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Release Marketing
Release Marketing
6 answers
Vice President, Product Marketing at Momentive
First off, I'll say that I'm never a fan of making someone create
messaging/positioning and defining a GTM plan about the interviewing company's
product because you're never going to get to the level of knowledge as someone
in the company...and it takes way longer to do it right. OK, rant over. :)
Typically when I ask candidates to give a presentation, it's less about the
specific products they're presenting, but rather HOW they present it. Can the
candidate articulate how they effectively approached their GTM strategy, from
ideation to execution and beyond. Can they clearly understand t...more
Head of Product Marketing, Cisco Meraki at Cisco | Formerly Tellme Networks, Microsoft, Box, Vera, Scout RFP, and Sisu Data, to name a few.
Pulling this one up. It's outside the realm of KPIs and measurement, but I think
it's really critical. And I have a few strong opinions here.
If I can summarize this back, as part of your interview process, you were given
an assignment to build an overall strategic plan to take a flagship product to
market, do it under extreme time and emotional pressure, and summarize it all in
a few hundred words.
To put it bluntly, this is a terrible way to assess someone's skills, is
antithetical to what we should expect of someone in the interview process, and
really sounds like unpaid consulti...more
Head of Industry/Audience Marketing; Director of Product Marketing at Procore Technologies
I don't think I can help you on the full assignment within the scope of an AMA;
especially since the sub-question reads like the company probably is going to be
using this question for other candidates in the future. However, here are a few
tips for any take-home interview round like this:
* If you're given the opportunity to ask follow-up questions, make sure you do
so; one key part of the exercise is seeing how you learn and research.
* Make sure you do your homework; know what the current messaging, positioning,
audience, and content available is.
* Spend the time to proofread ...more
VP of Product Marketing at Salesforce
Sorry, that didn't work out! Here's how I would approach this assignment:
* Study Certain's website to understand their current product messaging and
positioning. And make sure your draft is different from this but not
drastically different.
* Play closer attention to their customer stories/testimonials to understand
their use cases. This gives you a glimpse of what features to highlight in
your GTM strategy.
* The goal is to get more leads, so take a look at their pricing and packaging
to see if there can be a better approach.
* Understand Certain's key competitors ...more
Head of Product Marketing at Calendly
I’d have to see your assignment response to make recommendations! And I probably shouldn’t print my recommendations here publicly, as this company probably wants to keep the assignment confidential. Feel free to befriend me on LinkedIn, and I'll take a look at your assignment and give you feedback.
Director of Enterprise Product Marketing at Amplitude
I have no idea how you prep your presentation. But for an assignment like this
one, I think what employers want to test is your ability to assess the problem
and provide a solution. So before I would even start on the assignment, I would
try to highlight the problem statement. What problem is this product trying to
solve? Who are you solving it for? And importantly, is this a problem, the user
recognizes or not at all? These questions will help you detail your strategy
before you go into messaging and GTM strategy. Start with the problem statement
and how said product solves it. Then flow i...more
3 answers
Vice President Product Marketing at TripActions
I've never worked anywhere where releases don't get delayed - delays happen. The
best you can do is to stay in as close communication with your key stakeholders
as possible - informing them of updates in real-time. You won't lose trust with
your team if you're open and honest: put a stake in the ground and establish a
launch date if there isn't one, so that everyone can start planning their
respective workstreams and you can ensure a successful launch. But also clearly
communicate that there's a chance the date may slip. You can hold a launch
planning session on a regular cadence (every wee...more
Director, Product Marketing at Figma
I think it's safe to say that all product releases come with some sort of delay
or scope change, it's to be expected. But, it can oftentimes impact the morale
of the team if there are repetitive delays.
The biggest thing you can do is be transparent from the beginning. Oftentimes,
if you're working closely with your product teams, you can get a sense if things
may slip and dates may change. When you get that feeling, it's important to have
a conversation with your PMs about it so that you can relay information to your
team as soon as possible.
I have three tips...
First, turn delay...more
Head of Product Marketing, Core Product at Gusto
My advice is to separate the ship and launch functions. In my experience when
they are paired together, there is so much unproductive internal thrash when eng
encounters delays and all the downstream teams have to re-adjust their plans.
