Product Marketing is BrokenRepair It By Using Thematic Product Launches -
Do you have a product marketing department having trouble coordinating marketing resources to support an endless stream of product launches, with no release date and a chorus of product managers wanting to get tons of marketing attention with each launch? What if there were a better way?
- Be sure to pay the greatest concentration to the latest product launches.
- Make sure you tell a story that is overarching that is worth more than the sum of the parts.
- Help marketing be planful and logical so that they are able to do their best to promote new products.
If you're struggling with over-active product roadmaps and endless "t-shirt" sizes to estimate agile project estimates, slipping product release dates or worrying that you're letting your managers down, it may be time to consider thematic product releases. Learn how on this episode of Growth Stage!
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Audio Interview Full: Audio
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Audio Podcast Interview Full: Video
Transcript
David Vogelpohl () (00:04)
Hello everyone! You are invited to join the Growth Stage podcast by . I'm your host, David Vogelpohl. I am a part of the digital product community through my role at . and I am awed by bringing all the great things happening in the community to community to you here on The Growth Stage podcast. In this episode, I'm going to be interviewing an individual who is uh, truly unique to me. I work with him at . He's scheduled to talk about the way that product marketing has been broken and what you can do to improve it by using thematic
announcements of new products We'd be pleased to welcome to Growth Stage Mr. Braden Steel. Braden, welcome.
Braden (00:39)
Thank you, I appreciate your introduction. I'm looking forward to chatting about product marketing today.
David Vogelpohl () (00:44)
Awesome. Well, I love working with you here at , Braden. It was like I experienced an anxiety moment because I rarely pronounce your name in public. It's like, what if it might be a strange pronunciation that I did not remember to do, lost over the years, or whatever, but I'm glad you're to the forum. Of course, it is. The topic Braden is going to be discussing are his opinions about what's wrong with traditional product marketing and how the methods we employ is using quarterly thematic product launches.
Braden (00:58)
Yeah. Yeah, thank you.
David Vogelpohl () (01:14)
To give your full care to new product launches make sure you create a cohesive product narrative that will be more important than its parts, and aid marketing in being more strategic and thoughtful so you can give the best effort to the product launches you make. I was at 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.
The group was talking about the different problems and issues in marketing. The issue of product marketing was brought up. People were complaining that they were overwhelmed in dealing with every single feature launch, new product releases, and trying to make a big splash for everything. The topic of thematic releases for products came up somebody was in the group who had suggested it and we had adopted that here at a few quarters back and
And so I thought that it would be fun to have a discussion on the subject here today. So, Braden, are you willing to start the conversation?
Braden (02:18)
Yeah, let's do it. I'm excited to talk about the topic. it. it. it.
David Vogelpohl () (02:20)
Alright, good deal. I've been here for awhile and I still don't have the right answer for the question. What was the first thing you bought online?
Braden (02:28)
This is definitely a cool topic. I spent some time thinking about the subject. This was during the junior high school years. eBay was at its peak. Then I got an PlayStation 2 with a bundle of games. The bundle included sporting games, as well as additional games. Then I debated whether or not to purchase it. However, I bought it and enjoyed it. I gleaned a lot of value from the console, and also had lots of fun.
The other option was with my own cash. The first thing I made was to purchase a dogeridoo. It was the very first thing I purchased using my own money. That's the third choice.
David Vogelpohl () (03:06)
All right, I love the distinction you made your personal money from the money of your parents how was it like, your parent money? What was the method you used to fund your PSP?
Braden (03:14)
It's possible that I made it by weeding the garden or mowing the lawn or whatever. But the other one was like my actual income from my job that I earned on my own.
David Vogelpohl () (03:24)
If you're trimming the lawn, you're making money. Braden. That's fine. Okay, so I did it a during the introduction however, could you please share your thoughts with viewers about what you're doing 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 here at . My responsibilities include everything that goes to market for our entire range of products as well as the industry we work in as well. When a new product is launched that's when we're able to handle every aspect of messaging that goes under the product, and surrounding the product, as well as providing support for things like B2B games, video games or other industries that we're really eager to market to. is a retailer of record.
