[On Demand] Product Management Webinar: Go-To-Market Strategy

Megan Saker: [00:00:00] Thank you for joining us for our webinar today. Which is how to run a product launch. So this is a go to market guide for product managers. Just a bit of housekeeping before a kickoff. You guys have all found the chat facility. Feel free to use that at any point during the webinar to chat to your peers to discuss anything that we’re talking about.

You’ll also see in your toolbar at the bottom there on the top, wherever you put it, there is an additional box, which is a q and a box. So we will make sure that we leave time at the end to answer any questions. So at any point during the webinar, if you have a question, pop it in there and then Julie and I will come to them too, to them at the end.

So we’re here for an hour. Let me just quickly before we get into it. The real nitty gritty, just tell you a little bit about ProdPad. So if you are new to ProdPad, ProdPad is an end-to-end complete [00:01:00] product management platform. So we are a solution built for product managers, product teams in large organizations to manage and communicate your product roadmap, to organize and manage your idea backlog and to gather your customer feedback, analyze it, and use that to inform your product strategy.

So we are the sort of tool of choice to drive outcome focused roadmapping, outcome focused product management. Also, Includes CoPilot. Now CoPilot is the world’s most advanced product management AI. So it is primed and optimized for the product management context. And because it sits within your product management tool, it has complete access to all of your product work.

So it is great at helping you create your documentation answering and fielding stakeholder questions about anything in your backlog, any of your product work. And it is also [00:02:00] primed with product management best practice. So you can ask best practice questions. You can get a CoPilot to review your work and help coach you.

So that is ProdPad, so you understand a little bit about, about, about who we are. Let’s kick off and. With the content of today’s webinar, let me outline what it is that we’re going to be talking about. So we’re gonna start by looking at the role of the product manager in going to market. And then we’ll quickly identify who the other key players are and a bit about them.

We’re going to talk about how and when to communicate dates, right? So much hangs on the effective communication of dates in any product launch. Julie will take us through how to structure your workflow. So from release to launch and beyond as the product manager, what should the process look like that you’re managing? Within that we’ll [00:03:00] talk a bit about beta and beta launches and beta phases and how to deal with those.

We will then identify when in this process to engage, which goes to market team members. We’ll talk a bit about working with marketing. To size the launches for each particular feature and decide what sort of level of attention and how to make that decision. We’ll review at that point some of the keys to market decisions.

So you’ve got a sort of checklist. Mandy, sorry, I’ve just seen your question. Yes. The session will be recorded and we will send an email after the webinar with that recording, just give us a sort of day or two on that. Sorry. Back to the agenda. We will cover how to prepare for, how to prepare sales and marketing for product launch, how to prepare your customer teams, and then importantly, how to set your launch metric and goals.

And then finally how to measure them. So just before we get into it, probably Julie and I should introduce ourselves [00:04:00] ourselves. I am Megan. I am Chief Marketing Officer. I ProdPad, I have marketed. Primarily B2B tech for a hundred years. And obviously I am here joining Julie from being on the commercial team, the go to market side of things.

Julie. 

Julie Hammers: Thanks, Megan. Hello everybody. My name is Julie. So I am currently head of product here at ProdPad. Thank you so much for joining both of us. I came fairly recently to ProdPad. My background is actually in design, so I’m one of those design leaders who crossed over into the world of product.

I’ve been working with teams for over a decade but I’ve had the opportunity to work at some pretty awesome places like Zapier and TaskRabbit most recently at Help Scout. So I’m really excited to dig into how we can make a good launch. 

Megan Saker: Wonderful. So Julie, I’ll let you kick off [00:05:00] our analysis of the go to market team.

Julie Hammers: Totally. So when you’re gonna launch with your kind of cross-functional organization there’s a lot of different players. We have some cute illustrations to talk about the different personalities and folks that you’re gonna be working with throughout this whole process.

But what’s the role of the product manager in taking something to market? Um, most succinctly you can view it as we’re like the central nervous system of the whole GTM effort. We help connect the technical kind of reality to like what the commercial wants to do.

Yeah, we’re orchestrators and we make sure that there’s alignment. I could say it like 10 times. But across all the different functions from engineering to marketing, to sales, to sport we have to get alignment and consistency across the whole process.

So it’s most important that we’re communicating the value of the messaging, the pricing of all these things to all the different players [00:06:00] involved. And most importantly we’re the voice of the customer, right? So we are helping to make sure that’s being carried throughout this process.

And we haven’t lost our way just in terms of what’s the bottom line gonna be, or this particular partnership or something like that. We’re always focused on what that kind of customer outcome’s gonna be at the end of the day. So with that being said, let’s talk about dates. 

Megan Saker: And actually just just before oh no, sorry, Julia, you’re talking about the responsibility.

