itself to get the word out! Here are a few ideas:

• In-product notifications, banners, pop-ups, or walkthroughs. You don’t want to be disruptive to your users, but don’t be afraid to share the news. This is a good opportunity for A/B testing how modals or banners might work best for you in-platform.
• User-focused communities. If you’re lucky to have an online community like Trailblazer or our Hitchhikers program at Yext, the people in those spaces are often your most engaged users — so don’t miss out on the opportunity to get them excited! And of course, in post-COVID times, I look forward to once again being able to share the news at in-person user groups.
• It may sound simplistic, but I also love a good old plain-text email to current customers or prospects who are in an active sales cycle. Even though we’re product marketers, sometimes making something look less “marketing-y” can help it bubble up from the noise.

This is a common challenge across every product marketing team. It is a delicate balance in ensuring the market and your customers are aware of what you've built, while not overwhelming them with too much noise.

A few things that we've seen work well are releasing smaller tiered launches in a quieter fashion with either a change-log/product update or very targeted customer communications, and resurfacing these releases in some of the roundup activities we do. For example, we release quarterly blog posts and webinars that highlight our recent releases - these are always very popular with our audience.

Another tactic that we've leveraged is bundling releases. In this case, it only makes sense to bundle releases when the two (or more) features work together to tell a bigger story. This doesn't always equate to product holding back on shipping, often times features can release quietly - and are only promoted once all features are generally available. 

A lot of companies use a Changelog for these smaller launches. Your most engaged users will subscribe to the Changelog and get notified when you update it. There are tools like LaunchNotes you can use for this. https://www.launchnotes.com/ 

And then some features are self-explanatory and you may not have to communicate about them proactively at all. People should be able to discover them in-product (with a "new" label, or just from using your product). 

We tier releases for a reason—you can't scream about everything otherwise customers will shut you out. That being said, there is still a ton of value in communicating even smaller releases. Some ways to handle these tier 2 and 3 releases are:

• Include these in your external-facing release notes/changelog. You see a lot of companies have this live on their website somewhere, a dedicated landing page, within their help center, or sometimes in-app.
• As Erin mentioned, some of these features, especially tier 2s, will be super exciting and valuable for certain customers. Figure out the right segment of customers that will appreciate that release and do some targeted communication to them. In-product is a great way to go because tier 2 and 3 releases are typically enhancements on existing features that these targeted customers already use. So create contextual excitement by letting those specific customers know about the update, at the right time, and then walking them through what they need to know. 
• Package up some of these smaller releases into a larger story, which I get, is sometimes easier said than done. But ideally, your roadmap is built around themes and high-level objectives, that various small releases tie back to. So as you release these small updates, include them in your release notes and changelog but wait to talk more widely about them until you have a handful that can be included in a larger story.