Instead, group new products and features into larger campaigns where if
something doesn’t get released on time, you still have a compelling story to
tell and your campaign doesn’t get derailed. Set expectations that all features
must ship by X date to be included in the campaign.
This also has the benefit of creating more impactful launch moments where yo...more
5 answers
Sr. Director, Product Marketing at Seismic
Love this question! It's funny - the first one that comes to mind was not
actually a traditionally successful launch; it was the one where I learned the
most, got to spend a ton of time with customers, and really got to flex my
creative muscles. What I loved was having the space to conduct deep qualitative
and quantative research. I had the chance to go on a few multi-city roadshows to
pitch it live, and refined the storyline after every conversation to craft a
compelling, customer-centric, validated value proposition. Unfortunately, so
often, this part of the process is rushed. At launch, ...more
Sr. Director, Product Marketing at Seismic
Love this question! It's funny - the first one that comes to mind was not
actually a traditionally successful launch; it was the one where I learned the
most, got to spend a ton of time with customers, and really got to flex my
creative muscles. What I loved was having the space to conduct deep qualitative
and quantative research. I had the chance to go on a few multi-city roadshows to
pitch it live, and refined the storyline after every conversation to craft a
compelling, customer-centric, validated value proposition. Unfortunately, so
often, this part of the process is rushed. At launch, ...more
Sr. Director, Product Marketing at Seismic
Love this question! It's funny - the first one that comes to mind was not
actually a traditionally successful launch; it was the one where I learned the
most, got to spend a ton of time with customers, and really got to flex my
creative muscles. What I loved was having the space to conduct deep qualitative
and quantative research. I had the chance to go on a few multi-city roadshows to
pitch it live, and refined the storyline after every conversation to craft a
compelling, customer-centric, validated value proposition. Unfortunately, so
often, I feel like this part of the process gets rushe...more
Director, Product Marketing at Figma
This is a tough one! We've worked on so many awesome launches at Zendesk - and
as the team who's responsible for our quarterly launch programs, we've had no
shortage of fun launches to work on.
If I had to pick one, I would honestly say it was my first launch at Zendesk -
our analytics product Explore. You could say I was "thrown off the deep-end"
with this one.
I was relatively new on the PMM team but found myself in a position where I was
the sole PMM working on the launch. It's my favorite because it was an awesome
way of ramping up on everything product marketing-related and it ...more
Head of Portfolio & Engagement Product Marketing at Airtable
Every single launch, even the ones that made me crazy, taught me something
valuable. As I’ve gotten more senior, I’ve done less of the launch coordination
but I still get deeply involved in our product launches because I believe
there’s nothing that encapsulates the feeling, energy, and excitement of being a
PMM quite like launching a new product.
If I look at the launches I’ve been a part of, there are two that stand out to
me as the most impactful:
The first was very early in my career, in a job I actually didn’t thrive in, but
that I learned a ton from. I was lucky enough to be a very ...more
Head of Product Marketing, VR Work Experiences, Oculus at Meta
I don't have a favorite, but Horizon Workrooms has been pretty cool. I was on the launch team (shout-out to Yuxi Wang who was the PMM on the project), and I left a fantastic job on Gaming to work on this project. The technology is incredible and is helping me realize my personal dream of being to work well with anyone, even if we're miles apart. Check out the trailer too!
Head of Product & Partner Marketing at Qualia
I don’t know if it’s my ‘favorite’ launch but one launch that someone on my team
recently did was around some exciting automations within our product.
What makes a launch exciting for me isn’t the types of activities we do, or how
much cross-functional collaboration there is, or whether we came up with
something flashy for it. For me, what’s most exciting is when a product or
feature is incredibly strategic to the overall vision of our products.
This feature we recently launched was exciting on its own, but when put into the
context of how this will change the way a real estate transa...more
2 answers
Director, Product Marketing at Figma
There are a lot of different ways to prioritize releases - and we're currently
updating how we do it at Zendesk right now. If anyone else has any tips, let us
know!!
For the most part, we consider two things: business impact and customer impact.