Julie Hammers: Sorry, I jumped ahead. Carry 

Megan Saker: on. 

Julie Hammers: It’s okay. Megan, actually, before we jump ahead, I’m so sorry about that. Let’s talk about the other p players on the board. And I think Megan had a few things that she wanted to add there. 

Megan Saker: Yeah, okay. So in terms of the rest of the go-to market team, yeah, you can see them on, on, on the slide there.

We’ve got the marketer, sales person, and customer success support. That’s obviously not gonna be news to you. And you might have variations in your organization. The sales might actually be account management or [00:07:00] instead of customer access, you’ve got account management support, might be customer service, whatever your variations are.

But you will have folks who are responsible for promoting and selling the thing and you will have folks responsible for supporting customers and users with it and dealing with any issues. One thing to say about your go to market team in terms of marketing, obviously that can vary. Some organizations will have dedicated product marketing managers, product marketing functions.

You might be in an organization that doesn’t have that as a specific role, but depending on the size of the launch, um, and if it’s big enough, there will always be someone marketing, whether they are explicitly called product marketers or not. I just wanted to point out that I have included a designer here, and specifically what I’m focusing on here is a product designer.

Again, depending on the size of your organization and the teams, typically marketing would have a [00:08:00] marketing design resource aligned to them, graphic designers or marketing designers who will do the ad creative or the asset design. But I personally am a firm believer that the best person to give product specific assets and specifically I’m talking really about product shots.

Is the product designer. So having done it in different ways in different organizations, it’s always the most efficient. You get the fastest results and the best results if the person who designed the UI is helping, facilitating marketing, getting the product shots that they need. 

Julie Hammers: A hundred percent.

Yeah, but a quick question actually about product operations and where that role might fit in this kind of orchestra. I’m happy to take that. Yeah, 

Megan Saker: Great question. 

Julie Hammers: Thank you for that question. Again, this kind of depends on the structure of your organization, but I see product operations as like a layer.

Supporting what I call the experience org, which consists [00:09:00] of product and design and engineering working together and product operations helps to support all of that. So their role could include a lot of these activities depending on the function most especially when it comes, I think, to making sure that there’s consistency with the tasks that you are trying to align between the different teams.

And we’ll get into that later, but definitely product operations is part of this too, 

Megan Saker: right? So yes, as promised, let’s talk about dates. So the first consideration we need to address when it comes to relaunch is the issue of dates. And I don’t need to explain the problems that can arise here, right?

The potential sort of contention that can arise when it comes to dates, like stress lives here for sure. But it’s not hard to do this right and alleviate those potential issues around dates. Before I hand over to Julie, who will. Outline the best strategy when it comes to [00:10:00] communicating dates with the rest of the go to market team.

I just want to outline some of the context here. I think if everyone understands exactly why certain go to market teams commercial teams need dates then that will, that understanding will help you come up with a perfect solution between, giving the commercial teams what they need and not shooting yourself in the foot.

Over in the product team. So wider sales, marketing, lead dates. It’s obvious. It’s mainly so we can plan, right? It’s about lead time for what we’ve got to work on. Certainly in marketing it’s particularly about lead time. So with budget planning and allocation, like often that is done on an annual basis.

And that’ll be planning ahead where we are putting our marketing spend. Either the marketing team will be doing that to forecast spend on a set budget, or if they’re using zero budgeting, they’ll be using it to understand what budget is needed. So [00:11:00] that’s why that foresight is needed. One of the reasons.

Doesn’t need to be exactly a year out. But to have an idea of when the biggies are coming is really useful. That is why Now-Next-Later as a roadmapping format is great for us in marketing because it allows you to put those large sort of initiatives that might be a bit fuzzy still, they will be a priority to put them in the future.

Then let’s say I’m doing the budget planning, at the beginning of Q1 or even the end of Q4, the previous year, and I can see that there’s something coming in Q4 that is gonna be big. I’ll make sure to allocate enough budget there rather than not having that foresight when it arrives or getting notice like the end of Q3 and then, oh, sorry, there’s not enough budget left.

Campaign calendars are another reason. So there’s only so many opportunities really in marketing to talk to your audience without pitting them off. There’s email [00:12:00] schedules, there’s webinar programs, and knowing when we can plan in and what we plan in those times is important. Um.

Campaign planning. So actually having the time to understand what the lead time is for coming up with the tactics. And then the resource allocation, capacity planning that goes with that. And then really understanding what the prep window is. So for us it is about understanding like, when is the last point we have to have all the assets ready.

And then obviously working backwards from there. With sales, it is less about lead time, it’s more about how soon they can start talking about the features or the products. I think the expectation that salespeople won’t talk about a feature until it’s actually live is that you’ll know that’s not gonna happen when a sales person has a revenue target and they have a a deal that they can close if there is a sales objection.

