Jason Oakley
Let's face it, the pace of product development has gone crazy. Every product marketer that entered the workforce 5 years ago and experienced the typical release cycle then, is now holding on for dear life.
AI has made it possible for product and engineering teams to literally ship new features DAILY, if not certainly weekly.
There was a recent study done by Appcues that found only 7% of product marketers feel like they are currently able to keep up with the pace of product launches in their company. SEVEN PERCENT! That means 93% can’t keep up!
So what do you do when release schedules dramatically change like this?
The answer is NOT using AI to run more launches and churn out more content. That leads to checkbox marketing, creating more noise in the market, and overwhelming your teams with new things they need to learn.
And you can’t ask product and engineering to slow down. That never works. The pace of product development has changed dramatically and it's only going to get faster. We need to get used to that.
You may think the answer is that you need a new approach. And that’s partly true. But it also means that some of the fundamental principles of product launches matter more now than ever.
Here are 7 tips that will help you adapt to the new state of product launches.
Cut the fat from your launches
Where you used to have the luxury of a bloated bill of materials, dozens of internal meetings, and multiple channels that brought little return other than making people feel good - you now have war-time conditions where everything needs to be rationed.
In the past it was easier to say "Mark likes videos so let’s just do them." Now, every one of those little additions quickly piles up to create launches that are unmanageable.
So cut the fat. Cut any channel that doesn't help you meet your goals. Cut every piece of content that rarely gets used. Cut the unnecessary meetings. Cut the internal documents that sit on a shelf. Combine things, reduce things, and focus ruthlessly on the stuff that actually moves the needle.
Move to a two-tier launch system
The same cutting the fat analogy can be applied to your launch tiers as well. Ask yourself, "could two tiers work for us?"
Small launches, and large ones.
Small Launches (S)
Think of small launches like an upgraded version of a changelog.
You can have a standard playbook for these, and the goal of each one is typically customer awareness and adoption. Making sure that, for the people who want to use this, have been looking for it, or need to support people using it, that they have the information they need to do that effectively.
And to do this, you really don't need a lot.
Clear documentation, probably with a screen-share demo of some kind. One or two channels, like email or an in-app message. Simple messaging to let people know why it matters. And an FAQ doc for internal teams.
You can deliver on it quickly, likely by yourself without needing to pull in a team. Even better if you can enable your PMs to help cover some of this for you.
And to really bring this together into a larger body of work, create a launch center where customers can see everything you’ve shipped. Something you can keep directing them back to as the source of truth for everything new in your product.
A great example of this in practice is PagerDuty’s Product Drops page.
Large Launches (L)
And then there are large launches. The ones that have goals related to market awareness, revenue, win-rates, and getting on the news. These are market facing in addition to customer facing. They are bigger, and you can't do them all the time.
But here's the thing, there can be overlap between the big and the small, and this is the big part that people miss.
You don't have to slow down your product team or try to convince people to stop shipping. You have a system in place to communicate incremental product changes to customers and internal teams that can run smoothly without a ton of effort.
And the beauty of that is that you don't have to obsess over hitting the release timeline for large launches. The essentials will go out with the product, which gives you the freedom and time to see what needs more. What features are worth a push, can drive revenue, can generate buzz in the market. You also have the perspective to bundle the stuff that makes sense and make powerful stories from otherwise simple features.
So if you have a 4-tier launch framework that is starting to feel overwhelming, toss it out. Move to a two tier system.
Get clear on your goals
Too many launches run on vibes, without a real objective.
Are you trying to drive revenue? Make your investors happy? Increase product adoption? Make customers stickier? Move deals that have stalled in the funnel? Stop losing to a specific competitor over a missing capability? These are all totally valid reasons for a feature launch, but not all of them can be accomplished at once. Not effectively anyways.
So get clear on your launch goals. They will have a major impact on the channels you use, content you create, teams you enable, and the impact you have.
Know what launch channels work
Before you start planning for a launch (especially large ones) ask yourself, “what channels do we actually have at our disposal?”
Which ones do we own, which do we rent, and which ones can we go out and pay for.
One massive area of waste I see with launches, is that we disproportionally spend time on channels that have very little impact. For example, we spend all kinds of time creating graphics and copy for LinkedIn, then ask everyone in our company to post on launch day, when all it leads to is a small bit of website traffic and an ego boost for our CEO.