For instance, if something has a large customer and business impact, it's
prioritized above other items as a tier 1 launch. Or if a launch has a high
customer impact but a low business impact it will fall into our T2 bucket as we
likely will need to do a lot of promotion into our customer-base to drive
awareness, but the launch doesn't necessaril...more
Head of Product & Partner Marketing at Qualia
Like many marketing organizations, we utilized a tiering structure to determine
the priority of product releases as well as level of effort.
In general, I’m always looking to link our impact directly to revenue (new logo
or expansion) first and foremost. As a result, for us, “Tier 1” launches will
typically contain those products or features we think will really move the
needle in terms of generating hand raises from (1) total prospects (i.e., new
logos, those who don’t own any of our products at all) or (2) those who are
expansion candidates (those who own one of products today but are ...more
1 answer
Director of Product Marketing at Adobe
Success…you know it when you see it. Well, we all may see it a different way.
So, for me, it’s all about establishing what success looks like with
stakeholders and leadership (early and often), ensuring reliable measurements of
success metrics are in place before launch, and taking an honest and candid
approach to evaluating the launch.
We use the Go-to-Market strategy document to align the team on objectives,
measures of success and goals/targets. As we prep for the launch, we ensure
dashboards and data measures are in place to read out the measures/KPIs and
diagnostics and that we all ...more
4 answers
Director of Pricing and Packaging, Twilio Flex at Twilio | Formerly Narvar, Medallia, Helpshift, Feedzai, Reputation.com
Customer stories and case studies. Proof!
The public facing spike in the intial phase (hype creation), needs to move on to proof (value creation).
We saw this at Helpshift where the Chatbot product started to fully automate upto 70% of a few customers' inbound customer service chats. This was way beyond what any other product in the industry was able to accomplish.
Once the company had this data, it became very easy and effective to credibly continue to market and sell the product. It was no longer hype, the product performed, it was undeniable.
VP of Marketing at Privy
First of all, don't try to prevent the short term spike! that's why you launch, to drive attention and focus for one thing in the short term.
But how to get long term results: have a plan to continue building momentum. Like for a new product, you want to continue building momentum with content, marketing campaigns, sales team selling it, etc. And don't forget feature launches, if it's a new product, plan the announcement of the product, but then plan follow up launches for new features as you build them.
Director of Product Marketing at Quizlet | Formerly Udemy
There was a similar question below, so I encourage you to check that out, but
otherwise here’s a list of other thoughts that come to mind:
* For initial launch campaigns I always try to consider what can be repurposed
and reskinned post-launch for use in lifecycle campaigns, ad campaigns, and
user education. That means build things in a modular way so you can take out
any key dates or "brand spanking new" launch messaging without having to
fully redesign collateral.
* Post launch try conducting a survey or a handful of interviews with users who
have organically discovere...more
Director of Product Marketing at Adobe
“No, don’t do it! Don’t create a massive spike in traffic and run-up in sales
that blows through your numbers.” said no one, ever.
But really, I get it, you’re not looking for empty calories, you're building a
business. Here are a few thoughts.
1. Understand what might drive a short-term spike that doesn’t carry through.
Is your media spend too front-loaded?
Do you not have the right product-led growth motions to create sustainable
growth?
Are you taking pricing action along with a product launch?
If you are worried about this, list out assumptions of what might cause the
spike, asses...more
10 answers
Chief Marketing Officer at Zeplin
I’m a big believer in customer research as a part of the overall launch plan.
It’s tempting to make decisions based on “I think” or “I like” but in most
cases, the PMM is not the target audience so it’s important to balance a
convicted point of view with actual customer signal.
At Dropbox, we work with our Customer Intelligence team to do quant & qual
research across areas like: value prop definition, messaging, creative brand and
even perform research early in the pre-build phase to help inform the product
roadmap in partnership with Product.
We also have a program called “real wo...more
VP of Marketing at Process Street
For clarity, I’ll draw a distinction here between product research and product
launch research.
1) Product research happens before resources are committed to build the proposed
product. Product research is critical to ensure that you are, to use YCombinator
parlance, “making something people want”. This is frequently called validation
research. You are validating that A) a customer need exists, and B) what you
propose to build will meet that customer need. And you are seeking to understand
the nuances around that customer need. Individual customer interviews are the
main way that validatio...more
Sr. Director, Product Marketing at Hims and Hers | Formerly Lyft, American Express
To answer this question, first ask yourself a number of questions:
* Business importance: Is this a smaller feature, or is it a big bet and large
revenue driver?