They know they can answer because there’s a solution coming down, down the pipeline. Then they’re [00:13:00] going to talk about that, and you want ’em to be able to talk about that. So what is important is the date that they have access to, the date that they see is a date that is comfortable. And Judy will talk about how you manage that.

And then your customer teams, of course, customer teams will be wanting to respond to feedback. So they’ll be having customer calls. A customer will have put in a bunch of feedback. They’ll want to know what happened with it. Particularly if you’re using a tool like ProdPad, that’s very easy for a customer team to do.

They just go to the feedback entry, they see all the related feature ideas, and then they’re able to track those and that’s where they see the data and that’s when they communicate it with customers. But yeah, so customer teams want to relay customer fears. They want to also be able to plan in their time for training.

So that’s the sort of. Of why we need dates. 

Julie Hammers: Awesome. Thank you Megan. On the product side of the house with all of those kinds of external [00:14:00] forces and things that play between, your customers and commercial kind of pressures, how do you talk about dates? So I like to think about it as lenses where you have, like Megan was saying the Now-Next-Later format does give you that kind of graduated kind of sense of how much clarity you have about something like an initiative that’s coming up.

So the first kind of question to answer for yourself is how confident are you and your team about how much effort. This kind of project is gonna take and use that confidence to communicate early on about talking about how you’re, 80% confident that this is gonna land in Q2.

Just anything you can layer onto it, even if you’re saying like, okay, this is gonna be Q3 what in Q3 and how confident are you? So you can say, we’re very confident about this. This is a top priority. It’s clearly scoped. There’s no blockers. This should be no problem.

[00:15:00] To, something where you’re less confident where you can, you have to maybe speak in a broader window. And then think about what is the point in your discovery process where you have the most clarity about how long something might take. So this is something that I’ll be honest takes a bit of practice as a PM where you get to understand everything’s fine on paper, but you really have to understand your players and your team and how they work and what your velocity is to be able to give good estimates to your stakeholders. That’s part of it.

But you, there might be, I think you’ll find that there’s a milestone where you will have a much better idea. And that, for me, has tended to be around the point where we’ve done technical discovery, we understand the solution, we have a good idea of the approach that we’re gonna take and how long roughly that will take the team to get through.

And then next you might wanna think about, [00:16:00] flipping it sometimes in terms of if there are other competing priorities, you might wanna say something like this is gonna be like no earlier than before confirming final dates. And then Megan was talking about if there’s one thing you take away, it’s your kind of external date is not your internal date.

You should never be starting your marking campaign on the day that you launch this recipe for disaster. You need to understand the window that you need to have in order for something to bake with your application before you start communicating to customers. Be clear with your stakeholders and with your team, what the internal kind of date is and what the external date is.

And then lastly make sure you’re communicating. I have a practice of generally spinning up a project channel. We work in Slack, so I’ll attend to spin up a project channel for major initiatives. And that is a cross-functional place depending on the stage of the project where you’ll have your experience team, but then you can also [00:17:00] have your pmms or marketing team come in and they’ll get those updates as well as things change.

So yeah, early and often but graduated stepped like layers of like we’re more certain, we’re more certain as we go through. 

Megan Saker: And one of the, one of the important ways that you can successfully. Do that and communicate dates with the right roadmap format. So if you are, if your product roadmap is a timeline, then following the advice that Judy’s outlined is going to be hard because a timeline roadmap, every item right, has to have a date, right?

By its very nature to be on the roadmap. So this forces you to assign exact dates to initiatives or ideas like far sooner than you ideally would before you fully see it out, maybe even before you’ve done the discovery and you’ve even determined what the feature should actually be.

And as you all know, you end up with arbitrary dates on things, but you’ve put a date on it. And you can [00:18:00] bet that people in the commercial team, if they’re looking to answer a sales objective or reassure a customer that a solution is coming, they’re going to jump on that date that they see on the roadmap.

They’re gonna take that as read. After all, you, the product team, you’ve assigned that, that date. Then of course, because those dates are fairly arbitrary, that early out, the chances of actually, your estimates being accurate are slim to none. So things slip, and that’s when you get into the sort of sales induced mania and disappointed customers and moaning colleagues and everything.

So how do you avoid this pain? You don’t use a timeline to communicate your roadmap. You need a format that allows you to. Only communicating dates when the time is right to do it is the ProdPad co-founders actually that invented the Now-Next-Later roadmap formats and built ProdPad around that as the best tool to facilitate outcome focus roadmapping.

