Successful Product Launch Strategies

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So thank you, guys. If you want to raise your hand. There you go in the front. Teachers' pet. All right. And oh, other sponsors. I'm all over the place. Pragmatic Marketing. They're another sponsor here. They do a lot of training for product marketing teams, and their mission is really, their elevator pitch is we teach companies how to build and market products people want to buy. And so I've done training with them. Feel free to reach out to them if you're looking for some extra training if you're in product marketing. All right. So with that said, let's go ahead and get started here. I'm going to welcome the panelists. The first panelist we have at the very end is Alan Mask, and he leads global product marketing at Airbnb. Previously he led marketing and growth at a startup in San Francisco. After four years of brand marketing, product marketing, and media strategy at Google, Alan started his career on Wall Street and continues to manage a boutique creative agency he founded in 2010. Manav Karana is VP of product marketing at Twilio and loves solving technology, and he's in the middle, loves solving technology adoption problems. He started his career as a product guy in Motorola's enterprise mobility business. He went on to lead product and marketing efforts at two startups, Aruba Networks and Maroo Networks, both of which had successful IPOs. He grew up in India, earned a BS in electrical engineering from the University of Rochester, and got his MBA from Santa Clara University. And then to my right here is Matt Hodges. He's the senior director of marketing at Intercom. As Intercom's first marketer, Matt has grown the team to a world-class organization of over 20, while tripling web traffic and maintaining conversion rates. Prior to Intercom, Matt ran marketing for Atlassian's collaboration business, where he drove the go-to-market strategy for Confluence and HipChat family of products, a $60 million business at the time. All right, thanks, guys. So let's go ahead and just jump right in. Why do product launches even matter? Because they are the most important thing. I used to lead product marketing, and I'm a little cynical here. Do you want us to go in order, Alex? I think to me, and we were talking about this specific question a little bit earlier, I think it's really important that you get to market the right way, because getting to market also helps set the tone for the success of the product down the road. I think I was giving this analogy. I don't know if it's the right one, but there's some folks who can look at runners and tell who wins the race just by seeing their start. And I think product launches, making sure you get to market the right way, you get to market safely, has a lot to do with how successful the product is in the long term. I could probably, even at Airbnb, take our entire suite of products and lay out for you the ones that are most successful and the ones that were a little bit less successful and directly correlate and connect those to how much time and energy we put into a successful launch. And so I'd say it's everything, just as important as anything else. Just to add to your thought here, I think there are three reasons why product launches matter. There are two external, one internal. The one obvious one that you mentioned is ramping product revenue. It's a good platform to get things going. The second is brand. Not only the brand for the product, but the brand for the company, especially if you're introducing a product that is in a new space that gives you the opportunity to set a new tone for the brand, helps you enter new adjacent areas. And then the third internal one is around rallying the company, rallying the engineering team, the product team, the support team, the sales team to come together, not only release the product, but get ready to serve the customers that are going to adopt the product. And the launch service is a good way to create that momentum. I'm going to switch between launch and announcement. I mean the same thing when I say an announcement. But for me, just to build on Manav's first point, I think if you pick the right things to launch or the right things to announce, they all present a really good opportunity for you to generate new content for your business. So that would be number one. And then the second thing would be they each present an opportunity for you to show both perspective and existing customers momentum in your business. If you again pick the right things to announce, you can show that you're constantly innovating in the areas that those people care about and also addressing the feedback that your customers are probably giving you. So it gives you an opportunity to show momentum as a business as well. Can I interrupt? Not to interrupt your flow here. But I think the real thing you touched on here is the difference between launch and announcement. The thing that's most important, I think, to product marketers is to understand what is a product and when do you actually do that announcement. When the product is ready or we are kind of ready, where do you fit in that spectrum. So useful to understand everybody's perspective. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, to have that kind of definition then. I'd say one little thing that I also added to that is that being really intentional about launch helps you maintain control over what's going to happen as well as the process. I think it's really, really easy just to push code live. It's really easy just to say, okay, we're done and ship. But when you really have to be intentional and disciplined about thinking through how are we going to measure this, what does it look like for us to win? What are the things we didn't think about scenario planning? Even if you don't have to use it, just the exercise of aligning people internally and getting the teams ready to go to market ends up being a huge deal and I think it reached big benefits. If you want to behavior, then control that. Really plan to have that. That makes a lot of sense. Tell us about what your best product launch was and what you did to make it successful. Yeah, sure. I think there's two different ways to think about this and it all depends on what you're actually launching and there's different ways that you would deem what is successful based on what it is. So the first and the most obvious would be the launch of an entirely new product or a new product line. Ultimately there I would say we're successful if we've generated or had a measurable impact on the bottom line of the business. So my example there I would give is when we launched Acquire, which is our newest product through Inacom. We launched it back in October of last year and it's now more than, it's a multimillion dollar ARR business for Inacom. So it generated a new revenue stream for us. It's growing and it actually widened the top of the funnel. It opened us up to an entirely new segment of customers. So from that perspective I'd say that was successful. But we also launched things that are additions to our existing products. So major new features as an example. And for those I would look at a different measure. I'd actually look at adoption. We might be successful in telling people that this new thing exists, but the real measure of success is whether people are actually using it. Have you convinced them to make it a core part of their workflow and use it every day? So an example I'd give there is our Smart Campaigns feature that we added to our Engage product. We had a goal set with the product team that 90 days post