Marcus Hartwig

As you move towards a more senior role, you'll find yourself working on multiple projects and launches at once. One of the most critical skills here will be prioritizing, getting you and your team organized and managing reasonable expectations for all stakeholders - basically taking a more strategic approach than focusing on individual tasks. 

Sales and customers will be your most vital partners for this task. They will have likely have had multiple run-ins with your competitors. As a result, they will give you an excellent high-level understanding of competitive pitches, pricing, what attracted customers to them, and how the market, in general, perceives them. When you want to go deeper on a technical level, SEs, TMEs, and other PMs will be able to assist you with a feature-to-feature comparison, but keep in mind to approach the problem from multiple angles to get a better picture. 

Timing is generally dictated by Product. However, it's always wise to anchor the launch with various stakeholders, both internal and external. For example, sales Enablement gets better traction if it does not happen the last week of the quarter, and a press release announcement will have better coverage if it isn't right in the middle of a large industry conference like RSA.