So in ProdPad you position your initiatives across a broad time [00:19:00] horizons, which are open to your own interpretations and definitions, of course, and then you can put dates on individual initiatives of your choosing. So some can have dates, some don’t need to have dates. You can set quarters, months, exact dates.

So typically you would have quarters over and later maybe months in the next. And by the time something is in the now column, it’s a well understood problem. It’s a defined solution. You’ve committed resources. That’s the point that you put an exact date on it, in line with what Julie was saying about confidence.

If that appeals and you are still battling away with the timeline and all the headaches that it causes when it comes to communicating launch dates, then we do have some resources that can help you. There’s a course which you can find in the downloads area, the PO head website. There are, I think 6, 5, 6 lessons there that you can work through in your own time.

And it takes you through the practical steps of converting a timeline to a Now-Next-Later. Part of [00:20:00] that is often convincing your stakeholders that they don’t need a timeline. And so we have this resource, which is a ready made slide deck for you to take and present internally to your teams, which talks through all the reasons why timelines are bad for business and the advantages of the Now-Next-Later approach.

So yeah, that’s our advice in terms of roadmapping. Julie. 

Julie Hammers: Thanks Megan. I know we had a few questions pop up. I think one question was about the kind of soft stages, which I think they might have meant. Like a beta or alpha stage. So we’ll get to that in a little bit.

And the other question was around actually the examples that we just saw on our roadmap. And we’ll also come back around to that in a little bit. But I just wanted to address that real quickly. Okay. So getting into it. How do we wanna break down this whole process end to end? Again, like I said at the start, your kind of technical release is not the same as your commercial [00:21:00] launch.

Jo that into your head first. And then the next thing we wanna make sure is that we’ve we have we create clear phases with clear deliverables for each stage. And it’s very important. Every department in your business understands what these phases are, and you have a shared understanding.

It’s not a good idea to have a very this is the way our particular pod or team does releases with the exception of maybe something like mobile where they have very specific structures around how they release to an app store or something like that. But as much as you can to have the same consistent release structure across all of your cross-functional teams.

So below is like an example of what that flow might look like breaking it down at the very beginning. You are probably still like at the, in the middle of, in, in our world, we’re probably in the middle of or in process of our discovery. So we are in the process of.

Really [00:22:00] nailing actually what the feature is. You’re iterating on designs, you’re talking to your customers and you’re going through that process. And when we get to a certain point that is actually I would say like 80%, like it’s there and we’re actually floating this with stakeholders and other people in the business.

That is a good point to start to shop this out to your go to market team and start to talk about the value proposition. And start to have those conversations about how this aligns with our business goals and how we might track those success metrics. And then from there you might want to define whether or not it’s gonna have what kind of stages it is gonna need in order to make sure that it’s a proper fit with customers.

Sometimes for smaller things, you might do what I call an alpha or just internal testing phase which is just with your, maybe your support team or just like internally within your team. And other times you might do a beta, which is either closed or [00:23:00] open. So that can be like you want to if you are redesigning your flagship product and it’s a really big deal, that’s gonna be a different process than if you are just adding an upgrade to an existing feature.

So in that point you, you wanna, depending on how long it takes your team to turn around on like customer feedback and changes that can change the length of that phase. Another, right before, like the team has moved into the kind of delivery final delivery phase that might be a launch kind of readiness thing where you’re working more closely with your go-to-market partners.

And they are working on their deliverables for training and for any type of collateral that they’re preparing. And then so post, post, our release and product side marketing and other functions are working on the coordinated kind of rollout across the channels.

And then post all of those activities you’re working on, looking at monitoring and gathering feedback [00:24:00] and addressing issues. So that’s like a really high level version of what is involved here. But we can break it down a little bit more. One, one thing. Oh, if you can actually just go back for just a sec.

So one thing is making sure that this plan is shared and visible. And lastly, as we’re gonna go into the next slide, understanding what everybody’s doing across all the teams. Having that visible is super helpful. I know some people talked about it in the comments already of having some type of pre-launch checklist.

Okay. Megan can take it over. So this is a version of my ride or die checklist that I’ve used in different organizations. It creates consistency and transparency. Everybody knows what’s left to do, how far along we are in the process. It’s set up in a way that anybody can look at it quickly and understand where we’re at.

If you create a checklist it should reflect all of your stages. Not all releases have all stages, like I talked about before. And you’ll be [00:25:00] able to see who’s responsible. You should be helpful just to sometimes see what team they’re on. And then the bonus points is if you can set up automation to update those project channels, like I talked about when an item is complete.

So there’s lots of different ways to do that. You can use Slack. You can set it up there, or you can use something like Zapier or other like automations to hook up fields to send notifications to channels. But something like this. Yeah, you should be able to easily like anybody should be able to step into it and should not be something that’s hard to find or in an app that your team does not use.

