Mary Sheehan

Ultimately I think that every launch should have one "north-star" goal and cascading KPIs, and you might see that varies by launch. For example, your north-star could be increasing Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), increasing customer Monthly Active Use (MAU), or increasing net new customers. Once you've landed on that, you should be ruthless about developing a GTM strategy that helps you hit those goals, and choosing metrics that help you understand if you are on track for those goals or not.  Th ...Read More

Practice some basic questions you will get using the STAR method (The STAR method is a structured manner of responding to a behavioral-based interview question by discussing the specific situation, task, action, and result of the situation you are describing) Do you have a product marketing philosophy? What’s the biggest project you’ve led? What worked/ didn’t? Challenge: If you had $5k to spend in any way you wanted, how would you spend it and why? Will this be the same type of role you’ve done ...Read More

Tell them about one! Just like any interview question, break it down into its components and relate your story. Start by explaining the product you launched, its purpose, and how it fulfilled a need in the market. Describe the process of planning and executing this launch - from ideation to execution. Talk about any challenges that arose during the process and how you overcame them. Finally, share some of the results that you achieved during the launch such as increased sales. Also mention any f ...Read More

First of all, successful launches set a goal for a launch during the initial phases of the launc, not just slapped on at the end. If you don't know why you're launching something, and what goals you are trying to acheive, you should pause and sort this out before moving forward. Once the launch happens I like to assess the impact of the launch by channel at first weekly to spot any anomalies and make sure your launch is on track, and then at least monthly to keep up momentum and iterate if neces ...Read More

Once you’ve interviewed and/ or surveyed your customers, prospects, and churned customers - it’s time to put the personas into a digestible format. I recommend Google slides (or PPT, if that’s your jam) and hosting them on a central resource so all teams can use them. For example, at last night’s PMM meetup, Shyna Zhang, Director of Enterprise Strategy at Marketo, talked about how they whiteboarded the personas in a common space for product and engineering to always be able to reference, making ...Read More

Post-launch momentum, what I call "Rolling Thunder," is one of my favorite topics! I think a lot of times people throw in their hats when the launch moment is done, but this is really when it's just beginning. A good strategy is to take some of the "core" assets you've created for the launch (e.g. a case study, presentation with new stats, a blog post) and to chop them up and use them in many ways. A good way to frame it is: How can you reuse and improve the content over and over again to hit yo ...Read More

Ideally, before a launch, you have worked hand-in-hand with the product team to understand who the product is for, and what product it solves. But if you are coming into a situation where this is not defined, here are some ways to approach it:  Ask the "dumb" questions to your product and eng team (other people WILL want to know them too): Who is this for? What pain points does this solve? Why did we build this? Develop a hypothesis on who the customer is and test it, stat. This could be in the ...Read More