And so what that means is we take everything beginning with the purchase button and ending in a digital product sales experience. We collaborate with SaaS companies, gaming companies AI firms B2B companies, and other things like that. that. that. that.
David Vogelpohl () (04:18)
Excellent, excellent. When you talk about kind of what you did, you touched on many different aspects. You touched on product releases as well as feature announcements. Also, you touched on verticals. You mentioned B2B SaaS or video games. The modern marketer is often embracing these vertical positions for a particular product. It just even further amplifies the complexity of product marketing.
So, what is broken about product marketing? What wasn't working for you using the old approach?
Braden (04:56)
Yes, that's a good query. You know, product releases hinge on a lot of variables that are out of the product marketing manager's reach. For instance, engineering issues, if there's customer commits which need to be fulfilled, if sales suddenly has an enormous issue that says, hey, you need to complete this product prior to when the release of another product. There are a lot of shifting pieces to these launches. Therefore, it is important to work with the product teams in order to establish the commit dates as well as to comprehend,
What time do these products are scheduled to get released? What does release really mean? Are you able to access it in general or is it still in the beta phase? It's time for the next question to be asked is it the right time to talk about the software? What is it that we'd like to discuss? And can we even talk about this since we're currently trying to test the product? This raises a number of questions, a lot of uncertainty is created by this model of, just the way that manufacturing and engineering work. So I believe the major thing that's broken is
there's just so-- it's difficult to visualize the final product and think about a release date and plan for a product to be ready to go. And so what happens is product marketers such as myself get you know, a week prior to launch, and one week prior to GA and a week before GA, the manager of the product saying: Hey, this will be finished. Then, you can do all of this work. Then it's like I'm holding for a second. There's other things I had to finish. It's true that you've talked about verticals. We've been talking about that.
That's right, it takes up a lot of time too. And so the question that, you know, I've been forced to resolve and thought about is: how do I manage the launch of my product, along with the other tasks of my job even though I don't have any control over that launch date?
David Vogelpohl () (06:40)
So you've got like these floating timelines, and the software isn't ready. There's a glitch that's discovered just before the deadline. They are able to push through the release, and they get the release out early. They're trying to coordinate their sources with marketers from other companies, designers and website people as well as content people and stuff similar to this. This coordination with floating dates is what I'm hearing there. What about the other side? Like the one I've...
You know, I have worked in the field of product marketing at various times over the years. I'm like, I feel like every time I talk to a product person you'll hear them say, I'm going to release X and we need to make a big blast about the release. do you feel like your expectations regarding the level of work required for these different product releases is sometimes overwhelming? Is that part of what's missing from traditional marketing for products?
Braden (07:28)
Yeah, for sure. It's true that the product managers are product managers with a purpose. They're the ones who own these products. They're extremely excited about it. They've been working on these products for understand, all the way to several years that they've been striving to get the products out there. Naturally, they're going to want to get as much help as they can for their products. When it's very challenging to have an executive from the product team come up to you to say that I'm very excited about 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 a little bit for reasons A, B or C reasons, but I just can't support you, or I can't because I'm not able to do it or I'm just frustrating and difficult to keep a strong relationship sometimes with those product managers because, you know, they might feel that they, you don't wanna help you or anything, but that doesn't happen, and obviously, you don't wanna help as many people as you can.
David Vogelpohl () (08:26)
Yeah. So it feels like then that from your point of view managing a go-to marketing campaign around a launch You're dealing with floating dates that are part of the standard method, as well as every other manager, just as you mentioned, given all the investment and time they're investing in and it's like lets make an announcement over this. However, with all the expectations, along with the dates floating around you feel as if you're not performing the best job you can. You're distributing yourself amongst all these things and you're finding it hard to do your best work is kind of the gist I'm getting. Do you think that's fair?
