Shardul Golwalkar

At Jotform, we've launched a book (and another one in progress) and many products and features. Here's the difference in our specific use case: For book launches: * Find the right book-market-fit, who is most likely to read your book? What type of customer are they? Is this a TOF exercise or BOF? What are the places where we should spend the most time? * Can the book be marketed on the author's back? In other words, is there built in marketing that you don't need to do? * Are there snippets from the book that can taken out and used as promotional material? Either screenshots or short anecdotes? What parts of this can be product promo? For product launches: * Who are the users, why do they care about this feature/launch? * How do we promote and increase adoption? The main difference is a change of audience and message. However, we treat book launches as product launches so there is a lot of similarity between both types of launches, but the audience and core messaging differs. 

Here's your priority list: * Listen and learn. And understand what isn't being said. You'll quickly realize where the gaps are and what * Schedule 1:1s with people to learn more about their specific customers, this will challenge your own assumptions of the current product marketing state. * Now after you've learned a bit, focus on doing your own product research. Look at how the product works, understand it. * Learn about how it's currently being marketed and to who, what do sales folks use to market it? How is it being messaged? Now when you think you've learned, researched enough, form some opinion. It might be wrong and that's ok, but form an opinion about where to proceed and use different product marketing frameworks to craft your pitch. For many organizations who haven't had product marketing, I'd recommend articulating the value of product marketing during an all-hands or thru a meeting with your manager and team. Set some goals for yourself on this too so people know what you're working on. Now that you've informed people, you can start getting more granular and working on the finer things. Those include a messaging strategy, competitive positioning, creating sales enablement material and learning more about how product marketing has been done in function without being called product marketing. Your job now is basically to prove out that product marketing is critical function to the company.