Ashley Faus

I recommend a tiering system for product vs. feature launches. The tiers include criteria about the impact of the feature that's launching (or series of capabilities, in the case of a full product launch), and the activities associated with each tier. For example: Tier 1: Impact: All customers, market-level, significant company revenue Activities: Press, social media (product and brand handles, personal handles), newsletters, blog (executive byline), Community series, website update, event keynote, multiple demos, paid promotion (ads, boosting social media, sponsored content, etc.), in-product notifications and/or navigation updates Tier 4: Impact: small sub-set of users, minimal revenue, limited/no market Activities: limited social media, single Community post, limited newsletter promotion The key is how much awareness and attention you want to drive to the new feature or product. If this is creating a new category and/or a new capability, you want to use pull all the marketing levers. You can also grab free templates: https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/templates/product-launch https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/templates/go-to-market

Sales/partner/channel enablement is the biggest differentiator for enterprise-focused vs. startups or SMBs during the launch. I'm coming from a software-as-a-service (SaaS) lens, which means that I have the option to include a variety of self-serve tactics that make it more scalable for smaller companies to get what they need during a launch. Examples include: * Product Guides: basic onboarding, core use cases, and templates so that small teams can see fast time-to-value * Evergreen articles about practices, optimized for search (SEO), so that teams can use the tools and associated practices to be more successful * Social media prompts, images, and links so that employees can share on social media (in our case, Product Managers and Engineers are part of our target market, so enabling these folks to share means that their network of similar users sees the information from a credible source) * Community posts to engage directly with users In contrast, many larger enterprises have a longer roll-out plan, choosing to engage with a sales rep for a discount, customer success for the implementation, and/or consultants for a phased roll-out. This means that the launch timeline needs to include extra time to brief sales and partners (assets might include new battlecards against the competition and/or the market landscape, decks with case studies/testimonials, updated demo environments, message house, etc.), and the deal cycle will take longer. As for metrics, you can measure the increase in sign-ups and monthly active users for smaller accounts. You can measure the time-to-close, average deal size, and account expansion for larger enterprises.

The biggest key is where does your audience spend time, consume content, and engage? We use a mix of in-product notifications, emails, social media, blogs, events, and press to notify our audience about new features and products. But, we adapt the format, message, and frequency, based on the audience needs and potential impact of the launch. For example, we have a large existing customer base, so we tend to see strong performance when we email them with information about new features. We're cautious about in-product notifications because we don't want to annoy someone who is already using an existing product. Constant pop-ups or notification bells distract from the core experience, so we use those selectively. I work in Agile and DevOps, so I know that most of the product managers, developers, and technical team leads I want to target are not hanging out on Instagram and TikTok, but they do spend time on Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn, and HackerNews. I prioritize content and outreach in those channels because that's where my audience is more likely to see the information. If you have historical data about past launches, industry benchmarks, and/or research about competitors in your space, you can use that to create an initial recommendation for which channels to prioritize. If you have limited budget and bandwidth, I recommend starting with one long-form channel and one short-form channel to build an audience, test the messaging, and get a baseline for your results. The specific channels will depend on your industry and audience.

For folks who are unfamiliar, here's a short note on some key elements of the Content Playground framework: - The traditional funnel struggles to capture the full buyer's journey, since it only starts when the marketing team recognizes that someone is on a journey. Most people are NOT in the market to buy, and they do a lot of their research before they raise their hand to show that they're buying. - Thus, we need to stop mapping content to the traditional phases (awareness, consideration, and decision), and instead, map them to content depths (conceptual, strategic, and tactical). Conceptual is the "what" and the "why" of the idea, and helps the audience understand the problem space. Strategic is the tools, processes, and key knowledge components that must be in place to make the conceptual ideas reality; it helps the audience think about the solution space, and equips them to do their own research. The tactical depth is the prescriptive, step-by-step instructions and ongoing habits to implement the idea. - We must also look at multiple intents, not just buy-intent (the traditional funnel assumes that all content is ultimately buy-intent). But the Playground means we recognize that there's also use-intent, help-intent, trust-intent, and learn-intent. As we think about this from a marketing and content creation perspective, we need to think about the next action and explicit CTAs. For example, if the next action is to log into the product to do something, the content is use-intent content. If the next action is to contact sales or sign up for an account, then it's buy-intent. True learn-intent content doesn't require the audience to do anything "beneficial" for the company. They might tell their team about the idea, think about it while they take a while, or share it on social media, but they're not necessarily doing something that we can "track" as part of the "funnel". When it comes to AI, I think that the initial content mapping needs to be done by a human, because it's a mix of art and science. Figuring out which narratives to focus on, how to frame them, which depths are most important and which narratives have enough depth to fuel programs and campaigns is the strategic and creative work that humans are good at and enjoy. However, getting audience insights can be a use case for incorporating AI into the workflow. For example, using it to summarize customer research or user interviews, helping to pull out patterns to inform the content mapping process. It can also be good for helping you understand the language of the audience and topics the audience is most interested in hearing about. For example, it can help you identify the most-asked questions if you give it a bunch of webinar transcripts. It can also help you see most-used words in customer conversations to help you mirror the language of your audience. Because the Playground is about seamless hand-offs and allowing your audience to choose their own path, it requires a lot of content. AI can accelerate repurposing efforts. For example, we've been experimenting with AI-assisted clip creation, using a tool to help generate short clips from a long-form video. We've also used machine-generated transcripts to make it easier to create long-form or short-form written assets from podcasts or webinars. These are basic use cases that go much faster as the tools get smarter.

