Releasing new products and features are a routine part of a product manager’s craft. But what are the keys to a successful product launch, and how do you make sure you have all the right components upon release? We spoke to launch expert, Derek Osgood, to gain all of the key insights.
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Featured Links: Follow Derek on LinkedIn and Twitter | Derek’s website | Ignition – The first dedicated GTM platform for PMMs | ‘Critical Customer Touchpoints for a Successful Product Launch‘ feature at Mind The Product
Episode transcript
Randy Silver:
Lily, I know that half the reason we book guests on this podcast is that we want to get better at our own jobs. But I think you might have cut this one a bit close to the wire.
Lily Smith:
This is true, Randy. I’m launching something really exciting tomorrow. And we just happen to have product launch guru and CEO of ignition, Derek Osgood on the podcast today. But we were meant to talk to him a while back, and I would have had plenty of time to put his advice into action. Sadly, COVID launched itself at you. So this interview was slightly delayed.
Randy Silver:
Yes, sorry about that. Oh, he’s ruining launches. And we are talking to him today. And did you know that Derek’s co founder and ignition is one of our former guests Kartik Suresh, it’s a small, small world.
Lily Smith:
Well, and fortunately, I have done lots of work, Derek recommends ready for my launch, but not all of it. So to find out how you can get the most out of your product launches, just keep on listening. The product experience is brought to you by mind the product.
Randy Silver:
Every week, we talk to the best product people from around the globe about how we can improve our practice and build products that people love.
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browse for free, or become a mind the product member to unlock premium articles, unseen videos, AMA’s roundtables, discounts to our conferences around the world training opportunities.
Lily Smith:
My new product also offers free product tank meetups in more than 200 cities. And there’s probably one you
Randy Silver:
Derek, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today.
Derek Osgood:
Yeah, thank you guys for having me really pumped, pumped to jam on this stuff.
Randy Silver:
So before we get into the whole idea of watching products and doing that stuff, tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get into this whole product game?
Derek Osgood:
Yeah, totally. So I mean, the the TLDR on me is I basically straddled a whole bunch of stuff from product marketing to growth to product management to now CEO. And basically, you know, I originally became a marketer, because I thought that it would, you know, kind of best prepare me to be a CEO. And part of that is that I actually view marketing through a lens that mimics a lot more closely kind of what has become modern product management. And you know, I originally was in kind of a brand manager role, which really looks a lot like product management when you’re in entertainment and consumer products. So, you know, I started my career in entertainment, I was watching Big triple A games with him at Playstation and then you know, basically been in and around, you know, venture backed startups ever since. So, I was the head of marketing and or product marketing for a bunch of early stage startups. And like every possible vertical, you can imagine sort of like messaging payments, field, service management, every everything under the sun. And then it’s a corporate innovation stuff, running marketing, across a whole portfolio of companies at BBVA. In their FinTech innovation arm, both kind of launching and scaling companies that we need. They’re incubated or acquired. And then most recently, I was one of the first few dozen folks that rippling where I help stand up the product marketing function. And also at that point, like we didn’t really have PMS, so I was kind of doing a lot of the the pm work as well, as we went up from from zero to about 20 million in ARR. And, you know, ever since I’ve been, I’ve been working on building a company called ignition.
Randy Silver:
Okay, that’s a hugely diverse array of stuff. So we’re gonna ask you, which one was your favourite to launch? And why?
Derek Osgood:
Yeah, most favourite launch? I mean, I think it depends on if you’re asking me my favourite tech launch or my favourite, you know, like software launch or my favourite launch in general, you know, wanting seven PlayStation it’s, it’s somewhat incomparable in terms of how fun it is in that, you know, a, you’re just working on really fun content, because you’re watching games, but also, obviously, you have a lot more resources at hand. So you’re able to do kind of bigger splash your launch planning, and you know, you’re able to just tap into a lot more, a lot more cultural impact that you don’t really have available to you if you’re launching stuff that’s a little bit more boring, like b2b SaaS. But so I think my favourite my favourite one, to be honest, was a it was a game that PlayStation called the Beyond Two Souls. It was a game that, you know, had, it was kind of the first of its category where it was really focused on delivering a story and kind of more of an interactive cinematic experience as opposed to, you know, a real like game that you were playing. And it was really fun because we got to go like we positioned the whole launch around launching an entertainment brand as opposed to a gaming brand and so we got to go like screen the game at Tribeca Film Festival. Got to work with celebrities on it, it was it was just kind of like a really fun experience. So that’s probably my fav.