So I put together this template for everybody on this call. So everybody who registered will get a link to the template along with recording. And along with the checklist. Last thing I’ll say is the other kind of extra credit helps a lot. Things I like to include with this is who will receive this feature like with the target audience rollout [00:26:00] strategy any limitations.

Something about urgent questions on release day. Like what happens if everything goes south and we need to figure out what we’re gonna do, what a rollback plan is. And yeah, just generally the kind of the TLDR for everybody. Yeah, hopefully that is helpful for folks.

So now let’s talk about beta. So what’s beta? Why do you need a beta? Why would you beta launch first? So generally it might be to identify bugs or usability issues. That’s the massive one for me, is understanding that the market fits with folks in actual accounts with actual data to see what’s happening.

It also helps you to maybe find early adopters or folks that maybe to build customer relationships with folks that maybe have expressed interest in this feature. So yeah, good ideas to introduce like, when should you do it? If you’re doing a new feature that impacts your core workflows, like I talked about earlier.

If you are. Doing something [00:27:00] that affects your core product, you should probably, definitely consider during Aveda. If there’s just if you’re reaching out into a, I’ve done launches where we’re actually going outside of our kind of target market and we wanna understand if it’s gonna land.

So that’s another opportunity that you would wanna do beta. So closed or open? This is I think overwhelmingly most of the time I have done a closed beta. And I think this really depends on the size and of your user base. And we’re in B2B SaaS that’s a bit different than doing B2C.

Like if you’re in B2C you’re gonna be more likely to do like an open beta than you are. In our neck of the woods. So it depends on your market. But yeah, you wanna consider close beta for features that maybe aren’t fully stable or have competitive reasons to limit early visibility.

Okay. So how long should you do your beta? So results may vary depending on your team size of teams, who’s [00:28:00] working on it. But a general guide is for simple things you might be able to do in a sprint, have enough time for something to like, get out there, get feedback, and then for us to turn around.

So two to four weeks on simple things, four to eight weeks generally I would not extend a beta, maybe unless it’s something that is agreed upon that you want to get a longer kind of learning lens on. Maybe something like ai, I would not recommend extending a beta past a certain amount because you start to then lose trust with your users.

So talking about what you should be doing, like I. W when you’ve gotten through, or as you’re going through a beta, you’re gonna get customer feedback directly from them. You should have a flow set up to capture that feedback. Your support team will hopefully be involved too.

So they’ll be receiving that feedback or your customer success and so they’ll be bringing that back to you. You should be [00:29:00] able to hopefully find customer quotes or kind of use cases that you can then give to your, like GTM partners. And then by the time you’ve decided that things are ready to go we can start to start to get ready for launching to ga.

But make sure to always thank your beta customers because they’ve done a lot of great work for you.

Okay, so I just talked through a lot about like phases and people and we’ve gone through that. So some folks just need a visual. So this is just a quick slide on kind of what that might look like in terms of the whole kind of end to end and like where you’re intersecting with people. Like I was saying, try to engage, like Megan was saying, there’s usually a longer lead time with your marketing friends, so try to engage them as early as you possibly can.

So ideally, like that’s happening, at the tail end of discovery where things are defined. And then as you’re getting ready to release internally, you’re partnering very [00:30:00] closely with your support team to make sure that their team is ready and they can be part of the process to help test out features and give you feedback as well.

As you’re going to beta, you’re, making sure that all of your kind of. Use cases and demos and things are geared up and ready to go for sales and they can start to pitch and talk about a feature. And then finally in GA you are getting up and gearing to send out all of your communication to your customers.

And so you can get ready to learn and see how you did. So going on, next one, we’ve got launch sizing. 

Megan Saker: Thanks Julie. So yeah, Julia has just mentioned there that the, that early engagement with marketing and one of the key things that you’re doing at that point is working closely with marketing to, to find out from them or decide together what level of promotion, what level of campaign this launch is getting.

And that will influence a lot of the ongoing [00:31:00] process. It’ll certainly influence how early they need it. They need web marketing. It’ll also influence the level of involvement you can expect from product marketing or marketing along the process. So I’ve just put on this slide some sort of example campaign activities.

Thanks Dennis. These are, yeah, just some examples of the types of tactics and activities relative to the size of the campaign. Yes when I say launch, I’m talking about yeah. Launch to the market. So depending on the level of campaign marketing you will need different things from you guys in the product.

And that is ranging from when we talked about product shots earlier, a small campaign might just need a bit of help to update some existing product shots where a feature or new functionality impacts something existing, right? The way up to features that need entire feature pages on the website and a whole series of product [00:32:00] shots.