launch or post announcement we'd have 20% of customers who had access to that feature using it. I just checked this evening we're at 16%, so we're almost there. So again, depends on what you are launching and there are different measures of success. And Matt, with that choir that makes up a big chunk of revenue for you guys, what did you do to get it so successful? Because you've launched other products. I think it was in large part listening to what our customers were asking for. It was a gap in our offering. They wanted to expand the places that they could speak to their customers. If you're not familiar with Intercom, we're a customer communication platform. We have a suite of products that you can use to talk to customers at different stages of the life cycle. Before we introduced a choir, you weren't able to speak to people when they were on your website. You could only speak to registered users of your product. So it was something that our customers had been asking for and we delivered on that and we solved the problems that they had and the things that they were asking for. And as a result, they were able to promote that to a wider audience for us. You really nailed the problem on that. It's very hard for me. We've launched, what, 10 major products at Twilio in the last two years and probably numerous, multiples of that in terms of features. So it's very hard for me to pick which one of the children is the best. But if I had to pick one using your construct, we introduced a brand new product called Video about a year ago. And we used that as an opportunity not only to introduce a new product that our customers can adopt, but also to change the tone of what Twilio is known for. Prior to that, Twilio was known as a company that provides an API for SMS primarily, but by introducing Video, and we actually launched it three times, despite the best intentions of my PR person to only launch the product once. We did end up actually launching it three times, which set the tone of Twilio expanding and being more than just a one-trick pony and providing a full portfolio of communication services. So that was kind of number one. Number two was another product that was very niche, very small percentage of people in our audience even care about it because it solves a very narrow problem. And similarly, the conversation was a little different. Here, everybody in the company was telling me that it's not worth making a big bang about this product. We're not going to get press. We're not going to get all the noise around that we want. So we resigned to the fact that, okay, well, we'll do what's in our control, and we created a kick-ass demo on the website where developers who wanted to access the product could log on and self-service and use the demo without actually creating an account and see what the product is. And luckily, the product was picked up by Hacker News that same day. It was number one on the first page. And we had 10,000 people register for Twilio that one day for that one product. It was really incredible to do that. I think for me, I'll take a bit of a different angle. I've worked on a lot of launches. I think these guys have too. I tell my teams all the time, one of the best ways to get good at launch is just to launch a lot or work on a lot of launches. One of the ones that stands out to me as being more successful than others or successful in a different kind of way was when I was at Google. I worked on the Android team. I was on the Google Play team as well. And one of the products I got to work on launch for was Google Play Music All Access, which was our unlimited streaming service, our Spotify competitor at the time. And it went really well not just because it performed, but the team really understood how to work together to get this to market. It was a seamless experience across all the different divisions, all the organizations, from engineering through comms. Everybody knew the role they had to play. Everybody knew what they needed to put into it. People saved margin for things they didn't really expect. People were patient with things that didn't happen necessarily on course or on schedule. And it felt like a really classically trained group of folks who were working together. And it wasn't always that way. I worked with the same team on things that didn't go as well. But for this one period of time, I think we all committed very early to doing everything we could to make sure it was successful. And even that commitment, that mindset, made the whole entire process so easy. And I think we were a lot more successful because of it. It's like that winning team mentality. I'd like to maybe just ask one other question. You mentioned that you announced Twilio Video three times. How did you do that? So, you know, we actually borrowed a page from Apple's book that I still think intentionally leaks pictures of their next iPhone to tell people what they're going to launch and then launch it and then ship it. So, like, well, that seems like an interesting idea. But in our world, it was a little different. We announced a month and a half before we were actually going to introduce the product. They were going to announce, introduce this product at our upcoming conference called Signal. And we talked about what the product was going to be and we got a bunch of press that day. And we were accepting people to get early access requests so that when they come to Signal, they would get their hands on to the product. Then at Signal, our CEO, who is a fantastic spokesperson for the company, he did a live coding demo of Twilio Video. And that created a lot of buzz and a lot of interest amongst the press and in our customer base. And then when we actually opened up access to the product about a month or so later, we talked about how people are actually using video inside software, which is a novel concept. So in other words, it was three different stories about the same product, rinse and repeat, to get more information out. Makes sense. Last question, follow up to that. Does that work for everyone? Obviously it works for Apple, household name, Twilio, household name, and the tech community amongst developers. Would it work for a startup that's three months old? Actually, can I ask you to rewind? If you say that Twilio is a household name, you should say that to my CEO. He'd be very happy with me. You're welcome. You know, when we did this, we were not considered the same at the time. So part of it was luck, part of it was plan, and the plan worked out. People definitely say it's true. You cannot tell the same exact story again and again. It's about the different angles on the story and what's new and what's worth writing about from a press point of view that gives you the opportunity. I think that speaks to the fact that what works is going to be different for everybody. I know we're talking about winning strategies and we're going to share some insight for us, but I think at the end of the day, you guys with your teams are going to have to really understand your user, understand your technology, and think through what makes the most sense for you from a launch perspective. So I think hearing from folks, getting some experience is really, really important, but what works for Twilio may not work for your startup. What works for Airbnb may not work for your startup. So I think it's important to have that angle, too, that there may be something that you knock it out of the park with that may not have worked at your last company or your next company. Yeah, there really is no like, open up the book, this is the blueprint, step one, step two. You kind of got to figure out