Lily Smith:
That definitely does sound fun. And, but that was kind of like earlier on, I guess in your in your career. And I imagine I mean, the difference between, like you say launching a game versus launching a b2b SaaS product is quite different, but then also has like, just launching products in general changed a lot over the years and the way that we approach it.
Derek Osgood:
I think it has, and it hasn’t, I think, you know, basically, and I wouldn’t necessarily say that the way that it’s changed has changed for the better when it comes to actual adoption driving. You know, I think, inevitably, companies, especially software companies have definitely moved much more towards a continuous deployment cycle, where, you know, they’re shipping things on a much, much more rapid cadence. And that just doesn’t allow for as much time to invest in like real go to market planning around these products and building up to bigger, splashy or launches. And I think what that allows for on the positive side is it allows for a lot more agility on the development side of things. And it allows for you to iterate much more quickly on customer feedback and get to, you know, a point where the product is does really have true product market fit. But I think, you know, on the downside, if you are launching something that you have done the upfront research and done the upfront iteration on, you’re going to inevitably get lower adoption and lower performance, when you don’t actually put, you know, a more concerted go to market plan in place around launches. And I think, you know, a lot of companies have, have sort of like, stopped truly launching things because they just either don’t understand how to do it, they don’t have the resourcing in order to like properly plan around it. Or they’re just trying to ship things so quickly, that they’re, they’re just not devoting the time and energy that they really should be towards building out, you know, a concerted process. And I think it’s hurt some companies, like you see, companies like, early days, Uber was fantastic at launching things, and every single thing that they launched, had some kind of event tied around it. And you just saw really, really rapid uptake of almost everything they shipped, as opposed to you know, a lot of companies now they just kind of think that, hey, we’re gonna send an email to customers. And that’s the extent of the of the announcement that we need to make in order to get people to use this new thing that we built. And then they’re just consistently underwhelmed with how folks, you know, end up adopting the products that they’re shipping.
Lily Smith:
That’s a really interesting point. Because that kind of when you think of launching a product, like, we didn’t cover this, at the beginning, we probably should like what even does launching a product mean? Like, is it just saying, hey, it’s available now? Or does it come with a whole go to market plan and marketing and strategy? And how do you approach it when you’re working with other people? I guess people ask you for advice quite a lot. Because, you know, it’s one of the your sort of areas of expertise. Like, if someone’s asking you what, like I’m about to release this thing. Like, how do you advise people to think about how big the launch should be? Or like, what the launch should consist of an apron launch in inverted commas button that no one can see.
