Product Marketing is BrokenMake It Right With Thematic Product Launches
Are you and your team of product marketers trying to coordinate resources for marketing to support an endless flow of new product launches with a lack of release dates, and an endless stream of product managers wanting to get tons of marketing attention with each new release? Is there some better ways to do it?
- Be sure to pay the greatest attention to all product releases.
- Create a compelling product story where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
- Make sure marketing is organized and logical so that they are able to be the best at their job to promote new products.
If you're struggling by a flurry of product roadmaps that are constantly active and endless "t-shirt" sizing for agile project estimations, slipping product release dates and fretting about failing to keep your product managers down, it may be time to look into specific product releases. Find out how to do it in this episode of Growth Stage!
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Transcript
David Vogelpohl () (00:04)
Hello everyone! Welcoming to this episode of the Growth Stage podcast by . I'm your host, David Vogelpohl. I'm a member of the digital products community with my work as . and I am awed by bringing the best of the community to community to you here on this episode of the Growth Stage podcast. This episode, we're going to interview someone who's uh, really important to me. He works with me at . He's going to be talking about how product marketing is a mess and the best way to fix it with thematic
announcements of new products We'd appreciate having you join us at Growth Stage Mr. Braden Steel. Braden, welcome.
Braden (00:39)
Thank you, I appreciate the intro. I'm excited to chat regarding product marketing this morning.
David Vogelpohl () (00:44)
Awesome. And I am so happy to work with you here at , Braden. It was like I experienced a moment of panic as I never pronounce your name loud. Then I thought, what if it might be a strange pronunciation that I didn't know about, or have forgotten over time or something, but welcome here. Yeah, of course. What Braden will talk about are his thoughts regarding the flaws in traditional marketing for products and we, with quarterly thematic product launches.
Braden (00:58)
Yeah. Yes, I'm grateful.
David Vogelpohl () (01:14)
for you to pay the highest attention to your product releases make sure you create a cohesive product story where the whole is more valuable than it's parts. It will also help marketing be more planful and careful so that you are able to deliver the highest quality work on the product launches you make. I attended Spryng organized by Wynter, W -Y -N The -T-E-R is what I think, and S -P –R -Y –N -G, but it's a conference.
The group was to discuss the many problems and issues in marketing. The issue of product marketing was brought up. Many felt they were overwhelmed in dealing with every single feature launch and new product release and attempting to create a big splash for all of it. The topic of thematic product releases was brought up by someone was in the group who had recommended it. We had taken it up some time back.
Therefore, I thought it would be interesting to talk about that topic this morning. That's it, Braden, are you willing to start the conversation?
Braden (02:18)
Yeah, let's do it. I'm looking forward to discussing the topic. it. it. it.
David Vogelpohl () (02:20)
Alright, good deal. I've been here for awhile however I do not have the right answer for the question. What was the first product you purchased online?
Braden (02:28)
Yeah, this is an awesome idea. I spent some time thinking about the subject. It was the junior high school years. eBay was at its peak. Then I got an PlayStation 2 with a bundle of games. The bundle included sports games and some additional games. Then I debated whether or not to buy it. But I did and I enjoyed it. I got a lot of enjoyment from that console and had a lot of amusement.
Other options were with my own cash. The first thing I earned was a didgeridoo was the first thing I bought with my own money online. So that was the other choice.
David Vogelpohl () (03:06)
All right, I love the way you distinguished your personal money from, I guess, your What was it similar to your parents' money? What was the method you used to fund your PSP?
Braden (03:14)
Yeah, I may have gained it from weeding my garden or mowing the lawn or whatever. However, the second one was my salary that I earned by myself.
David Vogelpohl () (03:24)
If you're mowing the lawn, it's your money, Braden. This is fine. It's true that I gave it away a little bit in the intro But, can you talk about with the audience what you do here at or about how you work here?
Braden (03:27)
Sure, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, sure. So I'm the senior Product Marketing manager here at . My primary responsibility is to manage go-to-market for all of our products, and also the various industries that we operate in. When a new product is launched that's when we're able to handle all of the messaging underneath the product as well as around it, and then also helping with things such as B2B, games and other sectors that we're eager to market to. is a retailer of record.
What that means is we take everything beginning with the purchase button and ending for a complete digital sales experience. We collaborate together with SaaS companies, gaming companies AI-based companies B2B companies, and other things like this. that. that. that.
David Vogelpohl () (04:18)
Excellent, excellent. As you go on to describe kind of what you did it was that you covered a bunch of different areas. The releases of products and feature release. You also touched on verticals. The B2B category was mentioned. SaaS as well as video gaming. Today's product marketers tends to favor the vertical position to promote a specific product. And I think that just increases the difficulty of product marketing.
But what do you think is broken about product marketing? What wasn't working for you in the conventional approach?