First, messaging shouldn't be so focused on features. It should be about the unique value you provide to your customers. While features ARE part of that value, they're not the ONLY thing that adds value. This is particularly true in a saturated market with feature parity. A few additional differentiators that you might consider: * Integrations with other owned products and/or lots of integrations with industry-leading products that your prospects likely have in their tech stack already * Ease of onboarding/roll-out/setup, particularly if you're in a space that's known to be more complex * Benefits like ROI, time savings, accuracy, etc.

This answer differs, depending on the size and structure of the organization. However, there's some common themes, including: - Product Marketing should be the experts in the product, audiences, and messaging. They should be able to articulate WHO we should be talking to, and WHAT we should be talking about that will resonate with those people. - Demand-gen and growth teams should be experts in reaching relevant audiences. This means that they know WHERE we should be talking, and HOW to talk in each channel. - PMM and Demand-gen work together to match the right messages for the right people in the right place at the right time. Practically, this means that Product Marketing provides message houses and audience insights to the Demand-gen team, and the Demand-gen team recommends the channel strategy and asset mix. In many organizations, there's a content strategy team that helps to create assets and gives recommendations on which assets are best for each channel. They advise PMM on which messages work well in different formats, and advise Demand-gen on which formats work well in different channels. This team also collaborates with teams like SEO/Editorial, Events, Email, Ops, etc. to expand the channel mix beyond traditional paid channels associated with Demand-gen responsibilities. The key to making this work is tight collaboration between the teams, with a high level of trust. This is not a "throw it over the wall" scenario, where PMM does a one-time hand-off of a static message house, or Demand-gen simply shares monthly or quarterly reports about campaign performance. Both teams need to have regular syncs, exchange information about what's working and what's not, and work together to fill any gaps in the audience journey.

The biggest key is alignment on priorities and goals. We can't run a campaign for every single feature update or asset, particularly if we have a large portfolio of products. So, we need to know which product(s) are the priority for each quarter, half, or year. And we need to know which goals are most important for those products. If we're announcing a brand new product, awareness might be the biggest goal, and we might have a larger budget to put into paid media, since we're trying to drive a net-new conversation. If we're facing headwinds from a specific competitor, we might need to focus more on enabling the sales team to handle objections or be strategic in our conversation with key accounts. Retention and expansion might be more important in this case. Next, quarterly planning rituals are key. The teams need to be talking to each other, meeting regularly, and aligned on which narratives are driving the goals for each quarter. We use Confluence templates for this, including these: https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/templates/project-plan https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/templates/marketing-campaign https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/templates/marketing-plan Finally, Product Marketing teams should keep message houses and persona information up-to-date to inform Demand-Gen deliverables. These are key to helping the demand-gen team know who to target and which messages resonate with each audience.

