Product Marketing Is Broken -- Fix It With Thematic Product Launches -
Are you and your team of product marketers trying to coordinate resources for marketing to manage an interminable number of launches with vague release dates as well as a constant stream of product managers insisting on a lot of attention from marketing departments for every launch? Would there be a better way?
- Give the best best attention to all product releases.
- Tell an overarching product story where the whole is worth more than its parts.
- Help marketing be planful and thoughtful so they can provide their best work to promote new products.
If you're struggling with a constant stream of product roadmaps and the endless "t-shirt" sizes to estimate agile project estimates and slipping release dates for your products or worrying about letting your product managers down, it could be time to consider themes for your product launches. Discover how this can be done on this episode of Growth Stage!
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Transcript
David Vogelpohl () (00:04)
Hello everyone! Welcome to the Growth Stage podcast by . I'm your host, David Vogelpohl. I support the digital product community with my work as . and I am awed by bringing the very best from the community to community to you here on The Growth Stage podcast. In this episode, I'm going to be interviewing one person who's really special for me. He works with me here at . He's going to be talking about product marketing is broken and how you can improve it by using thematic
new product launches We'd like to welcome to Growth Stage Mr. Braden Steel. Braden, welcome.
Braden (00:39)
Thank you, I appreciate your introduction. I'm eager to talk with you about marketing for products today.
David Vogelpohl () (00:44)
Awesome. Well, I love working with you here at , Braden. It was like I experienced an instant of anxiety since I don't often say your last name out loud. Then I thought I wonder if this is a weird pronunciation that I didn't know about, or lost over the years, or whatever, but I'm glad you're here. Of course, it is. What Braden will talk about are his thoughts regarding the flaws in conventional product marketing and the ways in which we, is using periodic thematic launches of products.
Braden (00:58)
Yeah. Thank you.
David Vogelpohl () (01:14)
To give your full care to new product launches, tell an overarching product narrative that is worth more than the sum of its parts, and aid marketing in being more strategic and thoughtful so you can give the best effort to your releases. I attended Spryng put on by Wynter, W -Y -N -T -E -R, I believe, and also S -P -R -Y -N -G, but it's an event.
The group was discussing the various issues and challenges in marketing, and the issue of product marketing was brought up. People were complaining that they were overwhelmed, you know dealing with every single feature launch, new product releases, and attempting to create the most of every single one of them. The topic of thematic product releases came up somebody else in the group had recommended it. We had adopted that here at the time of some quarters ago.
So I decided it would be neat to discuss the topic this morning. That's it, Braden, are you willing to start the conversation?
Braden (02:18)
Yeah, let's do it. It's a pleasure to discuss it. it. it. it.
David Vogelpohl () (02:20)
Alright, good deal. I've been on here for a while now, but I don't know the answer to the question. What was the first product you bought online?
Braden (02:28)
This is definitely an awesome idea. I spent some time thinking about the subject. And it was in junior high. eBay was hot. It was also when I purchased an PlayStation 2 with a bundle of games. There were games for sports and other stuff. Then I debated whether or not to purchase it. But I did and I enjoyed it. I gleaned a lot of value from the console and had a lot of enjoyment.
Other options were with my own money I ever earned was a didgeridoo was the first thing I purchased using my own money online. So that was the other alternative.
David Vogelpohl () (03:06)
It's all right. I like how you differentiated between the money you own and the money of your parents how was it as a parent's money? Which way did you finance the PSP?
Braden (03:14)
It's possible that I made it by weeding the garden or mowing the lawn or something. But the other one was my salary which I made through my own efforts.
David Vogelpohl () (03:24)
If you're mowing the lawn, it's your cash, Braden. This is fine. Okay, so I gave it away a little during the introduction, but could you share to the viewers the things you are doing here or in what you do here?
Braden (03:27)
Sure, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, sure. As a Senior Product Marketing Manager at . My responsibilities include everything that goes to market across all our products as well as the industry that we operate in. If a product goes on sale, you know, all of the messaging underneath the product, and surrounding it, and then also supporting things like B2B games, video games or other fields that we're excited to sell into. is a retailer of record.
The way we do it is that we incorporate everything starting right from the click of a button to in a digital product sales experience. We collaborate with SaaS firms, gaming businesses AI-based companies, B2B, things like this. that. that. that.
David Vogelpohl () (04:18)
Excellent, excellent. Now, when you describe kind of what you did it was that you covered many different aspects. You touched on product releases and feature release. Additionally, you mentioned verticals. You mentioned B2B SaaS or video games. And the modern product marketer is often embracing this type of vertical positioning for a particular product. This, I believe, increases the difficulty of product marketing.
But what do you think is wrong with product marketing? What was not working using the old approach?
