Product Marketing is Broken- Fix It With Thematic Product Launches
Do you have a product marketing department trying to coordinate resources for marketing in order to handle an unending stream of product launches, with vague release dates as well as a constant stream of product managers insisting on a lot of marketing attention for each launch? Is there a better way?
- Be sure to pay the greatest attention to all product releases.
- Tell an overarching product story in which the entire is greater than the sum of its parts.
- Make sure marketing is organized and logical so that they are able to provide their best work in product launches.
If you're dragging yourself to death with over-active product roadmaps and endless "t-shirt" sizing for agile project estimations or slipping dates for release of your product, or being worried that you're letting your management team down, it might be time to think about specific product releases. Learn how in this segment of Growth Stage!
|
Audio Interview Full Audio
Listen online, or look for it on other podcast platforms.
Audio Podcast Interview Full Video
Transcript
David Vogelpohl () (00:04)
Hello everyone! Welcoming to The Growth Stage podcast by . I'm your host, David Vogelpohl. I'm a member of the digital products community by working at . And I love bringing the best of the community to community to you here on the Growth Stage podcast. This episode, we're going to be interviewing one person who's really unique to me. We work together at . He's going to be talking about the way that product marketing has been broken and the best way to improve it by using thematic
announcements of new products, and I'd like to welcome to Growth Stage Mr. Braden Steel. Braden, welcome.
Braden (00:39)
Thank you for your time, I appreciated the intro. I'm excited to chat about product marketing today.
David Vogelpohl () (00:44)
Awesome. And I am so happy to work together here at Braden. It was like I experienced a moment of panic as I never use your last name loud. It's like, what if it is a weird pronunciation that I didn't know about, or lost over the years, or something, but welcome to the forum. Yeah, of course. What Braden will be discussing are his opinions on what is wrong with traditional product marketing and how the methods we employ here, are using quarterly thematic product launches.
Braden (00:58)
Yeah. Yeah, thank you.
David Vogelpohl () (01:14)
for you to pay the highest focus to the new releases of your products make sure you create a cohesive product story that will be more important than the sum of its parts, and assist marketing to be more organized and thoughtful so you can deliver the highest quality work on the product launches you make. I attended Spryng hosted by Wynter, W -Y -N -T -E -R, I believe, and also S.P. -R. -Y.N. G, however it's not a conference.
We were at a roundtable discussing the various challenges and marketing and the issue of product marketing was brought up. People were complaining that they were a bit grumpy, you know dealing with each and every feature release and new product release and attempting to create an impact for everything. And the topic of theme-based product launches was brought up by someone was in the group who had recommended it. We had taken it up the time of some quarters ago.
So I decided it would be interesting to discuss the topic in this blog today. That's it, Braden, are you eager to get started?
Braden (02:18)
Yeah, let's do it. I'm excited to talk about it. it. it. it.
David Vogelpohl () (02:20)
Alright, good deal. I've been on here for a while and I still don't have the right answer for this question. What was the first thing you purchased online?
Braden (02:28)
It's an awesome question. I thought for a while about it. This was during the junior high school years. eBay was in its heyday. And I bought a PlayStation 2 with a bundle of games. There were sporting games, as well as other stuff. Then I debated whether or not I should purchase it. But I did and I enjoyed it. I got a lot of value from the console and had a lot of fun.
Another option is to use the money that I have made was to purchase a dogeridoo. It was the first item I bought with my own cash online. That's the third choice.
David Vogelpohl () (03:06)
All right, I love the way you distinguished between the money you own and, I guess, your how was it similar to your parents' money? How did you fund the PSP?
Braden (03:14)
Yeah, I may have earned it through weeding the yard or trimming the lawn or whatever. However, the second one was my real job money which I made through my own efforts.
David Vogelpohl () (03:24)
So, if you're trimming the lawn, you're making cash, Braden. This is fine. Well, I kind of let it slip a during the introduction however, could you please share your thoughts with viewers about what you do here at or what does and what you do here?