Derek Osgood:
Yeah, totally. I mean, the the word launch is obviously kind of like a trap word that that honestly, like we wrestle with when we’re trying to explain what we do at ignition, because, you know, everything hammer, like everything looks like a nail. And so when you talk to a lot of like, PMS are thinking about the launch process in terms of actually just shipping the product. When you talk to a lot of product marketers, they are really thinking about the go to market plan around the launch, and how do you actually announce this thing to customers and then drive ongoing customer adoption, really, like both sides of the house should be thinking about this in the same way. But I think, you know, really, when when we think about this, and when I talk to people about it, I am talking mostly around go to market, like how do you actually deliver a product to customers in a way that maximises the chances that they will use that product and that they that that will that product will then you know, inevitably contribute to revenue. And so I think, you know, a lot of companies what they what they should be thinking about more, ends up being one of the biggest areas that gets forgotten is just internal enablement and internal alignment around the launch. Like they they forget the fact that you have if you’re a company of you know, 300 500 people or so, you are a company that has a built in Salesforce and a built in marketing engine, just in the form of those employees. And so making sure that all of those people know exactly how to talk about this new thing that you’ve created, and making sure that they are all promoting it in the proper way on why launch day on in the weeks leading up to in the weeks coming out of launch just gives you a head start that 99% of companies never take advantage of. And then beyond that, also the other thing that that companies end up kind of forgetting is they, you know, now in software land, they treat segmentation as oh, we’re gonna like ship this announcement to customers. And then maybe there’s some people who are using this feature that are, you know, maybe a little bit better of a segment for us to focus on in our messaging, but mostly, they just broadcast an announcement to their whole audience, when they ship the beta, their whole audience when they ship to general availability. And the reality is, again, the bit, the way to make a launch successful is to find a really, really passionate group of early users, before you ever even go out and make the announcement about this thing, and have those users promote on your behalf, but also have stories about how those users are experiencing value from your product. And I think so many companies, they announced this thing, and they’re like, Hey, we just built this thing, it’s awesome, go use it. But they don’t actually tie that to hey, we just but they don’t go the extra step of saying, Hey, we just launched this thing, here’s three people that we have already shipped this to. And here’s how they’re how they’re getting value out of that product, and how you can take the ways that they’re getting value and apply it to your business or, you know, personal life or whatever, you know, whatever we’re trying to serve. So, you know, I think companies have have just under invested in general in the go to market process and proper kind of upfront planning and communication, both internally and to and to external customers.
Randy Silver:
Derek, you just talked about, you know, pre testing stuff with with customers. I’m curious, because I’ve seen this go wrong any number of times? How do you qualify a customer to partner with to do the to the early, whether you call it private beta, whatever it might be? How do you make sure you’ve got the right partner for that?
Derek Osgood:
Yeah, I mean, a lot of this, a lot of this comes down to how much time you have to plan obviously, like, if you’re just shipping a beta really fast, and you have a one week beta before a release, it’s really tough to do a lot of intense qualification here. But you know, for larger launches, where you are, you know, spending a month, two months, three months planning that cycle out, the best way to do it is first go minor support tickets, go figure out like who has asked for the thing that you’re building, and then get them to commit upfront to some degree of commitment around giving you feedback. So you know, build a formal beta programme and actually have them sign up for this thing and like, apply to the beta programme, and raise their hand as I will give you feedback at this cadence in exchange for early access to this product. And then also, you know, within those people make sure that the folks that you’re talking to are, you know, first of all, under NDA around those new features so that they don’t go leak the announcement, like you want your announcement to be as flashy as possible, which means that you actually need to keep it somewhat confidential, while it is in beta. And in early testing, so make sure people are willing to commit to that, like I said, make sure they’re willing to give me give you feedback, and then make sure that those folks are also willing to give you case studies at the end of it, and they’re willing to actually put their name on paper and say, hey, you know, if we deliver value to you in the way that we’re promising you, you will then help promote us when it’s time to come and talk to other customers. So I think a lot of it is like qualification around how they’re going to engage with your data. But then, when it comes to actually identifying who the right users are for a specific product, a lot of that comes down to you having done your research on why you’re building that product in the first place. So making sure that you really understand the personas that you’re building for making sure that you really connected those personas to some kind of value propositions and value statement that explains what your products gonna do for them. And making sure that then you’re just mining both the qualitative and quantitative data that you have available to you, whether it’s, you know, product analytics, and you’re looking at certain other features that people are using that are indicative of them being a potential good user of this new thing that you’ve built, or whether that’s just them having like submitted support tickets, like I mentioned.
Lily Smith:
So we’ve kind of covered a little bit around like what’s included in and launch. But one of the things I really wanted to ask you about was, in this day and age, we tend to have a very specific format around alpha test, private beta, public beta, and then launched just kind of happens. And you get the excuse when you’re in like beta that it doesn’t have to work perfectly or. And then you noticed that I’ve seen some companies, I think Google do this really well where they kind of allow you to try out a new feature or a new version of their products, but you can kind of switch back to the other ones so other days. like that big bang launch just like gone forever? Or do you think that still happens, but in in sort of like a different way?