Braden (04:56)
It's really a excellent question. The fact is that product launches depend on many variables that are out of the product marketing manager's reach. For instance, engineering issues, if there's customer commits that need to happen and sales are suddenly a big deal that's like"hey, we need to get this done before the release of another product. In addition, there are many shifting pieces to these launch. Therefore, it is important to work with the product teams to get commit dates and understand,
When are these items going to get released? What does release really mean? Does it mean that it is generally accessible or is it currently in a beta stage? It's time for the next question to be asked is it the right time to discuss it? What are the topics we'd like to talk about? And can we even talk about this because we're conducting tests on the product? This raises a number of questions are being asked, and there's a lot of confusion arises from this particular system of how manufacturing and engineering work. So I believe the major thing that's broken is
it's so difficult to know when it's so hard to see the final product and set a date for release and prepare for the product to be ready to launch. What occurs is that product managers such as myself get knowing, for example, one week before launch, one week prior to GA, the product manager saying,"Hey, this product will be finished. And then, get to do all of this work. Then it's like I'm holding on. It's not the only thing I've had to finish. It's true that you've talked about verticals. There's been a lot of discussion about verticals.
It is a huge chunk of time, too. And so the question that I've had to solve and have to consider is how can I do the work of launching the product along with the other tasks of my work in the absence of control over the date of launch?
David Vogelpohl () (06:40)
If you're using floating timelines. The product isn't yet fully functional. They discover a bug in the last second. They manage to power through the release, and they get the release out early. It's a challenge to coordinate the resources of other marketers, designers and website people and content specialists and other things like that. This coordination with floating dates is what I'm hearing there. Is there a different aspect? Just like you've...
It's true that I've have worked in the field of product marketing at various times over the years. I'm thinking, I feel as if every time I speak to someone from the product department you'll hear them say, I'm going to release X and I need to go out and make a statement over the release. Do you think that expectations about the amount of effort required to promote different product releases is sometimes overwhelming? Could that be a part of the reason why you're missing from traditional marketing for products?
Braden (07:28)
Yeah, for sure. It's true that the product managers are product managers because of a reason. They're the ones who own these products. They're super excited about this. They've worked on these products for understand, all the way to several years working to bring these products out there. So naturally, they're going to want to get as much help as they can get for these products. And when it's, it's difficult to get an executive from the product team come up to you to say that I'm really excited about this new feature.
I'd like a lot of support, here's all of my suggestions as well as to say, well, let's pump the brakes just a bit to accommodate the A, B, or C reasons, but I'm not able to support you, or I can't do it because, well, I don't have the time or I'm just difficult to sustain a strong relationship sometimes with the product managers since you might think that because they feel do not want to help their cause, or do something else. This does not happen. Obviously, you don't wanna help all the people possible.
David Vogelpohl () (08:26)
Yeah. It's like you're looking at it from the perspective 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 method, as well as every other manager and rightfully so, like you said, with the time and money that they're spending on it It's like, lets make an announcement over this. But with all those demands, plus the floating dates It feels like you're not doing your best work. It's like, you're spreading you across a variety of things and you're finding it hard to perform your best job is kind of the gist I'm experiencing. Does that sound right?
Braden (09:01)
Yeah, yeah, that's right. You end up at the position where all different things fall apart all at the same time. And suddenly you have to determine how to achieve everything. And not only is there just 24 hours in a day, not to mention, you know, working all day long and also the stress of trying to think about, keep all of those things in mind, take this highly technological approach and.
Condense them into something that is market facing. So yeah, there's many challenges to overcome.
David Vogelpohl () (09:35)
You mentioned this just a moment ago, when we were talking about supporting product managers and the relationship between PMMs and PMs in the sense of. Do you think that the traditional form of product marketing is it fair to say it has some friction with PMMs and PMs?
Braden (09:58)
Yeah, I think so. I've had experiences where, yeah, it's certainly an a little tension-filled conversation when you have to declare that I don't have the funds to assist the way you want to go. You know, when that happens it's important to be attentive and understand what the PM is looking for, however it causes tension. And, you know, you need to be able to communicate effectively for situations in which in a position where you have to be there and engage in those discussions, paying attention.
Be clear, be adept at logging what you're doing, and in our case, deploying the process of thematic launches to avoid a lot problems that are associated when you launch a traditional product.
David Vogelpohl () (10:41)
So you have the Product managers asking for the largest possible megaphone to announce their new products. You have the other marketing departments asking, can we be more planful so we're able to work better? And you kind of discussed the move towards thematic releases of your products. Let's start with the basics. What is a thematic product release?
Braden (10:59)
Yeah, great question. Thematic releases are bundle of items under an umbrella of a theme. For example, B2B as the umbrella and the other items are in line with the theme.