what works for your company and your market. Who here, a show of hands, who's participated in a product launch in the last three months? Okay, so, and everybody up front. Here's a good question, because there are tight deadlines and there's things that you got to get out, and it's hard to get everything done you need to get done in a product launch. What's the bare minimum in terms of deliverables that you have to make sure gets done for a product launch? Yeah, I'll start. For me, it's anything that is customer-facing. If the whole idea of a launch is to onboard customers to get access to the product or sign up for the product, so everything that your primary channels where people do that for us, that's the website, is the most important thing. And then right after that is the onboarding experience, so once people do sign up, what do they actually get their hands on and how is that going to be for them? Those are the two most important things. Everything else you can actually even delay. I mean, there have been times where you've shipped product first, getting the website right, and then done the PR, then done the blogs and emails and social media and the like, but helping customers onboard and getting the first portal detached is the most important. So just don't drop the customer. For me, it really comes down to understanding what we're announcing. So I like to say that everything that the product team ships presents a marketing opportunity for us. And when that's the case, and in InnoCom's case, we shipped more than 100 changes to InnoCom last year, you're not able to shout about each and every one of those things because people are going to stop listening to you. So you need to be really thoughtful about what you decide to announce and how you go about announcing it. So we use a really simple framework. Think of two accesses, on one access you have value. Is this something that you're shipping that's going to be mostly valuable to your existing customers that's probably going to help retain them, or is it something that is going to be mostly valuable to new customers? On the other access you have innovation. Is the thing that you're shipping just filling a gap in your product and playing catch-up to the competitors in the space? Or is it solving a problem in an entirely new way? Is it a new invention? So you've got this quadrant in the top right. You have P1, you have a P2, you have a P3, and you have a P4. So we look at everything that we ship and we map it on that quadrant, and then from there we can start to understand what level of investment we want to make. So for everything that we ship, we put an entry out on our changes page, which lives inside the product and you can access it on the web. But for our P1s, which are those new inventions that are mostly valuable to new customers, those are our biggest opportunities to grow the business and generate new demand for Inacom. So those are the ones that we really shout about. So those are the ones that we definitely want to pitch the media and try and get some media coverage. Those are the ones we definitely create a landing page for and a series of videos and work with the entire go-to-market team to make sure that the onboarding flow is there. So again, it depends on what you're announcing to help you understand what level of investment to make. And I want to jump in real quick. I think that's really good, a bit of a tangent, but the fact that you have priorities, you've prioritized criteria, and you've made it public. Because I think as you start to grow in your company, there are people that are going to question why you do certain things, and so you have to make sure that you have objective criteria that you're consistently following and that other people understand. Yeah, I think I would totally agree with that. It depends on what you're launching. I think at Airbnb, I would say, I'd say whatever you can comfortably ship with, I think is bone versus fat or versus muscle. So if we can ship comfortably and be happy with it, then I'd say that's the bare minimum. And I think it's maybe unusual for us, but my team is so far upstream with the product teams that we would never launch anything without a very, very, very heavy product marketing hand on it. And so the experience before, like the in-product experience for a user is just as important for us as the promotional aspect. So new user experience, naming, messaging, positioning, onboarding, even the interaction designs, we're so hands-on with every single piece of the product that I'd say bare minimum for us is what we're comfortable shipping. And then everything else beyond that isn't necessarily a nice to have. It just depends on what you're launching, how big it needs to be, how urgent it is, how important it is for the user. Hey, Alex, I was going to go back to your point about setting priorities and your point about creating the four tiers of launches and the like. We've always done that. You know, in every job, product marketing job, we've had different tiers. We've tried to communicate it. But something interesting happened in the last six months for us where I found it incredibly hard to create that consistency because we were moving so fast. Products were coming. As teams were growing, we have more and more parallel product teams that are working. And it was impossible to create the same level of tiers and consistency across tiers to the point where we today put a new standard in play where there's only two tiers of launches, major releases and enhancements. Enhancements have zero coordination. We actually announced the product after it's already shipped, taking away all the coordination tax between the product teams, the support teams, the sales teams, and the marketing teams, and then only doing the coordination on major releases because that's where it's either time-bound or it's at a major event or something that we are preparing for as a very big company event. That kind of simplifies things a little bit. So maybe six months from now, it was a bad decision, but that's what we ended up at. You're in hyper-scale mode. You got to survive. Let's turn a little bit to when we start to think about a product launch, one of the things we're really thinking through is positioning. It plays a huge role. How do you uncover the so-what that underpins good positioning? Let's start with you, Matt. Cool. So for us, it actually all starts with the first document that's created for anything that we ship that's going to take longer than a week for the product team to build. That document's called an intermission, and it's an internal name for a project brief. The goal of that document is to get a shared understanding across product and across marketing of what problem we're solving and why, and that is usually based on customer feedback or customer research that we've done. So that intermission is written by the product team or the product managers who's leading that project. And then from there, the partner in product marketing or the product marketing manager will take that intermission and then look at the competitive landscape and think about who else solves this problem. How do they describe it? How do they position it? How does it work? And from there, you can start to form an understanding of, well, what are the unique selling points that we might have to play with here? And then you can map those unique selling points back to the original problem that people had that you're trying to solve. So once we have a shared understanding and agreement on what those things are, we'll go and write what we call an interstory, which is one paragraph pitch, your