Braden (03:27)
Sure, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, sure. So I'm the Director of Product Marketing, Senior at . My job is everything go-to-market across all our products as well as the industry that we operate in. When a new product is launched, you know, all of the messaging underneath the product as well as around the product, as well as helping with things such as video games or B2B or other fields that we're eager to market to. is a retailer of record.
What that means is that we incorporate everything starting from the buy button onwards in a digital product sale experience. We partner in partnership with SaaS businesses, gaming companies AI-based companies B2B, etc. the. that. that. that.
David Vogelpohl () (04:18)
Excellent, excellent. When you talk about kind of what you did, you touched on various areas. There was a touch on new product launches and feature release. You also touched on verticals. You also mentioned B2B SaaS as well as video gaming. The modern marketer is often embracing these vertical positions to promote a specific product. And I think that just even further amplifies the complexity of product marketing.
So, what could be broken in the marketing of products? What wasn't working for you with the traditional model?
Braden (04:56)
Yeah, it's a really great topic. You know, product releases hinge on a lot of variables that are out the control of a marketer's product. Engineering, for instance and customer commitments that need to happen or sales have significance that's"hey, we need to complete this product prior to when it's released. And there's a lot of moving parts around these launch. And so working with teams from the product team to set the commit dates as well as to comprehend,
when are these products going be released? What exactly does "release" mean? Does it mean that it is generally accessible or is it currently in an early stage of testing? It's time for the next question to be asked, when do we want to talk about the software? What is it that we'd like to talk about? Can we even speak about it since we're trying to test it? There are a lot of concerns and a lot of unease is created by this model of, you know how engineering and product works. Therefore, I think that the most important thing that's broken is that
it's so difficult to know when it's difficult to visualize the final product and plan around a release date and plan for a product to be prepared to launch. What can happen is that product marketing professionals such as myself get just a week before launch, a week before GA, the product manager saying,"Hey, this product is going to be ready. And then, get to complete this task. Then it's like, hold the faith. I got other stuff I got to do. It's true that you've talked about verticals. There's been a lot of discussion about verticals.
It consumes a significant amount of your time. The question, you know, I've had to solve and thought about is, how do I complete the product launch work as well as the other aspects of my job even though I don't have any control over that launch date?
David Vogelpohl () (06:40)
If you're using floating timelines. The software isn't ready. They discover a bug in the last second. They somehow power through the release and get it done early. They're trying to coordinate their the resources of other marketers as well as designers and webmasters as well as content people and stuff similar to that. So this orchestration with these floating dates I'm hearing there. Is there a different aspect? As I've...
you know, you know, I've worked in marketing for products and at various times over time. I'm thinking, I feel as if every time I speak to someone from the product department you'll hear them say, I'm making X and we need to make a big blast about the release. do you feel like your expectations regarding the level of effort for all these new product releases can sometimes be overwhelming? Do you think that's part of what's wrong with the traditional approach to product marketing?
Braden (07:28)
Yeah, for sure. It's true that these product managers, they're product managers because of a reason. They are the owners of those products. They're thrilled about this. They've oftentimes been working on these products for understand, all the way to several years that they've been striving to get the products to release. Naturally, they're going to want to get as much help as they can get for these items. When it's very challenging to have someone from a product management team visit you and say, I'm extremely excited by this new feature.
I'd like a lot of support, here's all of my thoughts I'm going to say, well, we'll let the brakes go a little bit for A, B, or C, and I just can't support you, or I can't do it because, well, I'm just not in the mood, or, and that's discouraging and hard to maintain relationships with the product managers since, you know, they may feel like they, you don't wanna help their cause, or do something else. This isn't the case, obviously it's not your intention to assist all the people you can.