* Risk: Even if it's not a large revenue driver, there may be a substantial
reputational risk to getting it wrong. Is this one of those situations?
* Timing: When does this need to hit market? Can you convince management and
stakeholders to wait for research, or do you need to act now? (Side note:
Many projects will feel urgent, but it's rarely the case. Customers tend to
forget who launches something first.)
...more
Head of Product Marketing at Narvar | Formerly Iterable, HubSpot, IBM
It depends on the launch, but I will usually do a mix of these:
Customer Research: Talk with existing customers, or survey your existing
customer base (or a segment of it) if a solution your launching is directly
related or adjacent to an existing product you have. If you need deep insight
into the pain points a customer is facing a 1:1 conversation would likely be
best. There’s no magic number of conversation to have - but once you start
noticing trends in a lot of answers you can generally stop. In my experience
it’s usually between 10-15, but can be more or less. If you are launching yo...more
VP of Marketing at Privy
The #1 thing is listening to customer calls. Or beta calls if you have someone
selling the product before the launch. We use Gong.io for that.
This is where I get most of the positoining. Copy and paste call transcripts
into the positioning deck. Better to use their words than make up your own.
Once you have the positioning, you can pitch it to other customers. Get on a
call yourself, test it out. So not only does your positioning originate with
your customers, but it's validated by more of them.
If you're short on time, pitch the positioning to your team (CSMs, sales reps,
supp...more
Vice President Product Marketing at TripActions
Customer research is so critical to the success of a launch and the extent of it
will depend on the size and scope of the launch. At a minimum, you'll want to do
customer interviews to understand:
- The customer problem
- The value the product will deliver
- Who your target segment(s) and persona(s) are
These will serve as the inputs to your product or feature messaging and
positioning. If you work at an enterprise-focused company, it's sometimes not so
easy to get in front of senior buyers at the enterprise level. In these cases,
you can leverage the feedback of CAB members and beta custom...more
VP Marketing at Cameo | Formerly Uber, Fivestars, Electronic Arts
Love this question. I take a 1 is greater than 0, even if it's less than 100
strategy here. Talking to any customers is better than talking to no customers.
Obviously if you have sufficient time you'll want to gather feedback (qual +
quant) on both the product experience, the positioning, and any campaign
messaging or assets that you have. I find that's rarely the case though and
almost everything is done with half the time and a quarter the resources you'd
like. In that case, I take a best guess at messaging and positioning - create
some assets or tools for somebody to react to. Push notif...more
Head of Product Marketing at Retool
I like to break this down into: product research, messaging research, GTM
research.
Product research is research you do to inform the product the team builds. This
almost always manifests in alpha and beta testing, but it can also be a specific
research project you tackle.
Messaging research is research you do to inform how you talk about the product.
It can be as simple as showing a few customers your landing page to as complex
as testing different audiences with messaging options and ad variants.
GTM research is research you do to ensure you make money/grow because of the
product...more
Director, Head of Product Marketing at Webflow
There are a number of ways to approach customer research pre-launch. At Webflow,
we spend a lot of time with our community members to better understand their
needs and wants as it relates to our product roadmap and their business needs.
Really understanding specific audience segments and the why really helps our
product marketing team with better messaging that resonates in the market. I've
also been part of organizations where leveraging a cross-functional product beta
program with sales, product, and product marketing creates a strong repository
of not only customer feedback for product b...more
Director of Product Marketing at Adobe
Great question and glad to see people taking a customer-led approach to product
launches. There are a few strategies I recommend here and they fall into 4
areas.
1. Review the foundational research and insights that already exist - What
you’re launching was built based on deep customer research and …ensure
you’re clear on the insights that drove what you’re bringing to market in
the first place. If gaps are identified, now is the time to identify and
close them. It’s better late than never on the foundational pieces.
2. Dig into early customer feedback - Talk to beta cust...more
1 answer
Director of Product Marketing at Adobe
Developing your team and how x-functional teams work together may seem “less
pressing”, but while these things do not typically have urgent deadlines, they
are extremely important. Here are a few strategies I use to effectively develop
the team as well as meeting business goals.