Derek Osgood:
Yeah, no, I think it happens in different ways. So, like I mentioned, you know, much earlier on here, I think, too many companies have assumed that because you have a private public beta process that you don’t need to do that big splashy launch, because you’re just doing this cool. They hide behind this idea of like iterative launching, where they’re just like, Oh, we’re just going to go a B test and stuff until it works. And I think the the reality is, what you’re doing is a disservice to yourself in terms of actually driving customer adoption. So I think, you know, when you look at larger organisations like Google that do these big, you know, private beta programmes, where people can just kind of test them out. Really, what they’re doing is they’re moving the big splashy launch up in the cycle. So they’re actually doing the announcement. And they’re making a bunch of noise about the thing as it rolls out to beta. Because inevitably, like, once you’re at scale, and people are paying attention to every single thing that you do, if you’re, if you’re Google, if you’re Apple, if you’re Facebook, then you know, if you ship something to private beta, or public beta news is going to get out of it. And inevitably, the the press is going to be less interested when you actually like make the announcement and say, hey, you know, this thing is now live for everybody. So the right way to get ahead of it is if you can’t actually keep that beta programme under wraps, is that you actually do a launch ahead of time, and you do kind of a pre launch where you announce that thing at beta. And then you’re just collecting signups, basically, for when the thing actually shifts to general availability. And then again, you’re able to launch on the day of general availability, with a pre big batch of people that you can go immediately paying and say, Hey, we just shipped this thing that you signed up for that you’ve already raised your hand expressed interest in, we already know that you’re qualified to use it. And then you’re just amplifying the bigger announcement that you’re making across your other channels, by leveraging those users who have already signed up and raise their hand. So I think, you know, the days of the big splashy launch, I personally think like are not gone and they should not be gone. And you know, companies should if anything, be doing it more than they are today. But I think the way that their their their execute executed is a little bit different than it was you know, back in the days when you had two year long planning cycles to launch a semiconductor. So I think I mean, things have shifted, but you know, shades of the same.
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Randy Silver:
It sounds like in some ways you’re trying to prescript a narrative, what is the story that you’re trying to tell and hope that it goes the way that you want it to. So to that end, what makes for a successful launch? I mean, you can have a really great first day, and then crickets after that. And that might not be successful. Or it might be that it goes a bit slowly and ramps up. So how do you take control the narrative internally and externally? And how do you define success?
Derek Osgood:
Yeah, so I mean, obviously, the first step in that is to actually have a perspective on what the narrative should be that that is like really fundamentally where so many companies in today’s world of really faster shipping, don’t ever invest the time and energy to figure out upfront, like what do we want this thing to be when it grows up, they just kind of ship it into the world. And then they hope that the market will create the narrative around that product that they that they you know, that is beneficial to them. But in order to actually create a position in customers minds, you have to invest upfront in defining what you want that position to be in defining an actual set of steps that you’re going to take in order to get that get people to believe that position. And then you also need to invest in having a real I mean, this goes back to my point earlier about you no internal enablement and internal communication, you need to make sure that everybody in your company is kind of telling the exact same story and, and that because that translates to how your sales team is explaining it to customers, how customers are then digesting it, how how your PR team is pitching it to press, making sure that all of those people are telling the exact same story is the only way that you’re going to get a consistent message to the customers that you actually care about influencing in this case. So a lot of it is just defining, you know, doing the upfront work to define what you want that narrative to be, then doing the upfront work of communicating that narrative in a way that’s digestible to all the different internal stakeholders that you have. And then by proxy of communicating to them, communicating it to all the external stakeholders that they have, which will then communicate it to your customers. And then I think, you know, the, the last bit is just making sure that you don’t think about launches, and think about, you know, go to market planning, as we’re going to launch this thing. And then it ends at general availability, like the launch process starts when you’ve actually shipped the thing to everybody, because then post launch, you need to continually be iterating on messaging, you need to have frameworks in place for collecting continuous feedback post launch on how the narrative that you’ve created is resonating, are people actually understanding it? Or is it? Is it helping to motivate the behaviour that you want? And then you know, how to how do you operationalize actually iterating on that and pushing it back into the the development cycle that you’ve got to continue improving both your marketing and your in your product. So I think, you know, just thinking through it as a process, as opposed to just saying, you know, at the last second, hey, we’re going to go, we need some coffee to explain what this thing is that we built, and we’re going to send it an email to people, that’s that’s the way that you just create really inconsistent messaging that nobody really understands.
