Marcus Andrews

Product marketing is often defined as the people who position the products, but I think it's as equally important (especially as you grow bigger) that Product Marketing is also the most cross functional role in marketing. Creating alignment, securing buy-in, and building momentum around a launch is just as important (if not more) as any positioning work you've done. After all what good is a great narrative if no-one put it to use? If you want to ace this there are two things you need to do really well. 1) Leadership buy-in - You need product and marketing and sales leadership to be pretty aligned and give the project the top down support it needs. The best way to do this is to build some sort of prioritization device, that helps select the one or two biggest priorities a quarter. 2) A great roadshow. I love to build a strong narrative and get in front of people and pitching it. The key to getting buy in is usually sharing lots of information and the resources other teams need to execute easy. It also helps if you get them really excited about the launch. I do this by building and perfecting my pitch deck and then going to team meetings across marketing and sales.

Going to cop out on this one a little bit (all the parts are important!) and just tell you how we did it at HubSpot. There are many ways to slice it but our approach has worked really well for us. We always start with the change in the world. How people are different today, where they are headed and why. This is a great set up and will quickly give your positioning context and root it in a specific market and audience. We then talk about how businesses (or whoever your persona is) has to adapt to those changes. This should establish some very serious stakes and not be related to your product at all. Higher level strategy about what the ideal way to approach it is. From there we talk about how hard it is to do this, the tools you’d need, the strategy you’d need, and anything else that shows it’s very hard. At that point we’re really well set up to introduce our product and solution. If I had to pick one thing I love right now, it’d be a single page mock story. A narrative driven doc that walks the read through the above, but through the lens of an actual (made up) person. Those docs are fun to read, communicate all the important bits, and get people excited (which translates to buy-in).

Great question! First and foremost your launches have to have substance and that should dictate the cadence more than marketing need. I've seen some companies try and do a launch every week and it starts off great but then loses momentum quickly because people stop caring. Thats a bad situtation to be in. The launches just don't have enough substance and people are overwhelmed. You may have lots of different updates happening all the time, but the trick is packaged them up into a bigger more interesting update that has a slick narrative that ties them all together. One a month or one or two a quarter (depending on size and speed) is a good cadence. It gives your audience time to breathe and will make your launches more substantial. Having one launch as the one big thing your team is focused on for a quarter also gives you a lot of direction and a launch shouldn't happen all in one day. It can rollout piece by piece over the course of at least a week or even a month.

This is a bit hard without writing a novel but luckily I wrote that novel not too long ago - check out this post. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/elements-flawless-product-launch-li It's pretty easy to find a good framework that you like - the trick is tailoring it for your busienss and executing it. The right answer here is that you will develop something customer for your biz based on something like what I shared here. 

I think to be a great PMM leader, it's really important to have done the work. So to have owned massive product lauches, designed narratives, led sales trainings, etc. PMM can be an ambigous job so a leader that hasn't been there done that usually isn't succesful. The hard skill then left to learn is management. Coaching, support, leadership, alignment. That's a hard skill that you can't overlook. Just becuase someone is a great PMM doesn't mean they will become a great PMM leader. It takes knowledge, practice, and time to acheive that just like anything else. 

There are a number of ways we keep everyone up to date on the progress during a launch. Luckily at HubSpot we also have project managers to help us. I’ll say it, I’m not a good project manager. It’s another level of organization that I was just not born with. These people really help during this process, bless their meticulously organized souls. We usually have a bi-weekly or weekly meeting as we run up to a launch with everyone who is part of the DARCI model. The key stakeholders. This is a series of updates and conversations about blockers. During that meeting we usually run through some sort of doc, a BFS (big frickin spreadsheet). This sheet includes a timeline and is managed by the project manager but everyone is required to give updates. It includes a simplified red, yellow, green, view for leadership. Slack: Open slack channels where we can @here big updates, share news, and have discussions is extremely useful.

Strategic advice: Is it a good idea to do them at the same time? You could separate them and stretch out the pop you’d get from each. Also, can you tie them together? For many companies their brand story is tightly aligned to their product story, this is especially true for product driven companies. Which in my opinion are the type of companies that built to win in the future. Tactical advice: Do some sort of event for the rebrand. Such a good opportunity to bring people together who you care about and build some momentum with your advocates around your new name and identity. Hope that helps! 

I think you’re asking if it’s behind a pay wall and not just a free product? If that’s the case, you need material (video!) that can act as a demo, people want to see product, not just read about it. Salespeople who can give great demos and free trials are often a really effective a launch tool.

At HubSpot our PMMs are aligned by product line and are aligned to a Product director and GM, although we still meet regularly with our individual PMs. I think in general we try and tell a higher level story that doesn't really focus too much on any one feature but often certain features are very marketable. This is primarly the PMM's job to call out. To make it known that they are very excited about a certain feature and blow it up in the marketing launch. I think my product managers really apreciate that and are generally always very supportive. 

Read more, write more, get more feedback. I think there are courses you can take to help but in my experience its more a matter of just getting more reps and experience. Writing and storytelling is like going to the gym. Reading more, especially non-business news will help. Read writers you like and pay attention to their style and voice. Why do they captivate you? Write as much as you can. It can be social posts, internal memo's, wiki posts, things you never share with anyone, just write more. And get feedback. It can be hard, but if you write in Google docs, share it with people you trust who will give you really good feedback. Getting great feedback is the key to writing better faster.