best pitch to a prospective customer, convincing them that they should buy this solution versus an alternative. That kind of becomes the anchor throughout the development process, and we constantly revisit that as we look to make decisions around scope. What stays in scope will get dropped out of scope. Once we've built and designed a solution or are in the process of designing a solution, we'll then conduct what we call the Build-A-Box exercise. If you remember back in the day when you used to buy antivirus software or Microsoft Word, you'd go into a shop and you'd pick it up off a shelf. So we forced ourselves to think about what would this thing look like if it was on a box, on a shelf, alongside a bunch of competing alternatives? What do we put on the front of the box that clearly speaks to the value that this thing is going to add and is going to convince someone to pick up my box over the alternative? And if you flip that box over, what's on the back of the box that explains how it works? And this is when you start to think about, well, what features does this thing contain? So that's a really simple exercise that we conduct with product marketing and product management and any other core stakeholders. And we'll take everyone's boxes, we present them to each other, and we build the Uber box. We take all the ideas that we like the best, and we get agreement on what is the overall message and the story that we want to tell. And then you have a whole bunch of really great bits of copy and positioning statements that you can use for your email and your tweets and all the other supporting assets you need to create when you actually launch. I think for us, there are three, there's an exercise I do that has three parts with the team. The first thing we do is we identify who the key decision makers on the product are, you know, at that point in time or throughout history. So PM, PMM, Design Lead, Engineering Lead, Comms Lead, whoever may be applicable to the project. We get that team aligned on the core tenets of what the product is, where it came from, why it exists, what geos it's launching in, the code name. We identify the decision-making team. We get them aligned on why this thing exists, how we're measuring it, vision, strategy, goals. And then we make what I call trailhead or like trailhead copy, which is basically turning that understanding of what it is that we're doing and why into very high-level guide copy that can be used that's actually written in external language. So the one-liner, the three bullet points, the short, medium, long, the hashtags, whatever it is, we basically have this trailhead copy that can then be used and departed from to make up all the communications. And I find that 100% of the time, I think, successful in at least helping us understand why we're doing, who matters, who has a say, how it should come to life. And just throughout that exercise, we end up with this really rich document that is strong enough to inform any piece of creative or strategic background you would need to provide. So very similar to the project brief or to the creative brief. And I'm zooming out. It has some more detail to it as well, but those are the general three sections for us. Same approach as you guys, and we have a process as well. The only differences are that we use the press release format as our equivalent of the box and the equivalent of your positioning doc, because that press release is something that we can circulate then to our CEO, to our press teams, and then say, hold water. And the other thing I would say is the hardest thing in positioning is identifying the right hero in your story and the right villain in your story. And that takes a lot of iteration. And I know I drive my teams crazy trying to find that right hero and right villain to make sure that our story is actually unique, and it's a unique revelation that we are presenting to the market. Not the same so what. What's the villain? Have you guys heard of the hero's journey idea? It's for a hero that wants to accomplish something, what's preventing the hero from doing, getting to that end outcome? I'll give you a quick example. And this is not necessarily for launch, but just in positioning. We were working on something that you might feel right about as well. We were talking about why do people really want to build better communications in their software. And the obvious reason was that if you build a better communications experience, you'll deliver a better customer experience. And that's kind of the hero, that's the ultimate goal that you want. The issue with that is there is no company in this world, even Comcast, even United Airlines, where somebody wakes up every day and says, I don't want to create a good customer experience. They all do. What is the reason why they can't create that good customer experience, that good support experience? That is the villain. So what would be there so you can serve your customers better? Everybody wants to do that. There's no revelation there. Comcast is debatable. We call that tension, the point of tension. So it's different than the problem, but it's almost what no one wants to mention or no one wants to speak to that's an important reality for the team to understand in order to really get it. And I think another thing that's important, too, when thinking about positioning is you have to help the teams understand how to think about the product and how to think about the problem just as much as you're helping them understand what to say, which is why in that framework I shared with identifying the team, getting everyone in line, and writing external copy, what's most important is not having the copy. It's seeing the shift from the internal language to the external language because then people are able to get a better understanding, a better model for how to think about what it is that we're doing versus just like the bones or just everything else. You really need the soul and the spirit, and helping people understand how to think about something is far more valuable at that stage than giving them something they can use, like just straight positioning. man in audience. One of the many of our teams here have sales teams or customer support teams that they have to train and enable. And what do you really have to train people on versus what they want, and how much of it can you do pre-launch versus post? You mean the training of sales? Training sales, yeah, sales, and maybe customer service support. Can I start with what you should not do? Is no marketing person should ever stand up in a room, classroom style, tell salespeople how to sell, and tell support people how to support. It's an absolute recipe for disaster. Shit. No, seriously, I've made that mistake so many times, and I still catch myself making that mistake. The reason is that their realities are so different than what we think their realities are. So for things for sales enablement that work really well is when you get a salesperson who's your champion to show how they're going to sell and illustrate that. Or a support person on how doing a hackathon with a support person for Twilio, where they actually build with the product that we are introducing so they know what kind of issues people will run into themselves. And our job is to facilitate that environment, not teach them how to do that. My opinion. I think that's true. I think it's just in terms of setting sales teams up for success, I think it's just pure empathy. I think the teams, they have to know each other. One of the things I say often is my job as my team's job for product marketing is just to help people win, help