David Vogelpohl () (08:26)
Yeah. It's like that from your point of view of coordinating a go -to -market around a product launch You're dealing with floating dates that are part of the standard model, and every other product director, and rightly so, as you mentioned, given the time and money that they're spending on it and it's like lets make an announcement about this. but with all of those requirements, and floating dates you feel like you're doing less than your best work. It's like, you're spreading yourself amongst all these things which makes it difficult to perform your best job is what I'm experiencing. Do you think that's reasonable?
Braden (09:01)
Yeah, yeah, that's right. You end up at a place where a lot of things kind of collapse in a single moment. Then you must determine how to achieve each of them. There are only 24 hours in one day, let alone the pressure of working for 24 hours and also pressure of having to think about, keep all of those issues in your mind. Take these highly technical things and.
make them more compact into an object that's commercially relevant. So yeah, there's plenty of issues to be faced.
David Vogelpohl () (09:35)
So you alluded to this in the past when you discussed the importance of supporting product managers as well as the relation with PMMs as well if you will. Do you think that the traditional form of product marketing, can it be said that it has some friction with PMMs and PMs?
Braden (09:58)
Yes, I believe that's the case. I've experienced situations where sure, it's been a bit of a tense conversation to straight up declare that I don't have the resources available to help the way you want to go. You know, in these situations, you want to listen and attempt to figure out what the PM is looking at, but it does create tension. It's true that it's all about good communication in situations where you're, you know, you must be present and be listening.
Being clear, being adept at logging your progress as well as, in the case of using the process of thematic launches in order to eliminate some problems that are associated with traditional product.
David Vogelpohl () (10:41)
Now you've got the product managers requesting the largest possible megaphone for their releases. You have the rest of marketing saying, can we become more organized so that we are able to do a better job? Also, you've talked about the shift towards thematic releases of your products. Therefore let's get started with a simple question. What is a thematic product release?
Braden (10:59)
Yeah, great question. A thematic release is a bundle of items under an subject. For example, B2B as the umbrella and the other products are supporting that theme.
David Vogelpohl () (11:16)
So when we talk about thematic releases, I'm guessing there's not a single release each week. Maybe, I guess it's if you're extremely determined do you release these on a quarterly basis, monthly?
Braden (11:30)
Good question. There is a spring release or summer and fall release. The public isn't in the mood during the holidays at the close of the calendar year, therefore we don't release it in that period. But yeah, just three times a year with ad hoc releases every so often in between.
David Vogelpohl () (11:45)
This is because the product organization is aiming to say like every quarter, we'll have this thematic improvement to this particular product or line of products and we're going to incorporate it into product marketing, we're going introduce it through a large campaign. Does it include the elements of each of the products and feature new releases that are related to the subject?
Braden (12:08)
It does. It includes those elements. We look at our customer map and ask, Okay, what's planned for the year? It helps us organize those products within themes. We aren't always going from a top -down approach and saying, we need to find a solution for theme A What are the items that fit under theme A? Instead, we consider what are the suite of products we plan to release this year?
And then what's the subject matter that these items can be categorized under in those seasons.
David Vogelpohl () (12:44)
You'll be able to see this and the only thing you can do is amplify the effect. There's a chance that you'll be missing by a quarter, maybe at the time of release or something, but there might be a delay, I think, prior to you knowing you've got it. Yeah. So you're decoupling the GA in the event you want to in relation to the promotion.
Braden (12:51)
That's correct, yeah.
That's correct. Yeah. And that's a strategy, as we've already deployed our GA actions that we carry out, because these features do need promotion when they are launched. Therefore are part of the thematic process, we can have GA actions and thematic actions that we could apply to each of our products.
David Vogelpohl () (13:18)
Every launch, if it can, sort of has the opportunity to be part of the themes released. Then you can have a sort of a smaller version for such a thing as the GA release that is effective. So you kind of get a double dip there It sounds like.