* OKRs for personal development. We use OKRs to set and measure goals. Whatever
goal setting/tracking model you use, make room for you and your team to add
individual career goals. We typically all have a learning goal each quarter
which can range from doing a LinkedIn learning program all the way to
s...more
5 answers
Sr. Director, Product Marketing at Seismic
One thing that has been wonderful at Seismic is we have someone on the product
marketing team that is in a program management role and who is responsible for
driving and faciliating organizational readiness for launches (shout out to my
colleague, Steve!). He pulls together "tiger teams" for our major launches with
representatives from around the company, leads weekly meetings, and manages our
project plan. This takes some of that organizational readiness weight off the
PMM. The PMM lead may still have to help triage bottlenecks and risks, but frees
her up to spend more time on her core wor...more
Founder at BrainKraft
I start with the objectives of the launch and work from there. I look for
advantages that can be leveraged and obstacles that need to be removed. I assign
functional areas (e.g. Sales, Finance, Legal) to each launch member of my launch
team. One of their primary responsibilities is to identify readiness gaps that
can prevent us from achieving our launch objectives (OKRs).
A Launch Readiness Plan is created for each functional area to document the
readiness gaps, prioritize the gaps based on severity, and have a plan of action
to close each readiness gap. Granted there is some degree of s...more
Co-Founder & CEO at Flywheel
Great question! For the Jira Work Management launch I was actually the first
team hire. This was really important for the dynamic of our team and we eshewed
the common "triad" for a "quad". That is to say that I helped design the product
and no large decisions were made without my input, whether that was for design,
engineering, or product. The same existed in the reverse, where everyone knew
what the marketing gameplan was and was able to give their suggestions and
thoughts.
I would say that every new product team should be evaluating the market,
competitors, differentiators, packaging, a...more
Director, Product Marketing at Figma
This is an awesome question.
The way we've gotten ahead of it at Zendesk - which has worked well - is by
creating an "Operations Council" who is responsible for reviewing the
operational components of a launch. This includes reviews of things like billing
readiness, pricing & packaging, and making sure that we have reporting systems
ready for us to track the success of a launch.
These meetings are staffed by stakeholders in each department as well as their
respective leadership. It's a great way of ensuring that as a business we are
ready to operationalize a new product line or reve...more
Director of Product Marketing at Adobe
Organization readiness can be measured at different altitudes…e.g. Super high
level and broad: does the business have the right strategy to win? vs. tactical:
are we set up for a successful product launch and meet near-term goals? And
points in-between.
Let’s assume the big strategy pieces are figured out and set up for success and
we’re focusing on the more near-term tactical pieces of a successful launch.
There are a few areas that I focus on to assess launch readiness. For all of
these, the key is to gain partnership and commitment with your x-functional
leaders on the priority and mea...more
9 answers
Head of Marketing, Cloud Enterprise & Platform at Atlassian
Not all launches are created equal, so it’s important to have a t-shirt sizing
exercise upfront to determine how large a launch is (and hence what level of
effort/mix of activities should be dedicated to launch). Once that’s done, the
sooner we can put a launch plan in place, socialize that, and kick-off the
launch process, the better.
The process can then include checkpoints like getting the messaging finalized,
locking the website copy, etc. with each activity having a mini-process to get
sign-off (ideally using something like the DACI framework) based on when things
need to be ready for...more
Director of Product Marketing at Quizlet | Formerly Udemy
This is a good question. It depends how much buffer time you have leading to
launch and whether you’re in a comfortable place to execute on each phase and
collect feedback at each step. For me, I often need different people’s input at
different stages.
The two stages I need input in most are 1) after drafting positioning,
messaging, and high level launch tactics and 2) about a four to two weeks ahead
of the launch to ensure there’s time to make any last minute adjustments.
That said, stakeholders who are key to executing on that plan should be looped
in much more frequently in the st...more
Product Marketing SME, AWS at Amazon
As often as possible. Launches are exciting for all departments - so questions
and input can definitely start increasing the closer you get to GA, launch date.