David Vogelpohl () (11:16)
So when we talk about thematic releases I'm guessing that you're not doing one every week. Maybe, I guess that if you're very aggressive, but like do you release these on a quarterly basis, on a monthly basis?
Braden (11:30)
Good question. We do a spring or summer and fall release. There aren't many people around in the Christmas season towards the close of the year, so we don't do it at that time. However, there are only three of them each year, with occasional release every now and then.
David Vogelpohl () (11:45)
This is because the product organization intends to announce that each quarter we're going to make this theme-based improvement to this product or product line and then we'll incorporate it into advertising for products, but we're planning to bring it to life through a large campaign. What if it were to include the elements of each of the items and new releases that are related to the subject?
Braden (12:08)
Yes, it is. It has those aspects. When we look over our customer plan and say OK, what's planning for this year? And that helps us categorize the products into themes. Therefore, we don't have to go in a downward-facing direction in saying that we have to figure out for theme A What are the items that are relevant to theme A? Instead, we will look at what are the suite of items we are planning to launch this year?
What's the overall theme that each of those items can be categorized under in these parts of the year.
David Vogelpohl () (12:44)
You'll be able to see this and the only thing you can do is amplify the effect. You might be off by a quarter, maybe at the time of release or an event, but there could have been a delay, 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. And that's a strategy, you know, we've deployed our GA actions that we carry out since these products require promotion after they become live. So, as a part of the thematic process, we can have GA tasks and then thematic actions that we could apply to each of our products.
David Vogelpohl () (13:18)
Each launch, if it would like, is a part of the themes released. Then you can have a sort of a smaller version for like the GA rollout. You're basically getting the double dip as it seems.
Braden (13:31)
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And it's really helped to ensure that the internal teams of our company are able to access GA. This means that customer satisfaction isn't just suddenly getting feedback from customers. They're like, Hey I'm using this amazing product. I'd like to know more about it. Our customer success team wasn't set up. It's not the case since in GA we are releasing FAQs as well as value-based messages to make sure that our employees know what's happening.
Then, the go-to marketing messages, as you said, can lag on occasion. If you've got the product release in January and you don't have a thematically release in April, the product may not receive the same amount of marketing attention early on, but it will get to tag along with that bigger push later in the year.
David Vogelpohl () (14:17)
If you thought it was extremely strategically planned, would you include an X or a larger release between the theme releases, if you happen to be able to get a, that GA date for some like super strategic thing you were waiting on?
Braden (14:30)
Yeah, absolutely. Therefore, we do have some ad-hoc release which we support. We try to keep them to just one or two releases when they are possible. Then we've created a system that we have with you and the team of product developers where we engage in an exchange and think, okay, we are aware of this amazing product. The feature doesn't belong to the category, but it's crucial for reasons A or B. And so we plan on that together as a team so that everybody understands what we're planning to accomplish. And then, you know, that does get separate attention.
The benefit is that you don't need to worry about 15 different products all at once, crashing to the floor at the close of the quarter. This happens typically the case in the case of products that are delivering everything at the same time.
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 executives Q3 is the time to start Q3 and the engineering teams Q3 signifies the conclusion of the Q3. It sounds like the teams are all sort of obviously, getting in at the conclusion to meet those quarterly OKRs. Yeah. Okay. I gotcha.
Braden (15:33)
Yeah, exactly right.
David Vogelpohl () (15:38)
So you have this theme due out this quarter or next or something, but you have a big new feature or product that doesn't fit in the themes. Is this just one of those unique ones you've been discussing you could see in between the thematic release?
Braden (15:55)
Yep, exactly right. So I'll give you an example from our current work. We released a payment release early this year. This meant we could offer a lot of cool payments features. One of those payments which slipped through the cracks of engineering and couldn't be able to get it right by when the launch happened included Google Pay and everyone knows Google Pay. Then, we sat down to look at the feature and said, how can we promote Google Pay? This isn't really a B2B feature. So, yes we made a small mini release for Google Pay.
Created some documents for it FAQs, a blog post or promoted on social things similar to this.
David Vogelpohl () (16:29)
What happens if you have this kind of anchor product release and a thematic release that falls? This sounds like you were still using an anchor product that was the case in the thematic release that Apple Pay slipped from or Google Pay slipped from. So what can you do? Wait to release the thematic release until the anchor products can be included? What else can you do?
Braden (16:54)
Yeah, I mean, it depends. Sometimes it's a wait and see. There have been instances of that. It's true, I was having conversations with the team behind product today who informed me that B2B could be something to waiting and seeing launch coming a little bit later this year. The benefit of the theme-driven launch is that A, it's not a deadline. The deadline is set by us. So if we want to push that back slightly in order to support the deadlines of engineering and the product, we can.