Braden (04:56)
Yeah, it's a really great question. It's true that releases of products hinge on a lot of things that go beyond the reach the control of a marketer's product. For instance, engineering issues, if there's customer commits required, if sales suddenly has significance that's"hey, we need to complete this product prior to when this other product gets released. And there's a lot of moving pieces around these product launches. And so working with product teams to get commit dates and understand,
When are these items going to be available for release? What is the meaning of release? Is it generally available or is it in a beta stage? It's time for the next question to be asked, when do we want to discuss it? What is it that we'd like to talk about? Do we have the ability to talk about this since we're currently testing it? There are a lot of concerns, a lot of uncertainty arises from this particular model of, just the way that engineers and products work. So I believe one of the main issues is
it's so difficult to know when it's hard to envision the finished product and to think about a release date and prepare for the product to be prepared for launch. So what occurs is that product managers like myself end up, just a week prior to launch, and a week before GA, and the product manager says,"Hey, this product is going to be ready. Then, you can do all of this work. It's like, hold for a second. There's other things I got to do. I know you've mentioned verticals. We've been talking about that.
You know, that consumes a significant amount of time, too. So the issue that, you know, I've needed to answer and have to consider is how can I do the launch of my product, as well as the other aspects of my work in the absence of control over that launch date?
David Vogelpohl () (06:40)
If you're using floating timelines and so the product's not ready. There's a glitch that's discovered in the last second. They somehow power through the release, and they get it done early. It's a challenge to coordinate the resources of other marketers, designers and website people and content specialists and other things like this. So this coordination with floating dates I'm hearing. Is there a different side? Just like you've...
It's true that I've have worked in the field of product marketing various capacities throughout many years. It seems that every time I speak with a person from product you'll hear them say, I'm making X and I need to make a big blast over the release. Are you feeling that your expectations regarding the level of effort for all these different product releases is sometimes too much? Is that part of what's wrong with the traditional approach to product marketing?
Braden (07:28)
Sure. It's true that those product managers, they're product managers for a reason. They own those products. They're super excited about this. They've oftentimes been working on these for, you know, up to several years, striving to get the items to be released. Naturally, they'll want as much support as they get from these products. When it's difficult to get someone from a product management team visit you and tell you that they're extremely excited by this feature.
I'm looking for a great deal of help, so here's a list of my thoughts I'm going the courage to say: we'll let the brakes go slightly for the A, B, or C reasons, but I'm not able to support you, or I can't because I'm just not in the mood or I'm just discouraging and hard to maintain a strong relationship sometimes with these product managers due to, you know, they may feel like they, you don't wanna help them or something, which does not happen. Obviously it's not your intention to assist everyone you can.
David Vogelpohl () (08:26)
Yeah. So it feels like then from your perspective in terms coordination of going-to market around the launch of a new product, you're dealing with the floating dates that are part of the standard model, and every other product manager and rightfully so, as you mentioned, given all the investment and time that they're spending on it and it's like we should make a huge splash over this. but with all of those demands, plus floating dates It feels as if you're not performing the best job you can. You're distributing your time between all of these demands and you're finding it hard to perform your best job is kind of the gist I'm receiving. Is that right?
Braden (09:01)
Yeah, yeah, that's right. It's an area where lots of things kind of collapse simultaneously. You have to figure out how to, accomplish all of them. Not only are there only 24 hours in a day, and not even, you know, working those full 24 hours as well as anxiety of having to think about how to keep all of these things in mind, take the time to learn these technical aspects and.
Condense them into something that is market facing. There's certainly a lot of challenges there.
David Vogelpohl () (09:35)
You mentioned this just a moment ago, when we talked about supporting the product managers and the relationship between PMMs and PMs, or PMs. If you're feeling the traditional form of product marketing, would you say it can have some tension between PMs and PMs?
Braden (09:58)
Yes, I believe it's true. I've experienced situations where yeah, it's certainly been a bit of a tension-filled conversation when you have to admit that I do not have the resources available to help your request. You know, in these situations you need to pay attention and understand what the PM is looking for, however it can cause tension. You know, it's all about good communication for situations in which in a position where you have to be there and be paying attention.
Being clear, being adept at logging your progress being clear, tracking what you're doing and, in this case using the thematic launch process to avoid a lot of that challenge that comes with traditional product.
David Vogelpohl () (10:41)
So you have the product managers requesting the most powerful megaphone they can get in their announcements. There's the other marketing departments asking, can we be more planful so we're able to work better? Also, you've discussed the move towards thematic releases of your products. So let's just start simply. What is a theme-based product release?
Braden (10:59)
Yeah, great question. A thematic release is a bundling of products underneath a umbrella of a theme. For example, B2B as the umbrella and all of those products are supporting that theme.
