JJ Xia

Vice President Product Marketing, Zuora

Content

How do you think about the scope or deliverables for various launches?

JJ Xia

Zuora Vice President Product Marketing • October 2

Over the years, we’ve evolved the launch process at Zuora. When we were a smaller company, we launched products whenever they became generally available. Now that we have multiple product lines, we standardize on 2 seasonal product launches per year – Summer and Winter. Our engineering team is co......Read More

4383 Views

How do you roll out pricing and packaging for a new product launch?

JJ Xia

Zuora Vice President Product Marketing • October 2

We roll out new pricing and packaging in conjunction with our seasonal launch cadence. (See context in question below). There are 4 milestones in every seasonal launch: * Product Readiness * Cross-functional Readiness * Internal Enablement * External Promotion There are two parts that to......Read More

2832 Views

What are some unique external (customer facing) activities you include for promoting a new product?

JJ Xia

Zuora Vice President Product Marketing • October 2

We break down external launch activities into one of three categories: * Market Awareness: Will it generate market buzz and/or leads? * Field Enablement: Will it help sales generate revenue? * Customer Adoption: Will it retain customers? Based on that, launch deliverables naturally fall into......Read More

2552 Views

What is the best partnership process between product marketing and marketing when it comes to a product launch?

JJ Xia

Zuora Vice President Product Marketing • October 2

See answer below on “How do you think about the scope or deliverables for various launches?” Our Product Marketing org rolls into Product on the org chart, but we are every bit as part of the Marketing team too. For any launch, I think of Product Marketers as the quarterback for the rest of t......Read More

2537 Views

How do you follow the "Big Bang" of a product launch to drive/nurture sustained growth?

JJ Xia

Zuora Vice President Product Marketing • October 2

Good question. For Zuora - which is a B2B enterprise software product - a “Big Bang” product launch usually drives awareness, not necessarily immediate adoption. It takes additional education to get a buyer to commit resources to the sales cycle and effort to adopt a new software. That being said......Read More

2122 Views

How do you get creative in your product launch, and not feel too templatized?

JJ Xia

Zuora Vice President Product Marketing • October 2

We haven't gotten big enough as a company to feel templatized, thankfully :) Our approach is – Every product launch should be a bit different because each product story is different. The story should dictate what’s included as part of the scope, not a template. Take these two launches for exam......Read More

1776 Views

After an initial product launch, how do you think about the subsequent, smaller launches/updates? How does the strategy/channels/process change? How do you identify where smaller launches can be bundled into a bigger story?

JJ Xia

Zuora Vice President Product Marketing • October 2

First, every small subsequent launch is another chance to make noise for that buyer persona. So, it's a great thing that the product team continues to ship more features for that product line. We usually use every subsequent launch to highlight a different customer story, do another customer vide......Read More

1716 Views

How do you evaluate competitive intelligence firms to conduct some win/loss analysis?

JJ Xia

Zuora Vice President Product Marketing • December 19

We used Clozd, and so far they are fantastic. Every interview transcript is immediately available, and they offer a dashboard for us to start visualizing the trends/patterns that emerge from the customer interviews.