the organization win. And if you don't, you can't just go out and train a team, hey, here's what we're launching, do you have any questions? You really have to understand what they need to do their jobs well. And I would always start with that. Has something changed for this launch from the previous launch in terms of what you need to win, and how has that changed, and how can we give you what it is you need? So I'd almost like start with them and make sure they have more information than they need to sell. Again, it's kind of helping them understand the framework, helping them understand the spirit of what's happening, not just what it is they need to say. So I think it's really making sure that, or at least what, and we do have a sales team. I think people think that Airbnb doesn't have a sales team. We have a huge business travel organization that is very hardcore, old school, traditional, enterprise sales driven. And one of the things we do with those teams is we're preparing them, as well as our support teams, is we don't just give them materials. We almost don't even have a framework that was informed by us at all. We understand what they do so well that we meet them where they are, and we help them understand what it is they need. And then we use that relationship to understand where we fall short, and we don't fall short there again in the next launch, because we're always comparing it to something else we gave them on calls with them. And so I'd say meet them where they are as much as possible, and that's been at least our key. Yeah, so you're not just giving, it's not transactional. Here you go. Here's the training. You're trying to figure out what are the potholes that they're going to run into, and how can I be there to make sure that they don't hit that. Yeah, I'll just add, like, a lot of this is all really new to me. Before I joined Intercom, I worked at a last team for six years, and the last team is famous for not having a sales team. At least they didn't when I worked there. And so coming to Intercom, when we do have a sales team, about 40 people large now, I've been learning a lot about how to better work with the sales team and better enable them. So I can speak a bit about a couple of things I do that I think work well. We've got a lot of room for improvement, but one of the things that we do is we actually fly the product manager out here. So our product team is all based in Dublin and Ireland, and most of our sales team is here in San Francisco. So we actually fly the product manager out here. Once we have a good understanding of what it is that we're going to build and what we want to ship, and we run what we call a town hall. We do it right here. We invite the entire sales team. We do one for sales, and we do one for support. And the idea behind that is to speak at a very high level about what we're building and why, what problems we're solving, and talk a little bit about some of the research that grounds that. And then closer to the launch, we usually a week or so out, we'll host a open Q&A. We'll have, again, the PM and the PMM sit down, and that's an opportunity for sales and support to ask those questions that are probably going to come up when they're speaking to customers or when customers have questions. So you identify a whole bunch of FAQs that you need to document ahead of time or gaps in the things that you've created. But it also gives you that chance to tell the sales team specifically where does this fit in amongst our product landscape that we have and what are the opportunities you should be looking for to bring it up in conversation. So when you're speaking to a prospective customer, what are some of the signals you should listen for that present a good time to introduce this thing? And then you need to arm them with a good understanding of, well, in the event that they ask about an alternative or a competitor, be very clear about where do we win and where do we lose because we don't want to mislead people and take them up the garden path and sell them something that doesn't actually do. So I do think there is value in telling them how they should think about positioning, but of course they can take that and run with it as they will. I think, again, to add to this, your sales teams are not your clients. They are your teammates. You need to spend time with them. If any of you support sales teams, you should be their best friend. They should not be able to live without you. If something happened to you, your sales team should go away. You should be that integral to what it is they do. Every piece of communication you should audit. Take responsibility for where they fall short, especially if it relates to some piece of communication. If customers aren't getting what the new product does, it's your fault. If they don't have the right deck, if they don't have the right video, if they don't have the right illustrations, if they don't have the right training, it's your fault. I cannot stress that enough. In the places I've been across the Valley, too often is there's a separation between the marketing teams, your product marketing teams, and their sales teams. If there's anything that at least you get from me walking out of here today, that should never be the case in any one of your companies. They should live and die by the support you give, and you really have to be intentional about that. Do you actually get sales people coming to you directly? Absolutely. That's how I know my team's doing a good job, is when their teams come to us and ask for stuff. It's not to make them fully dependent on us, it's to work with them. We need to be on the calls. We need to hold down the same numbers they do. If you spend time on a call, you're responsible for the numbers that they're supposed to put up. We have to change this. And again, maybe it's just my limited experience working with the two B2B teams I have before. Like, we have to change that. As a product marketer, you are their secret weapon, and you need to understand what they do and how you can help them win, and you need to make sure at every interaction they have what they need to win. One fine point on that as well is you should also think about your website as your sales team. For a lot of us, majority of the sales happen through the website. That's how people discover the products that you have, sign up in many cases. So just like you were saying that sales teams are a part of your team, and they are, you know, really, it's a partner up with them, you also need to do the same thing with your website and see what the journey is for your customer with your website and equip your website to do the same thing. Yeah, absolutely. Just for time, let's go ahead. We have a couple of people that have mics that can run the mics on both sides. I think they're walking up here. And while they're doing that, I guess I can... One more question. Let me jab in, because they're walking. What is one... This is a Peter Thiel question. What is one thing you believe about product launches that most people would disagree with you on? Mine's already out there. You can only launch a product once is a fallacy. I think for me, and maybe some people wouldn't disagree about this, but I know a lot would, a lot do, at least at Airbnb, is the importance of internal comms. Like, you cannot just bring the people launching along. You have to bring the whole company along. Everybody has to be able to advocate for, promote, have used, have found bugs in that thing you were launching. I cannot... You go on a road show. Every office you have where there's a material group of people, take them a presentation about