Even if it’s launching a new product, its own website, lots of product shots help. In terms of you demoing the feature. Again, if it’s something small, maybe you don’t need to do that, right? A, a product marketing manager can go onto the staging environment, whatever, and work it out for themselves.

But as you, as they get bigger, it’s really important that you sit down with the marketing team and the other commercial teams and demonstrate the feature. One thing that is crucial, which we’ll talk about, a little while, which is the absolute baseline regardless of the size of the campaigning is an internal pr.

And we’ll talk about that a bit more and we’ll talk about the process that we have here in ProdPad which is great about how you communicate. The other thing to think about is the demo environment. So particularly in the large, definitely in the mega, marketing are probably going to want to [00:33:00] record demo videos walkthroughs, et cetera.

And thinking ahead about the demo environment that you are gonna be able to provide for them with content that shows off the value of the feature in the best possible way and the right user journey. Ha, having to think about that in advance is really important.

Also introing marketing as early as you can to customers, users that are involved in the user testing and discovery work in the beta so that those people who are really positive about the feature so that marketing can start to build up testimonials case studies, proof points or success stats to use in the go to market.

The other thing is that if this is a mega launch, it’s worth considering if you bake in some time to run an exclusive beta period for thought leaders or influencers in whatever space that you are in. That can go a [00:34:00] long way. Particularly if you shroud it in the idea of exclusivity, that can go a long way in terms of ego rating, getting these people to appreciate that they’re giving privilege access.

And then talk about the feature to their networks. So yeah, that’s some of the things that marketing will need in relation to the size. But we will come back in, in a.

Julie Hammers: Thank you Megan. As you can see, there’s quite a few decisions that we need to make when launching your product. So what’s most important is that your top six might vary depending on your work. But here are six top things that need to be decided for each launch and usually who owns that decision.

Sometimes if you’re familiar with RACI or other kinds of other things. Models of dis of determining who is the decision maker. These types of frameworks actually can be very helpful here to just to determine who is actually the decision making person. For these [00:35:00] items.

So first, who’s the feature for what they need? That’s in product camp 99.9% of the time. Two, what plans is this a feature available on? I have worked in orgs where that is entirely set by product, but sometimes there’s also overlap with maybe a growth team or a go to market team or a pricing team, depending on how it’s set up.

But generally it’s the product and GTM. How is this feature priced and are there any usage guardrails? More and more we see a trend towards introducing usage based pricing. Across pricing models. So for the feature that you have, it is good to understand the cost involved.

Any overhead in terms of integrations or just general hosting cost, et cetera. Is that something that is sustainable on your existing price plans? Do we need to set up any type of limitations or any type of add-ons that folks pay for to get additional [00:36:00] usage? And again, that would be a joint kind of like product and go to market team decision.

And as we talked about before, does this feature require a beta, that’s a product one. Five. What campaign size does this require as Megan went through? That’s generally in GTM marketing’s count and six. Although I will go back on five and say that product can definitely help influence that, and that is something that sure.

Very important in this conversation of talking about okay, like I really think this feature really matters. I wanna make sure that we actually this is like a, this is a mega launch, this isn’t a small one. It helps to come with your data about how that aligns. Like with those goals that your GD GTM team might have.

And then six. Lastly, how will we measure success? That is generally also a joint project between product and GTM, but I’ll talk about it in a minute. About how those goals can be different between the product team and marketing and other teams in your work. 

Megan Saker: Great. Yeah, I said that we would dive into this a little [00:37:00] bit more.

Although time is ticking on, I’ll have to move faster. But what are the things that you can prepare to help sales and marketing? So I mentioned this internal pr, so this is, and I’ve worked in organizations where this didn’t happen. And then as soon as I’ve started working with this setup, I never want it to go away.

It’s great. So writing an internal PR that captures all the important information, it’s in one consistent place. So this is your opportunity to explain the why, so why this feature exists, why prospects or customers should care about it. So what. So what, why should anyone care? So this is where you outline the problem that this solves and the evidence that you have that this problem exists.

What and what you expect it to do for customers. This is where you would highlight competitive advantage. If it brings it and be honest there. If it’s a hygiene sort of factor, let people know that internally, [00:38:00] this is of course in including adoption targets and expectations, that’s quite useful because it forces everyone to align on those at an early point.

So in product, you might have. Huge expectations. You might really think that this is going to drive a lot. There’s gonna be a lot of adoption here. This is significant. If you’ve got a sales person who just doesn’t see it and doesn’t agree at all, if you’re explicit about that at this stage upfront, then you can have that dialogue and you can thrash that out until you reach alignment in the early stages which is very valuable.

It’s also super important to think about how you deliver this internal pr. So it needs to be in the same place for each and every launch, and that place needs to be easily accessible. Otherwise, people will be hunting around trying to find the link. They’ll be emailing you or message or messaging you about disaster.