Or we could alter those themes at any moment. If a major new feature is no longer launched, maybe we could select one or two lesser features to form the perfect bundle to fit a theme in a different way. And so there's the flexibility in this model that still allows the possibility of changes all through the year.
David Vogelpohl () (17:47)
That's a good idea. When I consider an old-fashioned marketing campaign to promote an announcement of a new feature is something like an announcement blog or perhaps a press release, some social coverage, email our customers, contact our potential customers, that kind of things. How is thematic release different in terms of structure?
Braden (18:07)
It's true, I've mentioned the issue in the past. A lot of those things continue to happen. At the moment of the theme, those things are still taking place, however we also have what we call the GA tasks. Also, a great deal than just internal enablement within-app notifications. You know, when you allow access to a device or software and we're giving them access and also our internal teams. This is separated from the thematic release.
At the moment, instead of focusing on a lot of what's more the same features there's this feature accessible, at bits and pieces it's possible to create the of the overall value of all of these elements. And so that's a big distinction that you can't really do in the case of releasing something like, in a piecemeal fashion through the course of the quarter or year.
David Vogelpohl () (19:04)
Yeah. This is a good thing, because it feels like it helps you elevate the story. Since I'm a fan, an example that I think is perfect for me is this enhancements to quality of life which have been extremely difficult to engineers, yet don't always make the product more marketable. Cause it's, isn't it? A person who is outside isn't aware that there was a problem or something. So, it's often hard as Phil is an employee of a product marketing company, to go out and say"Hey everyone, we've solved this. In reality, it is actually beneficial both for the business as well as the clients.
Braden (19:08)
Yeah.
David Vogelpohl () (19:34)
So it's felt that thematic releases don't just give you the ability to share the megaphone, they also help to enhance the narrative of a few additional quality of life improvements.
Braden (19:43)
Yes, absolutely, you are able to access many functions benefit from this, which normally wouldn't be eligible for marketing or the benefit of a short announcement from Pendo. Instead, they're displayed on a landing page alongside the other features. And well, do share that megaphone. share that megaphone. There's plenty of value in the small improvements, like enhancements to quality of life.
David Vogelpohl () (20:08)
So, if you take this approach, how many quarters in are you?
Braden (20:13)
This is our third, next month we'll have our third theme launch month, which will be in July.
David Vogelpohl () (20:20)
Okay, so three quarters in, would you consider that this has enhanced your ability to coordinate marketing resources and help with product launches, or is it too early to tell?
Braden (20:33)
I'd say it's certain that it has improved on my part. What I see is not only do I have the ability to more effectively support the entire product team and not just support them and coordinate with the rest of marketing, specifically demand gen. They get a lot of lead time now that they did not have prior to this product.
and we can slot things into campaigns that were previously difficult to accomplish. So I would say that would be the biggest advantage. But then the other benefit is it's opened up time for us to work on vertical expansion in other areas such as video games, that we might not have had as much time for or sufficient manpower for pushing the verticals ahead.
David Vogelpohl () (21:28)
You mentioned the video game section for a while as well. The company has had customers who play video games for quite a while, almost since the start of the business. The company was being a bit more entangled in the segment. Do you think that segmentation can play a part in thematic releases or do you think that they are more focused on features?
Braden (21:51)
Yes, segmentation plays a big role. As I said, that our upcoming launch will be about B2B. This is a market that we'd like to market into and that we're enthusiastic to expand into. I can see a world in which we're doing it around video games as well. We've mentioned that we've improved the functionality of Apple Pay and implemented Google Pay. So yeah, expanding the vertical theme not only opens up that capability, you know, in terms of...
you get the benefits of the thematic launch, but it also offers the advantage of coupling things like thoughts leadership into your thematic launch, which you may have a difficult time integrating with a traditional launch. So, you'll get a bigger, potentially an even bigger push for your campaign as well as more value from this type of launch for the broader organisation.
David Vogelpohl () (22:44)
Excellent. This has been very interesting Braden. I appreciate the fact that you came to talk on air about this. It was such an interesting debate in Spryng here in Austin. I was thinking it would be cool to bring this discussion to the show. this was fantastic. Thanks for being a part of the show.
Braden (23:01)
Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you having me. It was really fun.
David Vogelpohl () (23:04)
Awesome. Also, if you'd like learn more details about what Braden is up to, including maybe his next theme-based release, please go to .com. Thanks everyone for joining this segment of Growth Stage. I've been your host, David Vogelpohl. I enjoy supporting the online product community as part of the role I play as . and I am awed by the opportunity to present all the great things from the community to you here on the Growth Stage. We appreciate everyone's support.