what's launching, why, and when. Make sure people are in the testing groups. I think I cannot overemphasize how important it is to have everybody inside the company come along for a launch versus not. And so there are people who don't think that's the case. Folks think it's not a great use of time or it's not relevant. I think it's the best use of time, and I think it's the most relevant thing you could do. So stress internal comms as much as possible, even with little things. If it's significant for the company, it's significant for the company, and everybody should come along. Mine I'm going to caveat with a big if. If you pick the right things to launch, I think that launches are your biggest lever in marketing to grow the business. And also, again, if you do it right, put the business on a completely new trajectory. All right. So we're going to go ahead and take questions now. If you have questions, raise your hand. And then when you ask the question, just make sure that it's brief, and then I'll probably repeat it, and then I'll ask one of the panelists for the answer. And then say your name and then your question. Hi. My name's Jessica. I think for all three companies that you guys work at, you've had a big part in defining a product category. As we think about tactical launches, how much time do you guys spend thinking about the broader product story and how everything fits into that category defining broader vision? Manav, do you want to go ahead and take that one? Yeah, so your question is, I don't really follow. How much time do we spend or what was... Thinking about the broader company story. Oh, right, right, right, right, right. Gotcha, gotcha. For us, that is the most important, one of the most important things that we do with every launch is establish Tulio as a leader in the category. But even before that, it's establishing our category. Despite Matt's assertion, we are not a household name. And one of the first things my CEO told me when I joined is that Tulio is the best kept secret in Silicon Valley, just to put pressure on. And we use launches as a vehicle to establish what our category is and then why are we the right choice within that category. So it's flipped for us, actually. One of the things that works for us, too, is almost envisioning it as like a filter, almost like a little Plinko board. When you're launching something or getting ready to take something to market, would, if you dropped it at the top of that filter, would it actually make it to the bottom successfully without getting stuck? So for example, Airbnb, company mission, belong anywhere, marketing promise, live there, product promise, magic and easy. Like, would it get stuck on one of those and or, you know, one of the other sub-bullets or more granular bullets? And if the answer is yes, then you need to reach in, get it, and bring it back up. It's not until it can actually hit through all those filters that it's even worth building, let alone launching. And so I think you have to have discipline about that, too. Is this me? Hi, I'm Derek from PubNum. I'm a little bit surprised no one has said anything about pricing so far. What role does pricing play in the launches at your three companies? Mao, let's go. Why don't you tackle that? So I think it depends on the structure of the business. At InnoCom, we actually have a growth team. Many of you probably have growth teams, too, but growth at InnoCom is quite unique in that it's actually an engineering team. Is there any engineering team that sits here in San Francisco just around the other corner there? But they're responsible for our, among other things, billing and our infrastructure. So our pricing is actually set by our growth team in collaboration with marketing and sales, but it's actually not something that's owned by product marketing. To give an example, we're working on a new product at the moment. You'll hear about it hopefully in October. And we're trying to figure out how to price it. So product marketing's role was to give the growth team an understanding of, okay, who are we going to be competing against when we launch this new product? How do they go about pricing? Is it based on views? Is it based on agents, those types of things? We can give them a broad picture of what the landscape looks like, and then they actually go away and do the analysis and start to figure out, well, what are the different metrics we'd want to price on based on the value that we're hoping to deliver? For us, similar to you, product marketing is not responsible for pricing. We don't know what our product teams are, but we are a very key collaborator. From our point of view, we think of pricing as a feature. In our service, it is very, very important that we market how pricing is different and the pricing model is different and how it's aligned with what customers need. So it's very important. And then the other thing that we do is validate that we have the right pricing model from when the product teams actually set it to when we actually release it out in the market. Next question, if you have a mic, hold your mic up so I can see who has it. Okay. Name and your question. Hi, my name is Teresa. So my question is about what metrics product marketing should be accountable for. I know you guys touched a little bit about adoption and revenue sales numbers and things like that, but I think I struggle with what is the metric that... The metrics are shared between a lot of teams. What metrics are you guys thinking about as product marketers? So Alan, do you want to take that and also weave it into your metric and then also metric related to launch as well? I think for my teams at least, we inherit the metrics of the actual product teams themselves. So Airbnb is structured from outcome to function to geo. So we have 10 outcomes which are almost verticals of the business. The functions, product management, engineering, product marketing are attached to those outcomes. And then we have geos, the theater in which work happens. And so depending on how the PMMs are staffed, they inherit all the metrics of their team. So if the team is building something to drive adoption, to drive growth, to drive revenue, whatever it may be, they inherit those metrics. And it ends up being really helpful from a launch perspective because we hold ourselves accountable from inception for the same numbers that that team is hoping to push. Oftentimes with our marketing teams, like our proper brand marketing teams, the metrics can be really different. You can see them focused on awareness, consideration, buzz. And at that departure, it can be really, really tough to keep folks together. But at the product marketing level, it's really, really helpful to inherit all the product teams' metrics because then you're working together towards the same goal. I don't know if everybody is structured that way or has the luxury of doing that. I've done it that way in the past too. But it's more structured that it's done that way, at least at Airbnb. The only thing I would add, totally aligned with what you do there, Alan, is, again, it depends on what you're announcing. Some things are designed to attract a new set of customers. Some things are more about getting your existing customers to adopt something. But for those major announcements that you are looking to grow the top of the funnel, obviously reach is the main one. Did we reach all the people that we wanted to reach? So visits is your metric there. But more importantly, how many of those people did we convince to go ahead and try the thing? So what we refer to internally as visit to email conversion rate or visit to sign up