Two fundamental issues with this blame game: 1) A product or feature launch and a revenue target are two different things, with different time horizons! 2) Marketing should have a seat at the table when the revenue forecasts are created. They shouldn't be "receiving" "prescribed" revenue targets and forecasts from sales. Let's dive into each issue: A launch is generally for a new product or feature, which means that there's less precedent for adoption and revenue. Yes, we can look at historical benchmarks, adoption rates for current features and products, and the predictions made prior to launch. But ultimately, those are predictions about signups, upgrades, cross-selling, etc. That's different than an overall revenue target. You might see that signups are strong, but it takes longer than expected for an account to upgrade to paid seats. A launch might have different goals around attracting net-new customers or retaining existing customers. Both result in revenue, but the time horizons differ. And revenue builds over time for SaaS companies (the mix of net-new customers, account expansion, upsell or cross-sell, and churn), so the revenue "at launch" is not indicative of the revenue over time. Set time horizons and track the trends to make changes to the strategy and tactics, but you need to see how it performs over time. The sales forecast is usually tied to existing pipeline, with the likelihood of closing the deals in the pipeline. While most of these forecasts turn over at the end of the quarter and/or fiscal year, realistically, it's a moving target. If a deal doesn't close in Q4, it's still possible for it to close in Q1, so the "forecast" in Q1 might start higher because of lagging deals from Q4. This has little to do with launching a new product or feature. And if that deal falls through, the team would miss the forecast, but potentially make up for the revenue with a new deal. Marketing should have a seat at the table for these discussions, and leaders should set reasonable targets for quarterly quotas and long-term revenue. The revenue is a mix of factors over a longer period of time, and a single launch shouldn't "miss" in a short time period after the launch. Sales leaders should not be telling marketing about revenue targets. Leaders from across the business should come together to set the targets based on growth trends, investments in key areas, market insights, etc.

I'm approaching this question with a Software-as-a-Service lens, so this depends a lot on the type of product, launch stage (ie: alpha, beta, or Generally Available), and the level of the launch (ie: full product launch vs. feature launch or momentum "launch). In general, we want to see an uptick in entrances to the product tour and evaluations and/or free sign-ups and an indication of time-to-value within the first few weeks (ie: creating a project, attaching a repository, inviting teammates). We monitor for an upward trend in Monthly Active Users, account expansion, and feature use over time. For launch-specific metrics, we'd look at core marketing metrics for each channel. Depending on the scale of the launch, these metrics might include: * Press coverage: number of articles, message pull-through, mentions alongside industry leaders if we're a disruptor in that market, backlinks to owned product pages * Social media: impressions and engagement on owned channels (likes, comments, shares), hashtag usage (if relevant), sentiment, mentions and/or amplification of launch materials by followers, influencers, and industry experts * Landing pages: entrances, conversion rates to evaluation and/or sign-up * Paid ads: impressions, click-through rate, long-term conversion to the next step in the journey * Emails: open-rate, click-through rate * Events/podcasts/webinars: message pull-through, hit-rate for pitches, inbound invitations, session ratings * Video: total views, average watch time, referral traffic to relevant owned property, shares * Other metrics as relevant: Community forms, influencer/analyst/partner mentions and engagement, SEO trends for related terms, short- and long-term customer satisfaction scores

This varies widely by company, org structure, and maturity. When I worked for smaller start-ups, we only had 2 dedicated marketers: me (generalist) and my VP (also a generalist, but she was running sales as well!). In that case, I had to divide my time by priorities for the business. This was determined as part of quarterly planning and product launches. If we had a product launch, then that quarter was dedicated to building the materials for the launch, and promoting the new product. In quarters where we didn't have a launch, I split my time among the other activities, based on the data. What are the top 2-3 goals your company wants to achieve, and on which time horizon? If they want to acquire new customers, demand-gen and sales enablement would be your top activities. If they want to drive Monthly Active Users and feature adoption, more traditional product marketing activities would be a better focus. In larger companies, there is a dedicated team for each of these areas, though they should be coordinating and collaborating. For example, at Atlassian, we have separate PMM, Demand-gen/CLM, and Sales teams. We also have a Customer Success team who helps with the retention metrics. And "retention" might include cross-sell, up-sell, and expansion, which is a mix between PMM, CLM, and Growth teams. There's many levers for each of these activities, so dividing them up based on skills and capacity is key. Some organizations focus their demand-gen teams exclusively on getting new customers into the pipeline. Some organizations want their PMMs to do lots of sales enablement, while others have them focus on collaborating with Product and influencing the roadmap. I would argue that Sales should not fall into the marketing roles you mention, as that's a different skill and different activities. Sales should be focused on closing deals, which is a short-term metric. Marketing requires balancing short- and long-term metrics, so the strategies, activities, and skills are not the same as Sales.