Megan Pratt

In the context of product launches, I see product marketers as the drivers in the early stages and brand, demand and content marketing as key partners in the execution of the launch and providers of critical market feedback. Product marketing is responsible for: - Deciding and articulating what the launch is, who it's for and how to talk about it - Getting clarity and product knowledge from the product team - Articulating and running a GTM process - Handing off knowledge at the right times, to the right people Brand marketing, demand generation and content marketing are responsible for: - Articulating which channels are most useful, which ones aren't and why - Listening to and absorbing information relating to the launch in order to find the right opportunities for the specific launch - Giving feedback on messaging and positioning, the process, etc. - Closing the feedback loop with performance data - Testing messaging, target audiences and strategies and bringing that knowledge back to the team Overall, a good product launch process will leave flexbility for both parties to provide feedback, ask questions and poke holes in the strategy with the goal of making the process itself better, as well as improving the content of the launch.

I like to keep the circle of feedback small, so that roles are clear and the strategy doesn't get confused. With that said, who exactly gets a say will change based on your organization. It's usually some combination of: - Product Manager, or Product Leader - Sales Leader - Marketing Leader - Product Marketing Leader On occasion in a start-up/scale-up, the founder or CEO will want to have a say as well. 

This is a really good opportunity to take a step back and look at your platform from the eyes of your customer. Are there groups of products that resonate with similar audiences? Or maybe they all drive toward the same goal? I'd recommend doing some deep customer research, both with current customers and people generally in your ICP. You want to understand how they view your products, the value they'd perceive if you were to group applications into more cohesive packages and what they'd want to know before making a purchase. You can do a lot of this yourself, or you can engage a pricing and packaging agency that will help guide you toward pricing and packaging best practices.

My general tiering process looks like: P1 - This is a feature, update, or solution that is new, innovative and exciting and will attract new customers P2 - This is a feature, update, or solution that will win new customers because it matches the market OR it will excite existing customers P3 - This will keep existing customers and match the market. The above criteria will change depending on your organizations goals. For example, if your goal is mainly to reduce churn, you might prioritize something for existing customers higher than you would something that bring new customers. Overall, though, I found that having tiers like this helps to smooth out communication with product and sales teams. I will usually tier something myself and then present my analysis and reasoning to the product and sales teams to get them on board. I've rarely had any pushback.

First, you have to ask yourself a few questions: * How often are we launching significant new or improved products? * Who are the key stakeholders during launches? * What are the key problems with the way launches are handled now? * What channels are at our disposal for launches? From there, you can start to design a strategy that works for your organization. In general, I recommend tiered launches. You'd ideally have some sort of matrix that aligns the organization around the answer to the question: "What is the impact we think this new/improved thing will have on the organization?" For instance, will it drive new business? Win competitive deals? Retain more customers? Drive expansion? Depending on how much value something will drive, you can give it a priority. I usually give something a P1, P2 or P3. If something is a priority 1 launch, we'll roll out the red carpet, pull out all of the stops and do everything we can to get as much adoption as possible. The exact things you'll do will change depending on your resources, as will how long it will take you to execute on a launch. P2 launches are great and we want people to know about them, but there's not as much "juice" per se. P3 is usually reserved for updates, feature launches, etc. and mostly is for letting existing customers know that this new/improved thing exists. That leads to the last step – which is articulating how much time is necessary for each launch and what needs to happen along the way. You can do this in a tool like Asana or Monday, or you can just use a spreadsheet. This step is incredibly important in order to drive alignment, get involvment from all necessary parties and make sure that you're generally launching things in a reliable timeframe. I like to do this in bi-weekly chunks, so it might be like: "In the next two weeks we'll write new landing page copy, provide the sales sheet copy to the creative team and schedule a sales training. In the following two weeks we'll...." and so on. The great thing about this process is that it serves to not only improve the way you launch things, but it also drives better cross-functional alignment, which will serve product marketers well in all other aspects of the job.

I generally start out with a very simple, standard framework for a battle card. Then, I present it to stakeholders for feedback. Generally, they find some fields in the framework to not be useful at all, and they request additional information that will be useful to them. The framework you use will be different based on your market, your sales team and the sophistication of your knowledge. Another thing to add here – your positioning framework is only as good as your team's ability to find, use and update it. I would prioritize access to information over a consistent framework every single time!

Your best bet will be to partner with an organization that has built up an audience in your target market. For instance, a platform like Wynter or a research company like GLG. If you don't want to do that, you can also try: - Making a post on LinkedIn calling for feedback - Partnering with a brand in an adjacent market but overlapping ICP - Working with organizations in your industry to conduct research

The main difference I've noticed is the information that the audience wants at each step of the buyers journey. More technical audiences, like developers, tend to want to get to the heart of the benefits and features faster than other audiences that are less technical (think marketers or HR execs) In short – they don't want the marketing spin, they just want the features and hard facts about the benefits they'll drive. You'll want to be able to deliver hard proof on each point with things like case studies, data points, etc. 

I'd start by evaluating a few things: - How have you positioned yourself? Are you positioned with lower-priced competitors? - What's your ideal customer and does this customer fit that criteria? - Are you actually priced too high for the value you provide? Let's take each question in turn: How have you positioned yourself? Positioning is essentially the context that you put around your product. Who are customers comparing you to? How do you compare to those products? When do you win? If you're consistently losing solely on price, there's a good chance that you're in the wrong context. Maybe you're putting yourself in a context where the value isn't clear. For instance, maybe your value proposition is that you deliver white glove service but you're competing against solutions that are all self-service. What's your ideal customer and does this customer fit that criteria? Continuing with the example above – let's say that one of your differentiators is that you deliver white glove service. In that case you'd want to target companies that have the right size of team and enough revenue to pay for that service. Otherwise, they won't be willing to pay for something that doesn't apply to them. Is the customer you're speaking with in that segment? Are you actually price too high? Here's the toughest one – you need to honestly evaluate if you are, indeed, priced too high. You can do this a few ways, but the best is a pricing and packaging sprint that will include customer interviews to determine which features people value and why, and evaluation of competitive pricing. Pricing is one of the hardest parts of a business to get right because everyone (customers included) will have different opinions on how it should be done. The best thing to do is consistent customer interviews including win/loss analysis to give you data to use in making decisions and changes.