conversion rate is one that we really track. But then if they don't go up and go ahead and adopt the product, then you've failed entirely. Actually, that's a really good metric for one reason alone, which is a lot of product marketers, my team included, we included think that product launch is when the product launch is done. It's actually when the product launch starts. And if you keep your eyes on adoption metrics and reach and conversions, you realize that you need three months of launch activities or a year of launch activities to get to that metric. But everybody should be on the same page about what it means for a product to succeed. If you have different goals in the product team, you're going to do different things to hit your goals, which means you may have different perspectives about how well it did, which means that you're rarely going to be on the same... it's just going to continue to depart as you go. So as much as you can, have everybody working towards the same thing. That's been successful for us. Really align yourself around a few key metrics. And then on top of that, make sure that you understand that it takes... if it stops when you launch, you're never going to hit your metrics. You've got to really continue to iterate. In the back, name and question. Hi, my name is Amit. I'm actually going to be cheeky and ask you two questions, but I may not get the mic again. So my first question is, what's the best book you've ever read on product marketing? And the second is, what is the best product launch you've seen with the least amount of money spent? And what was your learning in doing that? How about all three hit the best book, and then one of you guys hit the... What was the second question again? My second question is, what's the best launch you've ever done with the least amount of money spent? If you have lots of money, you can always do all sorts of different marketing stunts, right? But if you have very less amount of money to spend, how do you maximize the product launch in that? And if you've ever achieved that successfully, what was your learning? And if not, what was your learning? Okay, so who wants to take that second question? I'll take the book one first. I'll think about the second question a little bit more. So I'm not a reader. I don't read a lot. But I'd say the best book that I've read that's really helped me in my career is On Writing Well. A big part of any product marketer's job is writing really clear, concise, compelling copy. And that's a fantastic book to help you pick up some strategies on how to do that. It's called On Writing Well. Similarly, it's not on product marketing, but on telling the story. Made to Stick is my personal favorite. I think I've read it three or four times already and still realize there's more room to cover and getting better at telling the story. On the books thing, I'd say it's a combination of like three different books that are very different. I'd say, I'll explain that. I'd say Alice in Wonderland, plus Art of the Start, which is a Guy Kawasaki book, plus Don't Make Me Think, which is a usability book. I think Alice in Wonderland, because things are always more bizarre than you think they'll be. I'd say Art of the Start, because being a PMM is really about being an athlete for the organization, really being an entrepreneur, knowing how to think about the entire business and make an operational contribution, not just a contextual contribution to everything, is really important. And then the last one, Don't Make Me Think. Things tend to be more obvious than you think. It's a really amazing book. I forget the author, and I hate that I do, but it's a book that's often used in design curriculums around usability, around how focusing... There are a lot of decisions that you can make and should make that are obvious for the user that you don't think about until you put yourself in a place of realizing that a lot of what you should do is obvious. So I'd say the combination of those three being very different, I think, contributes to the fact that product marketing is new and unpredictable, and there are a bunch of different ways you can solve a problem and have to go at it, and you should take in whatever you can from wherever you can. That's a very creative thinking up here. Yeah. Let's... maybe this for the second question, if you want to come up and ask that after. Unless somebody has a quick answer. Just repeat it one more time. What was the best product launch you've ever done with the least amount of money? I mean, I would probably say every product launch, because it doesn't really matter about what it is that you spend. Like we talked earlier about, at least for my team, paid media is the first thing I would cut from a launch, because if you're focused on spending money to be successful, then you're thinking about the launch the wrong way. Every single launch you should have should be successful without you having to spend a dime. Like spending money is only going to make good great. It's not going to make bad good. And for us, it's optimizing the website experience. And that, we are lucky now that we have a lot of unique visitors to our website, and giving our customers a good experience on a new product is the lowest cost, resource, and dollar-wise that we can do. The product comes before the marketing, guys. And it's like, you've got to get that right before you think about the marketing pieces. I would think about every launch as you having zero budget, and then it's a blessing if you get budget, if you get creative, if you get more resource. I think you have to think about it that way, or else you can develop bad habits. I don't think you'll be unsuccessful, but you can develop bad habits quickly. You really don't need money to see if your product resonates. You just need money to grow from there sometimes. Ultimately, you really want to spend more time on the things that you're going to see as this resonating message and the product. Two more questions. Whoever has the mic. I have the mic. Put your name in the question. My name is Deep, and it's a question around leadership. All of you are talking about how do you align your teams to be able to work together so that they're working towards the same strategy direction and that they're also aligned to what the customers are, anticipating what the customers are. How do you remove unconscious bias out of your team, and how do you encourage unconscious competencies to come out so that your team really is able to produce the best experience for both the customer and for the organization as a whole? Can you talk a little bit more about what you mean for unconscious bias in this context? As people are sitting down and launching their products, everyone has their biases inside their head as to what they think the experience would be, and they may not necessarily articulate that, and it's going to color. Like you were talking earlier, somebody goes off in one direction, and then you have to go herd the cats and get people back in the same direction. So you're not necessarily getting the best creativity out of the entire team because you've got people diverging in different directions and not going towards a common goal. So that's what I'm talking about. So is it really how to get people on the same page? More or less, if you want to. More than them knowing it, really getting them on the same page, because they may think they are and they're not. Yeah, they think they are, but they aren't really there to tell you what they're doing and where they can contribute to our conversation. So how do you make sure that your team's actually on the same