This is why it’s super important to have a single source of truth for each of your product feature ideas. And this is what ProdPad [00:39:00] provides. So obviously at ProdPad, we do dog food, we use ProdPad to run our product processes and Julie’s team perched the internal pr into the idea record within ProdPad.

So it sits right there in the same place as everything else. So the related customer feedback, the specs, the designs, the discussion threads, the decision logs, the OKRs that relate to the target outcomes. And so over in commercials, we always know where we will find the internal pr. And honestly, that has cut.

So much faffing around very British terms. So much time for me and you know exactly where to go. The other thing is demos and scripts. It’s not just about internal and doing an internal demo, but it’s a really good idea in product if you get ahead of the demo script, sure, the sales team or the customer success team aren’t going to just take what you’ve written and repeat it verbatim.

But if you give them a baseline to work on, then you can be [00:40:00] confident that the, that you know the why, you’ve had a chance to explain why this is important or all of that good stuff that you learned from all that discovery work, you are able to convey that and ensure that the commercial team who are talking to the market are representing that, that value of this feature.

And then finally that brings us onto the customer research and feedback. This is really good to share with everyone. This is what makes it real. If you don’t keep all that great analysis and all that research you did to yourself, like everyone involved in Go To Market should see the evidence behind it.

It helps them believe in it, it helps ’em understand what the value is and then importantly, it helps ’em to tell that story then to the market. So those are the sort of three most valuable areas that you can provide for sales and marketing in terms of your customer facing teams to be that customer success or support or what, or customer service or whatever your setup is.

Getting the feature into their hands as [00:41:00] early as possible is really important. You don’t wanna blindside customer teams. You don’t wanna get a feature in front of their customers and. They won’t be able to answer questions. No one looks good in that situation. So the more prepared they are, the more confident they will be to talk to it.

The more they talk to it, the better the adoption will be with your customers. And then you’ve got a successful launch. So involve them. Early on in the feature development as Judy showed on that sort of timeline. Consider alpha testing with them. Help guide the support documentation, the knowledge base articles troubleshooting guides, et cetera.

With the knowledge that you have delivered training sessions to them. But make sure you focus on practical scenarios. So a customer is trying to do x. Let me show you, the customers in this situation, let me show you. You could consider implementing feature flagging. So to allow the support teams and the customer teams early access for real familiarization, this might be a good idea if it’s a particularly [00:42:00] complex area of the product or feature.

Feature. Another great one is to establish escalation paths for launch date issues. Again, particularly if something is complex, so that if issues arise you can jump on them and sort them out really quickly. And then this last one, which is a, which is something that Julie does, which is fabulous, is create a top 10 customer questions document with approved answers.

You are preempting any issues there might be. And you are giving, again, customer teams the confidence that they can talk about the feature.

Julie Hammers: So a key part of this process is making sure how you’ll measure success. So I know we’re running over on time, but I do wanna try to get through some guidelines to make sure that you’ve covered your bases. So you can see here, you can think, use these themes to help you guide like.

What your kind of metrics or goals might be are awareness, adoption, engagement outcomes that you wanna see. Think about what will be most often, like you’re trying to like, move a bigger number and that’s gonna be a lagging [00:43:00] indicator most of the time. So what are the initial leading things that might change and what’s gonna lag behind that you’re gonna need to check in at three months or six months to see if we’ve had any traction?

Definitely wanna understand which veg like business metrics that this release likes ties up to. More and more we have to as PMs, we have to actually show the impact of the work that we’re doing. So you need to understand how it’s gonna maybe affect revenue or retention.

And think about it. What for these metrics what type of customer are you looking to impact or change? Is it a trial list? Is it an existing customer? Is it a customer of a certain cohort, like a software company that uses your product? And make sure that you have set those timelines for these metrics with everybody.

Just to make sure that there’s alignment just in terms of once you’ve come together and reviewed them. That there’s just a general plan about like when you’ll [00:44:00] come back and measure them at the end. Um. Talking about who is tracking what so there’s a lot of things here and I did wanna talk about this because this is something that I’ve run into a few times in my career of saying, being asked by, a product marketer of being like so what do we what’s our metrics?

And saying I’m looking to see that, 20% of this group of folks adopt. And they’re like this doesn’t correlate to anything that we’ve, we care about on our side. Really important to understand that what your commercial team is focused on is adjacent but not the same in terms of what we’re tracking towards.

Same, we’re all shooting towards the same outcome for the business, but understand what your kind of like product metrics or product like things that you’re tracking and what is for the commercial team. So just understanding their goals, will help you better to understand how your metrics are gonna tie into theirs.