David Vogelpohl () (11:16)
When we speak of thematic releases, I'm guessing you're not doing one each week. It could be it's if you're extremely committed, however do you release these in a quarterly manner, or monthly?
Braden (11:30)
Good question. There is a spring release and summer release, as well as a autumn release. There aren't many people around for the holiday season at the end of the calendar year, therefore we don't do it during that time. But yeah, just three releases each year, with occasional releases occasionally in between.
David Vogelpohl () (11:45)
The product org intends to announce that every quarter, we'll have this thematic improvement to the product line and, if we can incorporate it into marketing for the product, and we'll try make it real through a large campaign. And I guess does it include the elements of each of the products and feature release within the topic?
Braden (12:08)
It is. It has those aspects. When we look over our customer roadmap and we say, OK, what's planning for this next year? This helps us classify the products into themes. Therefore, we don't have to go from a top -down approach or saying, we'll need to find a solution for theme A which products that are relevant to the theme of A? Instead, we will look at what products we plan to release in the coming year?
And then what's the subject matter that these products can fit under within those seasons.
David Vogelpohl () (12:44)
So you'll have this, you'll amplify it. There's a chance that you'll be missing in a quarter on the release date or an event, but there could be a lag, I guess, before you know that it's. Yeah. So you're decoupling the GA in the event you want to and the promotional.
Braden (12:51)
That's correct, yeah.
That's correct. Yeah. It's a good strategy. that's why we've implemented our GA activities that we do, because these features do need promotion when they become live. Therefore are part of the process that is thematic, have GA activities and then themes that we are able to deploy for each product.
David Vogelpohl () (13:18)
Every new product, if you can, sort of has the opportunity to be part of the themes released. Then you can have a sort of a small version like the GA release that is effective. This means you have an extra dip here, it sounds like.
Braden (13:31)
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. It's been extremely helpful in ensuring that our internal teams have access to GA. So customer success isn't suddenly getting feedback from clients. The customers are saying, Hey I'm using this awesome product. I'd like to learn more about the product. Our customer success team was never activated. This isn't the case because in GA we're releasing FAQ documents and value messages to ensure that the internal team members are aware of the situation.
Also, go-to market messages, as the one you cited, could be delayed sometimes. If you have the product launch in January but you aren't able to release a thematically-related product till April, your product may not receive enough marketing coverage at the start however it'll be able to tag along with that bigger push later in the year.
David Vogelpohl () (14:17)
If you thought it was extremely tactical, would you throw in an X, you know, a bigger release that was in between the other thematic releases in the event that you happen to know a like, GA timetable for that similar very strategic product you've been waiting on?
Braden (14:30)
Yeah, absolutely. Therefore, we do have some ad-hoc release that we do provide support for. we try to limit those to one or two if they are possible. Then we've created a system in conjunction along with your product team where we have a conversation and we say, okay, you have this amazing product. It's not in the category, but it's important to have A and B. We plan on that together as a team to make sure everyone's understanding what we're going to do. Then, as you can imagine it gets its own attention.
However, the advantage is we don't have 15 products all at once, crashing to the floor at the close of quarter, which is usually the case in the case of products that are delivering all at once.
David Vogelpohl () (15:08)
Thank you.
One of my favorite business jokes is the, not a joke, but an observation. The idea is that the executive Q3 is the time to start Q3 while the engineering team Q3 means the end of Q3. This suggests that the teams are all sort of you know, of course getting in at the end to hit those quarterly OKRs. Yeah. Okay. I've got you.
Braden (15:33)
Absolutely right.
David Vogelpohl () (15:38)
There's this theme due out the next quarter, or maybe in the future but there's a significant announcement of a feature or product that doesn't fit in the themes. Is this just one of those special ones you've been discussing you could see within the time between the release of the thematic theme?
Braden (15:55)
Yes, precisely as you would expect. So I'll give you an example from what we're doing. We did a payments release early this year. and so we had a lot of cool payments features. One payment that slipped engineering just couldn't be able to get it right by when the launch occurred took place. It was Google Pay and everyone knows Google Pay. Then we took a seat and studied it, and thought, how could we make sure that we are promoting Google Pay? It's not really a B2B function. And so, yeah we released a version of the feature for Google Pay.
It was created with some documents FAQ documents a blog post or promoted on social things like that.
David Vogelpohl () (16:29)
So what happens then when you've got this type of anchor product release with a theme release that isn't as good? I mean, it sounded like you still had some the anchor product it was in the thematic release that Apple Pay slipped from or Google Pay slipped from. So what can you do? You can wait for this thematic release until anchor products are in place? What else can you do?