page? Who wants to take it? I mean, there's a guiding principle and there's a set of activities that help you enforce that guiding principle. For us, we think of product marketers as CMOs of their product, and the job is to build a brand and the reputation as well as drive revenue, and everything is done from that true north of if you were the CMO of any one product company, what would you do? And that's the guiding principle. But the set of activities that I think are the most meaningful are bringing the voice of customer back in. You cannot do marketing unless you know about the market, and the only way you can know about the market is by talking to customers and bringing that information back in a systematic way and using that as your guiding post. I'd say, too, on that, you have to care about it, and you have to model it. You have to focus on and prioritize alignment as being something that's important to the team and the company, and you have to model fighting as hard as you can to get to alignment for your team, and they'll do the same. You shouldn't do it at the expense of the product being successful. You shouldn't negotiate down. But I think demonstrating to your teams that it's important for people to be aligned for the right reasons, not just for political reasons, is really important, and then showing them how you do that at your level has been at least successful for my team. I think how you structure your teams cross-functionally is really important here. So I'm a very big believer in that there needs to be a very direct alignment between your structure and product marketing and product management. So for every product marketing manager, we have a direct partner in product management, both on the product side and on the growth side here in San Francisco, and we need to get better at bringing sales into that mix, because your product team is going to be the closest to your customer, and they're going to be the voice of your existing customers. Your sales team, on the other hand, is going to be the voice of prospective customers. So being really close to both of those different groups and having direct alignment is going to ensure that your message resonates with both audiences and not just one or the other. Org design is really important, guys, especially for those of you who lead teams. Like, the Valley hates this. I think people in the Valley see it as corporate, but org design is really important. It's not enough to have the right pieces. You have to have the right pieces in the right order. And so I think setting up your teams the way that Matt was talking is really, really important, because you'll notice a night and day difference just based on staffing. You could literally 10x the performance of your team by reorganizing the way they support the actual business. And so that's so important, and people hate it, but it's so important. Yeah, reorg alignment, alignment around metrics, and then also that key point of, at the end of the day, we align around the customer. So if your product marketing team that actually talks to customers, that's better than if you're not. Last question. We should get somebody in the middle, because I know some of the folks in the middle. All right. Name and question. All right. So my name is Samit. I'm from Good Data. Coming back to the value proposition and so what question, when do you start doing that exercise where you're bringing all the team members, like you mentioned, in what phase of the product development? Is it after beta launch? Is it after MVP? When do you start the launch planning? When do you... Yeah. I think the best answer is to do it from the very, very beginning. I think the problem with that is it's more of a cultural thing, depending on how big your company is, depending on how the company's set up, depending on the culture of the actual company, sometimes that's not possible. But the best place to do it is at the beginning. Maybe you don't structure the exercise at the beginning, but the more you can be involved at the beginning, the better. And then I'd say you can let it slip as little as possible. So then if you can't do it at the very beginning, then do it before you go into experiment. If you can't get it right at experiment, do it before alpha, do it before beta, do it before launch. Do it as early as you can and do it as often as you can, because that'll make the difference. Like, you buy yourself so much more time, so much more equity. You save so much trouble by doing it early, far upstream, than having to deal with it downstream and their dependencies and their gaps that widen that you just don't have control of. I'd second that. It's an evolution. So marketing, and specifically product marketing, needs to be involved from the very beginning. If you don't do that, and you instead leave your product team to be and they hand over what they want to ship, I guarantee you there'll be a gap in the story that you want to tell. And it won't resonate with the people you want it to resonate with. And therefore your marketing team is going to tell a story that your product doesn't live up to. And that's the worst thing that you can do, because it'll underwhelm people, and you'll have so many opportunities to underwhelm people before they just give up. I think Apple Maps is a great example there. The story that was told at the conference that Apple runs, I'm blanking on the name, I don't know why, didn't match the actual product. The product didn't even work. And as a result, people didn't use it, and it's still not used widely today. Those gaps will widen. Where you see gaps, find gaps as early as you can and close them. Because the things that you let slide, you'll be surprised, especially once the marketplace gets a hold of the product, those things will widen, and you'll spend so much time and energy trying to close them. When that's time and energy, you should spend some place else. If there's anything at risk, if there's any sort of flag to be raised, I think it's our jobs to raise it, especially given the vantage point that we tend to have in our organizations. Close as many gaps as you can as early as possible, because I promise you what seems like a little leak will turn into a gaping hole, not even that far down the road, and you'll be stuck with having to patch that up. And product naming is the typical example of what breaks if you don't get involved early enough. You'll have a name that's embedded inside the product that when you name it something else from a marketing point of view, it's different on the website, different on the product. And then you name around it. Naming begets naming. We have a policy internally, best product name is no name. You have to earn a product name to get a name at Airbnb. Because if you name something wrong, then you end up naming other things around it, and then it just gets in this uncontrollable cycle, and you confuse, you're already confused users. Like, that's a perfect example of something that you want to get control of early. Wait, you don't like the AWS naming? Sometimes it's legal. Well, you know, and that's a good point to AWS aside. Sometimes you're under legal constraints. Sometimes you're under localization constraints. Understanding those things really early is super, super important. And we have a very rigid naming process that I think works well for us. Happy to share that with you guys who are in tough spots or trying to think through it. But naming is, like, really important to get right, because it's an expensive decision. It's an expensive thing to get wrong. Can we get a round of applause for Alan, Manav, and Matt? Thank you, guys.