TAGS

All Go-To-Market Strategy Product Launches Release Marketing

Release Marketing

Product Marketing

How can I make it easier for my team and stakeholders to work with me on the marketing launch timeline when engineering releases are sometimes delayed?

Any tips for setting expectations and not losing team’s trust while ensuring we have a timeline to work towards?

4 answers

Priya Patel

Vice President Product Marketing, TripActions • March 16

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...

Andrew Forbes

Director, Product Marketing, Figma • June 30

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...

Head of Product Marketing, Core Product, Gusto • April 27

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...

Kevin Garcia

Head of Product Marketing, Retool • October 4

EVERY company I've ever worked for, the engineering releases were mostly... not on time. And before you think that's a dig, let's levelset. Product development is hard. You are bringing an idea to life and testing it in the wild. You make decisions that work or don't, and then have to clean up later. You get pulled by customers to do things you didn't originally scope, and sometimes have to pivot (a lot). Product development done right is iterative, messy, and non-linear. The best products are not built in clean sets of two-week sprints. In other words, releases are a "guess-timate" at b...

Product Marketing

What type of customer research do you do pre-launch to help you have a great product launch?

11 answers

Chief Marketing Officer, Blend • March 18

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...

VP of Marketing, Process Street • June 1

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...

Alex Chahin

VP of Marketing, Titan | Formerly Lyft, Hims & Hers, American Express • August 19

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.) ...

Jeffrey Vocell

Head of Product Marketing, Narvar | Formerly Iterable, HubSpot, IBM • September 2

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...

Daniel J. Murphy

VP of Marketing, Privy • September 23

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...

Priya Patel

Vice President Product Marketing, TripActions • March 15

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...

Mike Polner

Head of Consumer Marketing, Discord | Formerly Uber, Fivestars, Electronic Arts • June 10

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...

Kevin Garcia

Head of Product Marketing, Retool • June 25

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...

Vikas Bhagat

Director, Head of Product Marketing, Webflow • July 11

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...

Stephen Baloglu

Director of Product Marketing, Adobe • March 30

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...

Christina Lhi

Head Of Product Marketing, Square • September 13

It is always a good idea to factor in some time for research pre-launch to make sure your messaging is resonating with your target customer. In the past, I've done this both via quant surveys (Pros: more data driven confidence levels but Cons: Finding the right prospect audience can be expensive) and qual (Pros: can learn more of the why and insights, Cons: lower levels of confidence). Another useful tactic is to loop in your GTM teams early on to get their thoughts on concepts/messaging. But ultimately, you shouldn't use these as a crutch, you should invest more energy and time up front to...

Product Marketing

How would you approach this product marketing interview assignment?

I interviewed earlier this year and did well except for this assignment. I'm hoping to better prepare for similar situations. Here's the quest: As mentioned, the next part of this process is to complete a brief assignment. The purpose of this assignment is just to see your methodology get some insight into your approach to tasks. For this assignment, I'd like for you to create a high-level go-to-market plan and strategy for our flagship product our event marketing platform. Our company traditionally has targeted enterprise b2b companies. I'd like you to come up with high-level messaging, define who the target audience is, and then detail your strategy for informing the market about our event platform and getting more leads. Please identify which channels you would use, and what you would need for this go-to-market launch. Please keep your response under 2 pages

7 answers

Vice President, Product Marketing, Momentive • July 1

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...

Grant Shirk

Head of Product Marketing, Cisco Meraki, Cisco | Formerly Tellme Networks, Microsoft, Box, Vera, Scout RFP, and Sisu Data, to name a few. • July 7

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...

Zachary Reiss-Davis

Head of Industry/Audience Marketing; Director of Product Marketing, Procore Technologies • July 14

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 ...

Rekha Srivatsan

VP of Product Marketing, Salesforce • July 27

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 ...

Jeff Hardison

Head of Product Marketing, Calendly • August 11

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, Amplitude • October 5

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...

Tracy Montour

Head of Product Marketing, HiredScore • July 29

I often find these assignments are about your approach to problem solving, positioning, and alignment rather than the work you actually produce. This is how I evaluate candidates. To me, it's all about their approach, rather than their output. You can't be expected to be an expert on the product or target audience before you even join an organization. I would recommend "showing your work" and helping the interviewing team understand your approach, as well as how you would measure success if you were to join the team.

Product Marketing

What's your favorite launch to date and why?

5 answers

Eve Alexander

Vice President, Product Marketing, Seismic • May 19

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...

Andrew Forbes

Director, Product Marketing, Figma • June 30

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 ...

Christy Roach

Senior Director, Portfolio & Engagement Product Marketing, Airtable • December 10

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 ...

Susan "Spark" Park

Head of Product Marketing, VR Work Experiences, Oculus, Meta • February 3

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!

Priyanka Srinivasan

Head of Product & Partner Marketing, Qualia • March 29

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...

Product Marketing

What criteria do you use to prioritize releases?

2 answers

Andrew Forbes

Director, Product Marketing, Figma • June 30

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...

Priyanka Srinivasan

Head of Product & Partner Marketing, Qualia • March 29

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 ...

Product Marketing

How do you track the success of a launch?

1 answer

Stephen Baloglu

Director of Product Marketing, Adobe • March 30

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 ...

Product Marketing

What is the best way to sustain launch over time and prevent the spike in traffic in the short run without long-term results?

4 answers

Ajit Ghuman

Director of Pricing and Packaging, Twilio Flex, Twilio | Formerly Narvar, Medallia, Helpshift, Feedzai, Reputation.com • May 21

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.

Daniel J. Murphy

VP of Marketing, Privy • September 23

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.

Caroline Walthall

Director of Product Marketing, Quizlet | Formerly Udemy • January 15

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...

Stephen Baloglu

Director of Product Marketing, Adobe • March 30

“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...

Product Marketing

How do you think about building a PMM team -- eg, how do you balance the day-to-day with less pressing -- but still important -- things around processes, career development, building x-functional relationships?

1 answer

Stephen Baloglu

Director of Product Marketing, Adobe • March 29

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...

Product Marketing

How do you assess organizational readiness ahead of a product launch?

Too often product marketing is seen as a collateral producing engine. But with substantial new launches, we are sometimes the only ones integrating needs, insights, and potential operational bottlenecks across all stakeholders, internal or external. I’m curious both of how you think of org readiness and how you incorporate this dimension into your launch motion.

5 answers

Eve Alexander

Vice President, Product Marketing, Seismic • May 19

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...

Dave Daniels

Founder, BrainKraft • May 25

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...

Chase Wilson

Co-Founder & CEO, Flywheel • May 27

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...

Andrew Forbes

Director, Product Marketing, Figma • June 30

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...

Stephen Baloglu

Director of Product Marketing, Adobe • March 29

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...

Product Marketing

What is the best cadence for gathering stakeholder feedback in preparation for a launch?

9 answers

Akshay Kerkar

Head of Marketing, Cloud Enterprise & Platform, Atlassian • December 23

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...

Caroline Walthall

Director of Product Marketing, Quizlet | Formerly Udemy • January 15

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...

Holly Watson

Product Marketing SME, AWS, Amazon • February 10

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...

Senior Director, Product Marketing, Bill.com • February 23

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...

Christine Sotelo-Dag

Director of Product Marketing, Mode • February 23

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...

Andrew Forbes

Director, Product Marketing, Figma • June 30

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...

Stacey Wang

Director of Product Marketing, Ironclad • June 30

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.

Director, Microsoft • December 1

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...

Lindsey Weinig

Director of Product Marketing, Twilio • March 16

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 ...