So the key difference [00:45:00] here is just we’re focused on how well the feature itself performs and delivers user value while commercial teams are, measuring how the feature drives business growth or like brand positioning even. But yeah, there’s some good examples here of what that might look like on the product side and what that might look on the GTM side.

Megan Saker: And just quickly to flag, if you are struggling to choose the KPIs, we have a complete ebook here that has a huge list of section OO of it with commercial KPIs and product launch quote KPIs. So you can take a look at that. We are really close to time. I’m conscious that we have got a bunch of questions, so we’re just gonna rattle through this section.

How do you measure the success of the launch? Now this is often where teams can fall down because they haven’t got a proper process in place. They haven’t allocated the stages post development and post-release to actually measure. And if you’re not measuring what you ship.

You are just a feature factory, right? You’re just pump, you’re just [00:46:00] moving on, pumping on to the next one. This is a slide actually from a previous webinar. The webinar is there, it is about optimizing your entire product process. And one of the areas we honed in on is this analytics and measurement stage.

You need to add a specific. Stage post-launch for measuring the success you need to identify target outcomes before the work begins. Actually, using ProdPad to do this is great. There are set areas and any idea record where you record your actual outcomes and really work like this.

So you, you have a, once your developers have finished, their work’s done, it’s released. You carry on then manage the rest of the product management workflow in a tool like ProdPad and whatever your stages are post-development, you need to make sure that there is a formal measuring success stage to ensure that actually happens.

If you want any more advice on, [00:47:00] on, on optimizing the entire process, again, we’ve got an ebook so yeah. Yeah take a look at that. 

Julie Hammers: Thanks Megan. Just really quickly so yeah, yay. You’ve reached you’ve launched your future. So how do you come back and measure success? So just make sure you have a, get it into your calendar.

If it’s not in your calendar, it doesn’t happen. Set up a cadence to check back, whether that’s a day, a week, a month, and to come back compare your actual versus expected to get your qualitative and quantitative feedback. Pod’s a great way to capture that. As you’re going through the process document any lessons learned from your lunch make sure to share when you’ve been with your team because it definitely helps as you are trying to get everybody rowing the same direction.

And yeah capture those success stories from your customers. And make sure to make sure to share with you, with all your folks. I’m sorry. I’m just like, ugh, trying to go too [00:48:00] fast and I’ve completely slowed down. So thankfully we’ve made it to the comment section. 

Megan Saker: We have.

Julie Hammers: Yes. 

Megan Saker: Yeah, we are out of time now. We look at you, I see that Julie, you’ve been answering some questions as we’ve been, as we’ve got, so that’s brilliant. We’ve probably got time for one or two. And then we’ll try and make sure that potentially we answer some of the questions in the follow up email that we send out.

So looking at the questions that have come in so far, 

Julie Hammers: I see one from Jen that I’d love to answer really quickly. Oh, yeah, go for it. Yeah. Yeah. So Jen was asking how do you track feature specific satisfaction? I would recommend either doing an in-app survey using maybe you can use your support tool.

We use Hub Scout but there are other options that you can do in terms of you can even do email or other folks that you see using your analytics tools. Look and see who’s using the product. Reach out to them. Run, you can run a survey. I like to look at maybe it’s like ease of use or if it’s just you can even do like a csap per.

Per [00:49:00] feature. And yeah, you can basically run a survey, get that feedback and then use that as part of your kind of overall package. But yeah reaching out generally in an app I think is the best way to go there. 

Megan Saker: Dennis asked a question actually about companies like Atlassian, the supposedly lack of sales function, how is their duty?

What’s their GTM team like? I, so often that is just about labeling, right? With, and I’ve worked in organizations where we’ve decided that sales is a bit of an aggressive sort of term and people don’t like that. And let’s lead with customer success instead. And I’m not suggesting it’s disingenuous at all, but it isn’t that different because you will still have the facility to book a demo with.

And it’ll be a customer success person, but that is the person who will be handholding and leading inbound inquiries and inbound leads through the process. And taking them through the buyer’s journey. So it is [00:50:00] arguably that the job titles might be different, but it’s still that process of having people responsible for promoting and selling or getting people to use it, getting people to sign up.

And then there’s people there supporting those people who are using it. And it might be that the same team is selling it and supporting it, but the same considerations still have to happen regardless of what the job titles are. So we are over now and we still have got a few.

Questions left, so maybe we will drop ’em into the email post webinar. Just give us a day or two to pull the recording together and those answers. But Julie, thank you so much for doing this and joining us. It’s been great. And thanks for everyone for joining today and I hope you found it useful.

And I say we will email around all the resources we’ve talked about as well as the recording and some answers. Great. Awesome. Thank you everybody. Excellent. Thanks everyone. Thanks for joining. Bye now.