Lily Smith:
And they say that timing is everything. So when you’re thinking about when to launch your product, like quite often it will be dictated by just when it’s ready. But how can you use timing to your advantage? You know, if you’re thinking about sort of what’s going on with your competitors? Or if there are events coming up? Or you know, just like, when it isn’t in the year and stuff like that, what, how do you kind of think about that when you’re planning your product launches?
Derek Osgood:
Yeah. So I think, I mean, there’s some obvious things to take into account with timing, I mean, obviously, like you can’t control when competitors are announcing things, or you know, what’s going on kind of out in the external world, but you can avoid, you know, avoid, try and avoid holidays, unless there’s something that’s, you know, really, really relevant to your product happening on that holiday, try and avoid, you know, Mondays and Fridays, because those are the days that people are just paying a little bit less attention. But I think you know, one of the big things that you can take advantage of when figuring out timing for launches, one is give customers a relatively consistent time at which you are launching and making an announcement so that they know to look out for that thing. This is something that I think a lot of companies forget to do. They just kind of ship things whenever they’re done. But even if all you’re doing is saying like, hey, every week on Thursday, like Thursday is the day that we as a company are going to launch things and then all customers know to come in and check like, hey, what’s the new stuff that shipped this Thursday, that alone has a huge impact on improving the effectiveness of your announcements, you can also look at, you know, batching those announcements together on those days in order to create a bigger narrative around, you know, more strategic initiative, that’s not just like, hey, we just shipped this, this new feature. And then I think the other thing that you can take into account is like, don’t feel like you do have to ship things. The second that they’re done, I think that, you know, it’s so common for pressure from, you know, the C suite, or wherever you’re getting it to say, hey, you know, we built this thing, when’s it going live, let’s get to live as fast as possible. But the reality is, if you spend even just one extra week, putting in place your real quality, go to market motion, you’re just gonna get dramatically better adoption around that product. And so, you know, don’t be afraid to push back on timing and say, hey, you know, until not just the product building is done, but also the go to market enablement and communication is also in place, then you’re not ready to launch and say, hey, you know, what’s, let’s wait on this for another week. So I think those are probably the big the big tips that I would give, obviously, like, the more time you give yourself for planning, the more effective you’re going to be, but, but that’s not always doable.
Randy Silver:
Can we talk about who takes the control of that of that go to market plan, and sometimes it’s a product manager, but and you said you’ve done it in that role before, but we’re seeing more and more product more marketing folks around. And then there’s the traditional marketing team as well, what’s the best way to work together? And who should be running this process?
Derek Osgood:
Yeah, I think it varies company to company, obviously, like the shape and sizes of product teams and product marketing teams are, you know, they come in every possible form you can imagine. So, sometimes product management owns this process, sometimes Product Marketing owns this process, I tend to view the best possible structure as like truly kind of shared ownership where, you know, the, the product marketing team is kind of leading the Go market process, and the product team is really leading the the kind of beta and development process. And then, you know, they’re working in lockstep from even the earliest stages of specking out the products that are being built. So that, you know, these processes can run in parallel. However, I think, you know, it’s hard to say which one’s the right one to own it. The biggest piece of advice to make it work, though, is to involve both teams at even the earliest, like customer research stages, because the more context each team has together in why decisions are being made, the better, they’re going to be able to craft a go to market strategy, as you start building out, like all the marketing, communication for it, the thing to avoid, which is, unfortunately, super common at lots of companies is the flaming bag handoff, where you’re just like, hey, you know, we built this thing. And now it’s time for the marketing team to go market it and you hand it off, when it’s, you know, just about to ship to beta, or it’s just about ship to general availability. And you try and give them as much context as you can. But it takes time in order for the product marketing team to ingest that context, in order for them to go conduct customer research, competitive research to understand how to craft a narrative around it. So it’s way better if you’re able to involve both teams together, you know, from the start.