Braden (16:54)
Yeah, I mean, it depends. Oftentimes it can be a wait and see. It's happened. It's true, I was having conversations with the product team today that told me, hey, B2B could be something to look and see at some point later in the year. However, the advantage of a theme-driven launch is that A, it's not a hard deadline. We're setting that deadline for us. If we have to delay it a little bit to better support the engineering deadlines and product We can.
We can also alter the themes at any moment. If a major new feature is no longer launched, maybe we could take a couple of additional features in order to make an assortment that matches the theme in a different manner. This is why there's some flexibility that exists within this system that allows the possibility of changes throughout the year.
David Vogelpohl () (17:47)
That's a good idea. When I consider the typical product marketing campaign for the release of a feature, it's similar to an announcement blog post Perhaps a press announcement or a social media post or email our clients, send our customers emails, this kind of things. How is thematic release different in terms of structure?
Braden (18:07)
Yes, I mentioned it a little in the past. Many of these things still happen. At the moment of the theme these things continue taking place, however we also have what we refer to as GA actions. This means that we have a variety of like internal enablement, within-app notifications. When you allow access to a piece of software or technology We're providing that technology to our customers as well as our own internal teams. And we decouple that from the this theme release.
At the moment, instead of paying attention to a large portion of things that are more similar to features, like, "hey it's available, you know, in bits and pieces, we can tell an even more compelling story about the value broadly from all these features together. And so that's a big contrast that I've noticed it's not possible to do in the case of releasing something in pieces over the course of a quarter or a year.
David Vogelpohl () (19:04)
Yeah. It also is like you are able to improve the quality of your story. Cause I, I like the perfect example for me is the enhancements to quality of life which are really difficult for engineers, yet don't always make the product more marketable. Because, do isn't it? A person who is outside isn't aware that there is a problem. It's frequently difficult as Phil is an employee of a product marketing company, to announce"Hey, y'all! we, we fixed this. when in reality it was really valuable for the business and for the customers.
Braden (19:08)
Yeah.
David Vogelpohl () (19:34)
And so it feels that thematic releases don't just allow you to kind of broadcast your megaphone but also kind of make the case for some additional high-quality improvements to life.
Braden (19:43)
Yes, absolutely, you get to, you know many features benefit from this that would otherwise not be able to benefit from marketing or even the benefit of a short announcement from Pendo. Instead, they live in a website that's a part of these bigger features that, well, do share that megaphone. share that megaphone. Additionally, there's lots of value in the small improvements, like quality of life improvements.
David Vogelpohl () (20:08)
So, if you take this approach, how many quarters are in?
Braden (20:13)
This is our third, next month we'll have our third thematic launch this month, which will be in July.
David Vogelpohl () (20:20)
So, three quarters later, can you agree that it's enhanced your ability to manage marketing resources as well as support new product launches, or is it still too early to say?
Braden (20:33)
I would say that it's definitely improved, you know, from my side. What I see is not only can I more effectively support the team behind the product, but help them out, but also coordinate with the other departments of marketing particularly demand generation. You know, they are able to use a large amount of lead time now that they didn't have before about this product.
And we could slot them into the campaigns that were previously difficult to accomplish. That could be the greatest benefit. The other advantage is that it allows time for us to work on the other ways to expand vertically such as video games, that we might not have had as much time to do or not sufficient manpower for pushing those verticals forward.
David Vogelpohl () (21:28)
The video game section at least a few months, and 's had video game customers for a good long while, almost since the start of the business. It was mentioned that the business is being a bit more entangled in the segment. Do you think that segmentation might play an important role in thematic releases, or do you think that it's more around the set of features?
Braden (21:51)
Segments definitely play a big role. As I said, our next launch is about B2B. This is a market that we want to sell into and that we're enthusiastic about expanding into. It's possible to imagine a future where we're doing that with video games too. We've mentioned that the improvement we've made to our Apple Pay and implemented Google Pay. This is why expanding the vertical theme not only opens up that capability, you know, for...
You get the advantages of the theme-driven launch, however you also get the benefit of coupling things like thought leadership into the thematic launch. This is something you'd be unable to integrate into a conventional launch. And so you can benefit from a greater, perhaps a bigger campaign push and more value out of these launches for your overall organization.
David Vogelpohl () (22:44)
Excellent. Well, this has been a lot of fun, Braden. I really appreciate you coming to the radio and speaking about this. It was such an interesting conversation in Spryng right here in Austin. It was my thought to bring this discussion on the show, but it was a blast. Thank you for coming on.
Braden (23:01)
Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you having me. It was super fun.
David Vogelpohl () (23:04)
Awesome. Also, if you'd like find out more information details about what Braden is working on, including maybe his next theme-based release, please visit .com. We thank you all for being part of this episode of Growth Stage. I've been your host, David Vogelpohl. I love supporting the community of digital products as part of the role I play at . and I am awed by the opportunity to present what's best from this community to you on Growth Stage. Thank you everyone.