Braden (13:31)
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And it's been really helpful in ensuring that the internal teams of our company are able to access GA. So customer success isn't suddenly being able to get feedback from clients. It's like Hey I'm using this amazing product. I want to know more about it. The customer success team was never activated. This isn't the case because at GA we're releasing FAQ documents as well as value-based messages in order to ensure our employees know what's happening.
And then the go -to -market messaging, like you mentioned, may be a bit sluggish on occasion. If you've got the product release in January and you do not have a theme-based release in April, the product won't receive as much marketing support at the start however it'll be able to tag along with that bigger push later throughout the year.
David Vogelpohl () (14:17)
If you were super tactical, would you to add an X you know, a bigger release that was in between the other thematic releases if you just happen to know a you know, GA dates for a similar extremely strategic item you've been in the process of waiting for?
Braden (14:30)
Yeah, absolutely. So we have ad hoc releases as well that we are able to provide support for. We attempt to limit them to one or two if we can. Then we've created a system in conjunction along with your product team where we have an exchange and say, okay, you know, there's this really amazing product. It doesn't fit under the concept, however it's really important for reason A or B. So we've planned for that as a team to make sure everyone's understanding what we're planning to accomplish. Then, as you can imagine it gets its own attention.
However, the advantage is you don't need to worry about 15 different products that suddenly crash at the end of quarter, which is, you know, oftentimes when product is delivering every single thing at once.
David Vogelpohl () (15:08)
Thank you.
One of my favorite business quips is not a joke, but an observation. The idea is that, the executives Q3 means the beginning of Q3 while engineering teams Q3 is the time to end Q3. This suggests that they're all kind of, you know, of course getting in at the end to hit the quarterly OKRs. Yeah. Okay. I've got it.
Braden (15:33)
Yes, precisely.
David Vogelpohl () (15:38)
You have a theme due out this quarter or next but there's a significant announcement of a feature or product which doesn't match with the overall theme. Is this just one of those rare releases you've been discussing you could see during the theme release?
Braden (15:55)
It's true. So I'll give you an example of the work we're currently doing. The release of payments was early this year. This meant we could offer a variety of interesting payment options. One of those payments that didn't make it into the engineering could not get to it by the time that the theme launch occurred was Google Pay and everyone knows Google Pay. Then we took a seat to look at the feature and said, how can we help promote Google Pay? The feature isn't really a business-to-business service. And so, yeah we released a tiny release to Google Pay.
It was created with some documents FAQs, a blog post or promoted via social media such as that.
David Vogelpohl () (16:29)
What happens when you've got this type of product that anchors as well as a thematic release which falls? I mean, it sounded as if you had an anchor product that was the case within the thematic release Apple Pay slipped from or Google Pay slipped from. But what do you do? Wait to release the thematic release till the anchor products are included? What else can you do?
Braden (16:54)
Yeah, I mean, it depends. It's usually waiting and seeing. It's happened. You know, I was having conversations with the product team today that said, Hey, B2B could be something to waiting and seeing launch coming at some point later in the year. However, the advantage of a Thematic Launch is that it's not a deadline. We're setting that deadline for ourselves. And so if we need delay that deadline slightly so that we can better meet the product and engineering's deadlines, we can.
Or we could alter those themes at any point. If a major element suddenly doesn't get launched, maybe we could take a couple of additional features in order to make the perfect bundle to fit a theme in a different way. This is why there's some the flexibility in this system that allows the possibility of changes throughout the year.
David Vogelpohl () (17:47)
That's a good idea. When I consider an old-fashioned promotional campaign of a feature release is like an announcement blog post or perhaps a press release and some coverage on social media and emailing our customers. email our prospects, that sort of item. What is the difference between thematic releases in its structure?
Braden (18:07)
It's true, I've mentioned this before. A lot of those things continue to happen. In the current thematic time they are taking place, however we also have what we'll call GA tasks. This means that we have a variety of like internal enablement, in -app notifications. When you allow access to a tech or piece of software and we're giving them access and those-- our internal teams. And we decouple that from the this theme release.