Lily Smith:
And you kind of touched on this just there with like, the types of activities that a product marketer would do, but just elaborate a bit more about how a product marketer is different to just your just your average marketing manager. I shouldn’t like give them a bad rap like that. Marketing Manager is a great as well.
Derek Osgood:
Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think like product marketing, similar to product management, like takes a bunch of shapes and sizes of different companies. So there are some product marketers who are really more focused on like content creation and content marketing and sales enablement. There are some who are who looked a lot closer to like product managers. But I think the best way to think about it is you know, most people think about marketing, and they think about advertising and promotion. And so they’re thinking about, like, what, you know, what are the tactical things that are being done? In order to promote this product? Like, what channels are we using? What 10,000 pieces of creative? Are we are we making to iterate on the single core piece of creative that’s being deployed? In order to support all those different channels? Like how are we deploying budgets to those individual channels. And I think, you know, that’s where demand gen comes in, like most people think of marketing as demand gen. And the reality is, the product marketing looks a lot more similar to like product management, it’s kind of the equivalent of the product management team for the product market for the marketing team. And so they’re the ones we’re kind of thinking, going and conducting all the research to really understand customers and be able to inform the way that you’re telling the story to them. They’re the ones who have all the market Intel to understand, you know, like, what competitors are good at, and data and how to frame products relative to them in order to best drive motivation and customers minds. They’re the ones who are also developing kind of like the macro strategy for the go to market plan around, you know, what’s the phasing and timing look like for this launch? You know, when should we be pushing things to beta or moving things from beta to GA? And then also, like, what channels at a very high level should we be thinking about based on where our customers live on a day to day basis? So they’re really kind of the one yeah, they’re, they’re very different from the rest of the marketing team. And it’s very funny, like I talked to product marketers all day. And they’re, they’re oftentimes tell they refer to the marketing team as a totally different team. And they view product marketing is kind of its own entity, it’s probably a lot closer, closer to product than anything.
Lily Smith:
So if you’re kind of growing business, when when would you look to employ a product marketer? When When do you actually need one?
Derek Osgood:
Yeah, it’s funny, I was talking to one of our investors eaten shot the other day, and he was telling me that like, of all the b2b founders that he talks to, like, the one thing that they consistently tell him is, I wish that I’d hired Product Marketing earlier like that, that is consistent across every single company and product marketing. There’s a reason that kind of Product Marketing at the moment, is seeing a really huge resurgence and booming demand, which is I think a lot of companies are realising that’s kind of one of the higher alpha roles you can hire for. I think it’s it’s is a hard roll to hire for when you are in the very early stages of your company, because of the fact that most product marketers are more kind of strategic than tactical. And so, you know, in the early days where you’re 50 people, you still need people who are just kind of executing and doing stuff and building things. And at that point, you know, you’re really probably having the product team pinch hit and do the product marketing job, up until you start reaching probably 100 plus people is when you start really meeting product marketing in house because you start having multiple different stakeholders cross functionally, who are all kind of disconnected in the way that they think about who your customers are, who the right segments to be going after are what the narrative to be telling them is. So you know, I think like, generally, I would say that the right move, right time is right around, you know, 50 to 100 people or so. But I think generally, if you’re able to hire as your first marketing, hire a product marketer, who does have some demand when jobs and can manage tactically, the process of going out and just acquiring customers, and owning a number, that’s the optimal time to hire them was like as soon as possible. But you know, it’s it’s tough to do when you’re just really tiny, and you just need people to put people into the funnel.