Meanwhile, we have an email list of 2000 people that we send one blast to and call it a day!
One valuable thing you can do right now is create your own tracker for launch channels. Use it to track your stats for each channel:
- Potential reach (followers, subscribers, audience size, etc.)
- Typical performance (traffic, CTRs, conversion rates - benchmarks or estimates based on past launches)
Now, when you start planning for a launch you can begin with establishing your goals, and then jump into your channel tracker to determine which channels will help you accomplish that and what you can realistically expect. If email is your most valuable and reliable channel, how many emails will you need to send to hit your goal? How much could you realistically expect from LinkedIn? And how much will you need to supplement those channels with paid ads in order to hit your revenue goal?
Then from that, you can start to plan the content that is required for those channels, to meet those goals.
Make enablement a priority
We spend a lot of time obsessing over content, for channels that perform poorly, and neglect one of our most reliable channels: customer-facing reps. The men and women on the front lines, talking to your buyers and customers every day.
But enablement is often an afterthought for a launch. We do the minimum to make sure reps know about it, but not enough to help them "sell" it.
For large launches, if you determine that one of your most important channels is your SDR team, you need to spend time enabling them. And it doesn’t need to be a pile of stuff either. A couple of slides, the talk track they need, a short demo video or interactive demo they can share, and an FAQ to answer their questions.
You determine what's needed. If a launch doesn't require a 60-minute enablement session, don't have it. If something async in Slack works just fine, go with that.
The main goal is making sure that they are prepared to help meet your launch goals.
And honestly, being available after the launch to quickly answer questions and give feedback once they actually start pitching it in the real world, is often more important than anything you do pre-launch.
Launch day is only the beginning
The last thing to remember about launches, is that launch day is only one milestone. Unfortunately, most companies spend all of their time focusing on launch day, and once it’s over, move on to the next shiny thing.
What you end up with months later is a valuable product or feature being totally unknown by customers and the market. You hear it all the time in customer check-ins where a CSM mentions a new feature and customers say "What? I had no idea that existed!" That's a sign of failed product marketing.
If you haven't heard the phrase "rolling thunder" it's something you'll want to add to your vocabulary. It’s when you spread a launch across a series of sequenced announcements over several weeks or months. Some can be big, others small, but instead of one big moment, each rumble (a feature drop, customer story, integration, webinar, analyst mention, pricing update) builds on the last. The market keeps hearing from you rather than spiking once and going quiet.
I'm also going to make an assumption here.
You are not ChatGPT, SpaceX, or Meta. You are not a massive consumer company where millions of people are waiting for your next drop. Where everything you announce instantly goes viral and gets used by millions of people. You are not that. And even those massive companies launch features all the time that are completely forgotten about weeks later.
Your company is a small startup with a comparably simple product, targeting other businesses who are not chomping at the bit for your next release. Your company can likely grow and hit your revenue goals with a few properly executed launches per year.
Think about that. What do you think is better, one new impressive and valuable product or feature repeatedly marketed to customers and the market 10 times over three months, or 10 individual new features marketed once to the same audience over 3 months.
It's the same amount of opportunities to get in front of your buyer and grab their attention, but the first strategy makes sure that the most important launch lands. And that's the key argument for prioritizing fewer launches and focusing on rolling thunder, not lightning strikes.
Measure, learn, adapt, repeat
And when it's all said and done, especially after your large launches, you need to start doing a post-mortem. It doesn't need to be complicated or take up a lot of time, but ask yourself these three questions:
- What should we start doing in future launches?
- What should we stop doing in future launches?
- What should we continue doing in future launches?
And on top of that, measure your performance so you can create benchmarks. Did you meet your goals, how did each channel perform? This is what makes every future launch easier to plan. You can have more confidence around each channel and what certain tactics can be expected to realistically bring in. And of course, doing all of this makes it possible to measure product marketing's impact. On revenue. On adoption. On retention.
Things change, but a lot stays the same
Sure, product development is changing and product launches need to adapt in order to keep up, but many of the key principles that mattered before matter just as much, if not more now.
Clear goals, prioritization, and giving the launches that matter the attention they need to succeed.
If you can nail those things, you'll turn launches into something that can reliably make an impact instead of making you hate your job.