And then at the thematic moment, instead of being focused on all of the more like features, like, "hey, this feature is accessible, at bits and pieces and bits, we're able to tell the of the overall value from all these features together. That's an important distinction which isn't possible with a release, like, in a piecemeal fashion over the course of a quarter or a year.
David Vogelpohl () (19:04)
Yeah. This is a good thing, because it is like you are able to enhance the narrative. Because I think the perfect example for me is this enhancements to quality of life which have been extremely difficult to engineering, but don't necessarily make the product more marketable. It's because, isn't it? Someone who's on the outside isn't aware that there was a problem or something. So, it's often hard as Phil or an employee of a product marketing company, to announce, Hey y 'all, we, we fixed this. when in reality it proved to be extremely valuable both for the business as well as the customers.
Braden (19:08)
Yeah.
David Vogelpohl () (19:34)
So it's felt like thematic releases not only give you the ability to broadcast your megaphone but also kind of elevate the story of some other quality of life improvements.
Braden (19:43)
Absolutely, yeah, you are able to access many functions benefit from this, which otherwise wouldn't get marketing activities or, you know, a short announcement from Pendo. Instead, they're in a website that's a part of these bigger features that, yeah, they get to be able to make use of that megaphone. There's plenty of value in the small things, such as enhancements to quality of life.
David Vogelpohl () (20:08)
Okay, so has this strategy worked? How many quarters in are you?
Braden (20:13)
This is our third, next month we'll have our third launch of thematic themes this year during July.
David Vogelpohl () (20:20)
Okay, so three quarters into the program, do you agree that it's improved your ability to manage marketing resources as well as support new the launch of new products, or is it still too early to say?
Braden (20:33)
It's certain that it has improved on my part. What I've noticed is not just can I better support, the entire product team and not only support them as well, but also collaborate with other marketing departments, specifically demand gen. You know, they have a lot of lead time now that they did not have prior to this product.
and we can slot things in campaigns we used to struggle to accomplish. This is the most significant gain. But then the other benefit is that it allows time to concentrate on vertical expansion in other areas, like into video games which we may not have had as much time to do or not enough manpower to push these verticals forward.
David Vogelpohl () (21:28)
So you mentioned the video game segment for some time as well. The company has had video game customers for quite a while nearly since the beginning of the business. You talked about the company having a tendency to lean into the video game segment. Are you of the opinion that segments might play an important role in thematic releases, or do you think that this is more akin to set of features?
Braden (21:51)
Yeah, segments absolutely play a big role. You know, I mentioned that our upcoming launch will be around B2B, a vertical that we'd like to market into, that we're excited to expand into. There's a possibility in which we're doing it with video games too. We've mentioned that how we've upgraded our Apple Pay and implemented Google Pay. This is why expanding, having these vertical themes not only opens up that ability, you know, for...
You get the advantages of the thematic launch. However, it also offers the advantage by incorporating aspects like thought leadership into the thematic launch. This is something you'd struggle to combine with traditional product release. This means you get a bigger, potentially a bigger campaign push and more value out of these launches for your larger organisation.
David Vogelpohl () (22:44)
Excellent. It's been really interesting, Braden. I really appreciate you coming to talk on air about this. This was an amazing conversation during Spryng here in Austin. It was my thought to kind of bring it to the show. that was awesome. Thank you for coming on.
Braden (23:01)
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for inviting me. It was super fun.
David Vogelpohl () (23:04)
Awesome. And if you'd like to learn more details about the things Braden is working on as well as his upcoming theme-based release, please visit .com. Thanks everyone for joining this episode of Growth Stage. I'm your host, David Vogelpohl. I am a huge fan of the online product community in my job as . It is my pleasure to bring all the great things from the community to you on the Growth Stage. Thanks everybody.