Lily Smith:
So, and you kind of mentioned, the higher in terms of like the number of people that you have, but I guess like with product launches, you might have like one product, that you’re not launching new products, you’re just launching new features. So do you see big feature releases, similar to product launches, so if you’re hiring a product marketer, they would look after that part of the the launch process, the main product as well,
Derek Osgood:
totally, I mean, at the at the early stages of a company, like until you actually make the leap from single product company to Multi Product company, feature releases, our product releases, and like those are, you know, when you’re talking about the larger ones, definitely product marketing should be involved in that. I think oftentimes, you know, the pitfall that companies run into, with product marketing teams with their first product marketing hires, they try and have that product marketer like nounce, every single thing that gets built, and it’s like, every single tiny little feature release that gets built, gets the same amount of attention as every single large one, because the CEO is like, hey, we invested a bunch of time and effort in building this thing, the CEOs excited about it, they’re like, Hey, I hired a product marketer to announce things, let’s go announces stuff, where the real value of that person can be at spending more time adding to is really around customer research, in forming the kind of bigger narrative that the company is trying to tell and seeing how those features fit into place within it. So you know, I think oftentimes, like companies should actually announce fewer of the smaller releases that they do or spend less effort on those, and then have product marketing really get involved in the kind of tier one tier two launches that are really, really impactful either to the company’s top level positioning, or to pricing or to, you know, the way that cuts or it’s just a really impactful feature for customers. So but yes, I think like feature launches, until you are a multi product company look very, very similar to product launches on the whole.
Randy Silver:
Okay, so you’ve talked a lot about what good looks like you’ve talked about a few mistakes, you know, over communicating, as you just said, launching on the wrong day, things like that. But what’s what’s the consistent rookie mistake that you see people making the first time they they start to take this on? What’s the one thing that if you wave your magic wand, you never have to see people do again,
Derek Osgood:
I think that I mean, the biggest one is just not having a process for this like it is you come out and you just are saying, Hey, we’re gonna send I mean, I think I’ve mentioned this once or twice, it’s like, you just send an email. And that’s, that’s the equivalent of your launch process, that is just disaster waiting to happen, because you’re going to have features show up in the sales team’s demos that they didn’t even know were coming. And then they have to scramble to figure out how to talk about something they’ve never even seen before or seen or heard of, you’re going to have marketing teams that aren’t really communicating consistent messaging about those features, or it’s just not even making its way into your demand gen efforts. You’re gonna have customers who are confused and you know, you get a, if you do a good email, you get 50% open rates on it or so. And so that means half of the people that you’re trying to announce this thing to, they never even see it or hear about it. So having multichannel process where you can actually communicate something and you know, an initial email, but then subsequent touch points, either in the product or in a release notes page or elsewhere, is really important. And I think companies just, they wing it for too long and then they end up with the end your hygiene just gets worse the bigger you get, and if the longer you wing it for the the more pain it is to go and fix that process down the road. So getting in place even a very low Lightweight process early can help save you tonnes and tonnes of time as you start to get bigger.
Lily Smith:
Derek, this has been such a great talk, I’m actually launching some products tomorrow website. And I’m really pleased to say that I have done most of the things or as a team, we’ve done most of the things that you’ve talked about. But you’ve also given me a couple of little hints and tips of like extra things that I need to get into the office and do straight away. So it’s been really, really helpful and great to talk to you. So thank you so much for joining us.
Derek Osgood:
Yeah, likewise, thank you guys so much for having us and hopefully hope the launch is go well.
Lily Smith:
Thank you. The product experience is the first and the best podcast from mine the product. Our hosts are me, Lily Smith,
Randy Silver:
and me Randy silver.
Lily Smith:
Louron Pratt is our producer and Luke Smith is our editor.
Randy Silver:
Our theme music is from humbard baseband power. That’s Pau. Thanks to Arnie killer who curates both product tank and MTP engage in Hamburg and who also plays bass in the band for letting us use their music. You can connect with your local product community via product tank, regular free meetups in over 200 cities worldwide.
Lily Smith:
If there’s no one near you, maybe you should think about starting one. To find out more go to mind the product.com forward slash product tank
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