To help with this, create opportunities to communicate your launch plan to each
team. Tailor the message to your audience as Sales will have interests around
pricing, packaging, target audience, dates; while CS will have questions about
customer environment changes, reporting impacts, and shifts to rules/established
workflows.
Outside of communicating the launch plan, also work to communicate how your
launch will run through stages...more
Senior Director, Product Marketing at Bill.com
It varies as you proceed in the various stages of the product development and
GTM. For example, in the early product development phase, It is more ad-hoc
where I rely heavily on the customer feedback through our customer interviews /
focus groups / surveys to ensure our team clearly understands the customers'
needs. I gather feedback with the core team that is in those same customer
research sessions to help synthesize what we're hearing from the customer. Then
as you prepare for the pilot and launch, you want to share your plan and gather
feedback from all your cross-functional stakeholder...more
Senior Director, Product Marketing at Bill.com
It varies as you proceed in the various stages of the product development and
GTM. For example, in the early product development phase, It is more ad-hoc
where I rely heavily on the customer feedback through our customer interviews /
focus groups / surveys to ensure our team clearly understands the customers'
needs. I gather feedback with the core team that is in those same customer
research sessions to help synthesize what we're hearing from the customer. Then
as you prepare for the pilot and launch, you want to share your plan and gather
feedback from all your cross-functional stakeholder...more
Senior Director, Product Marketing at Bill.com
It varies as you proceed in the various stages of the product development and
GTM. For example, in the early product development phase, It is more ad-hoc
where I rely heavily on the customer feedback through our customer interviews /
focus groups / surveys to ensure our team clearly understands the customers'
needs. I gather feedback with the core team that is in those same customer
research sessions to help synthesize what we're hearing from the customer. Then
as I prepare for the pilot and launch, I typically share my plan and gather
feedback from all my cross-functional stakeholders (E.g...more
Group Product Marketing Manager at Intercom
This is a great question. Managing stakeholders is such a huge part of the
product marketing role - and it can quickly become unweidly if not managed
properly.
I think the cadence is really personal to what kind of lead-time your team has
running up to a launch and the size of your teams, etc. But I can give some
insight into the key milestones where we are solict stakeholder feedback with
clear guidelines on 1. what kind of feedback we're looking for 2. timeline 3.
setting expectations around how feedback will be incorporated:
- Messaging guide complete
- Campaign concept & creative dire...more
Director, Product Marketing at Figma
Hey - Thanks for the question!
Short answer - Early. and. often.
Get stakeholders in a room early on and set the cadence with them. We use a RACI
model at Zendesk when it comes to ownership and development of launch assets.
Set this and then decide when you want folks to review. My take is that it's
always best to share before you're ready. Sometimes it can be hard to do because
you receive critical feedback BUT that feedback helps immensely with whatever
you're trying to do.
As for major launches, we typically get everyone together weekly for an hour and
have various stakeholde...more
Director of PMM at Ironclad
There is no one-size-fits-all here; this depends on the size of your company (the smaller it is, the easier it will be to keep everyone on the same page) and scope of the launch (the smaller it is, the less necessary it is to get everyone together). What's most important is to set a cadence up-front w/ your XFN stakeholders that makes sense for your org.
VP Product Marketing at G2
Because a launch has so many different moving parts across very distinct
disciplines, it is always handy to be agile as pivots may occur.
The best cadence for gathering stakeholder feedback is throughout the launch
process - at the beginning, during the middle and definitely at the end.
There are different stakeholders that you want to involve at the various stages
of a launch. If unsure, you can use a RACI to determine who is in the “need to
get” vs “nice to get” feedback camp.
In the beginning, the alignment on launch goals, deliverables and
roles/responsibilities of each department ar...more
Director of Product Marketing at Twilio
We tend to take a pretty standardized approach for leading launches with my
team. First we do a kickoff meeting with key stakeholders/deliverable owners
across sales and marketing where we cover the target persona, problem and
positioning of the new launch (shared early as a pre-read too) including a
proposal of launch deliverables like emails, blog posts and their proposed
owners. We then open for discussion on the proposal, requesting suggestions for
additional opportunities and feedback.
Stakeholder feedback can get more complex with high-stakes messaging like for
price increases or ...more