Episode 55: How to avoid surprises for product launches

“We aren’t ready. We need to delay the launch".

These are the dreaded words for any product marketer. Maybe second to “yes we need all this by tomorrow”

Assuming you were brought in at the right time, a product marketer ends up taking ownership off all the project management for a product launch. A list of who needs to do what by when.

While a shared list of todo’s is helpful, it’s only the first step of what you should be doing. There is one key action and one key question that have saved me from a launch being derailed every time.

Key Action: The ‘w’ email

The weekly wins (aka ‘w’) is a recap of reflections, learnings, progress/accomplishments, and blockers/next steps.

The idea is to take every relevant project stakeholder and put them on a single chain where you recap the progress. You start with all the people you’re collaborating with on a weekly basis all the way up to the people who sign off on the decision/finances. Each person gets a weekly update on what you said you were going to do, what you did, and what you will do next.

Because all stakeholders are on a single thread, you can quickly suss out misalignment. Whenever you meet with a new person / someone else gets involved (even if it’s just for one step) you add them as a recipient.

How the weekly dub has saved my launch timeline:

• clarified the decision-maker: I wrote a note saying I was sending a proposal to a Dir. of Product. Turns out he actually was going to defer to the CTO. After talking to the CTO he was going off a totally different set of facts and therefore wanted a different timeline. One meeting later, we were aligned on my proposal.

• learned new dependencies: I wrote a note saying we would roll out a new app to all customers on xx date. I got an email from a team I never even knew existed saying that some customers had asked that we give them a heads up before something new launches and only then could we roll it out to their instances. That would have been 10% less instances and we would have no idea why.

Key Question: “Who else does this depend on to be successful?”

Asking some version of ‘do we have the right people in the room’ has also helped avoid surprises at the 11th hour.

Note: this advice is exclusively for individuals working at 100+ employee companies; at earlier stages who should be in the room is generally various obvious or extremely limited

When companies are growing to $50-$100MM in revenue (especially if they have multiple products) you quickly run into meeting bloat. From the technical side you have a product manager, a UX/design counterpart, 1-3 engineering folks and then the revenue side you have product marketing, content marketing, demand generation and channel specialists (ads, seo, social, etc) not to mention sales (pre and post sales + technical sales if you sell to a technical audience). If your product launch touches multiple products then you have even more individuals representing those teams.

While it’s important to keep all involved parties informed (e.g. W email), it simply doesn’t scale to have every individual part of every conversation. What most people do is some version of having specific ‘core working group’ and then ad hoc add others depending on the topic.

Note: whoever is driving the project should have a good idea of dependencies and often people who don’t will give you answers to this question that will lead you to go down rabbit holes. Important to have a trusted partner in the process to gut check when in doubt

When you don’t directly own a goal but are held accountable to a goal, your reputation becomes the a) timeliness and b) quality of the project.

If you can predictably deliver projects of varying complexity, you will get rewarded with more strategic projects. Your impact on the business will also scale as a result of the types of projects you are now working on. As you increase your value creation to the organization, your value capture (promotion, salary, title, resources, influence etc) also grows.

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✨ Special thank you to Gigi Marquez who suggested I start this newsletter 🙏