Braden (09:01)
Yeah, yeah, that's right. It's an area where lots aspects fall down all at the same time. And suddenly you have to find out accomplish everything. Not only are there only 24 hours in a day, and not even the pressure of working for 24 hours as well as pressure of trying to think about how to keep all of these things in mind, take this highly technological approach and.
Condense them into something that is market facing. That's why there are 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 or PMs. Do you think that this is the typical form of product marketing is it fair to say it can have some tension between PMs and PMs?
Braden (09:58)
Yes, I believe so. I've had experiences where, yes, it's definitely been a bit of a uncomfortable conversation to simply admit that I do not have the funds to assist the way you want to go. And, you know, when that happens, you want to listen and try to understand what the person in charge is searching for, however it can cause tension. You know, the key is to communicate well in situations where you're, you know, you need to be in the room and be listening.
Be clear, be good at tracking your progress as well as, in the case of using the theme-based launch method to avoid a lot of that challenge that comes from traditional products.
David Vogelpohl () (10:41)
Now you've got the Product managers asking for the most powerful megaphone they can get in their announcements. There's the marketers saying"Can we become more organized so that we can do better work? Also, you've talked about the shift to thematic product releases. Therefore let's get started with a simple question. What exactly is a thematic release?
Braden (10:59)
Yeah, great question. A thematic release is a bundling of products underneath a topic. For example, B2B as the umbrella and all the products support that theme.
David Vogelpohl () (11:16)
When we speak of themes-based releases I'm guessing that there's not a single release every week. It could be, if you're really aggressive, but like, are you doing these in a quarterly manner, or on a monthly basis?
Braden (11:30)
Good question. We do a spring, summer, autumn release. There aren't many people around during the holidays at the end of the year, which is why we don't release it at that time. But yeah, just three releases a year with ad hoc releases every so often in between.
David Vogelpohl () (11:45)
The product org intends to announce that every quarter we'll make this theme-based improvement to this particular product or line of products and, if we can integrate it into the product marketing, we're going make it real through a large campaign. Does it comprise the various elements from each of the items and release within the subject?
Braden (12:08)
It will. It includes those elements. Then we review our customers' roadmap and we say, okay, what are we planned for the year? It helps us organize these products in themes. Therefore, we don't have to go in a downward-facing direction and saying, we need to solve for theme A which products that are relevant to theme A? Instead, we consider what products we plan to release this year?
What's the overall theme that each of those items can be categorized under in these seasons.
David Vogelpohl () (12:44)
You'll be able to see this and the only thing you can do is amplify it. There's a chance that you'll be missing by a quarter, maybe when the date of release is some other thing, but it could be a delay, I think, prior to you knowing you've got it. Yeah. So you're decoupling the GA, if you will, from the promotion.
Braden (12:51)
That's correct, yeah.
That's correct. Yeah. That's an approach, that's why we've implemented the strategy, and we've got GA tasks that we perform as these features require promotion once they become live. And so we are part of the process that is thematic, are able to have GA activities and then themes that we are able to apply to each of our products.
David Vogelpohl () (13:18)
Each product release, if you will, kind of gets to ride along in the themes released. Then you can have a sort of a small version similar reasons, such as the GA rollout effectively. So you kind of get an extra dip here as it seems.
Braden (13:31)
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And it's been really helpful to ensure that our teams within the organization are able to access GA. So customer success isn't suddenly being able to get feedback from clients. The customers are saying, Hey I'm using this awesome product. I want to know more about the product. The customer success team was never activated. It's not the case since during GA we're constantly releasing FAQ documents and value messages in order to ensure the internal team members are aware of what's happening.
Also, go-to marketing messages, as you said, can lag sometimes. If you have the product release in January and you don't have a thematically release till April, your product might not get enough marketing coverage at the start However, it'll get to tag along with the bigger campaign later throughout the year.
David Vogelpohl () (14:17)
If you thought it was extremely 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 that GA dates for a similar super strategic thing you were looking forward to?
Braden (14:30)
Yeah, absolutely. We also have occasional releases which we assist with. we try to limit those to one or two if we are able to. We've developed a procedure in conjunction along with your product team where we have an exchange and think, okay, we are aware of this amazing feature. It's not in the theme, but it's crucial for reasons A, B and C. And so we plan to discuss it as a group so that everybody understands what we're planning to accomplish. You know, that does get separate attention.
The benefit is that you don't need to worry about 15 different products suddenly crashing down at end of the quarter. This happens usually the case as the product delivers all at once.
David Vogelpohl () (15:08)
Thank you.
One of my top business jokes is the, not joke, but observation is that, the executives Q3 is the time to start Q3 while the engineering team Q3 is the time to end Q3. So it sounds like they're all, you know, of course getting in at the close to reach the quarterly OKRs. Yeah. Okay. I gotcha.
Braden (15:33)
Yes, precisely.
David Vogelpohl () (15:38)
There's this theme that's due to be released in the this quarter or next but there's a significant announcement of a feature or product that isn't compatible with the overall theme. Are you referring to one of those unique ones you were talking about that you might pop up during the theme release?
Braden (15:55)
Yes, precisely as you would expect. Therefore, I'll provide you with an example from what we're doing. The release of payments was in the beginning of this year. and so we had a variety of interesting payment options. One of the payments that didn't make it into the engineering could not reach it at when the launch happened included Google Pay and everyone knows Google Pay. And so, you know we took a seat and studied it, and said, how can we help promote Google Pay? It's not really a B2B feature. Therefore we released a version of the feature for Google Pay.
Created some documents for it FAQ documents, blog posts or blog post that is promoted on social networks such as those.
David Vogelpohl () (16:29)
So what happens then if you have this kind of product that anchors with a theme release that falls? I mean, it sounded as if you had an anchor product, I guess that was the case in the thematic release 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? Or what do you do?
Braden (16:54)
Yeah, I mean, it depends. Oftentimes it can be waiting and seeing. There have been instances of that. It's true, I was having conversations with the product team today that informed me that B2B may be an option to wait and see coming up a little bit later this year. However, the advantage of a thematic launch is A, it's not a hard deadline. We're setting that deadline for ourselves. And so if we need to push that back a little bit in order to support the deadlines of engineering and the product then we are able to.
We can also alter the themes at any point. In the event that a crucial new feature is no longer launched, maybe we could pick up one or two lesser features to form an assortment that matches the theme in a different manner. And so there's the flexibility in this system that allows the possibility of changes throughout the year.
David Vogelpohl () (17:47)
OK, that makes sense. When I consider the typical promotional campaign of a feature release, it's similar to an announcement blog post or perhaps a press release and some coverage on social media or email our clients, contact our potential customers, that type of thing. How is thematic release different in structure?
Braden (18:07)
Yes, I mentioned the issue in the past. Many of these things still happen. And at the thematic moment these things continue taking place, however we also have what we'll call GA tasks. Also, a great deal of like internal enablement, via in-app notifications. When somebody is able to access this piece of software or technology and we're giving them access and also the internal teams within us. This is separated from the thematic release.
And then at the thematic time, instead of paying attention to a large portion of things that are more similar to the same features, this feature is available, you know, at bits and pieces, we can tell more of a narrative tale about the benefits from all these elements. That's an important contrast that I've noticed which isn't possible with a release, in pieces through the course of the quarter or year.
David Vogelpohl () (19:04)
Yeah. It also feels like it helps you elevate the story. Cause I, I like my ideal example is the improvement in quality of life that are really difficult for engineering, but don't necessarily make the product more marketable. It's because, you know what I mean? 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 go out and say"Hey everyone, we, we fixed this. When in fact, the fix was really valuable for the business and for the customers.
Braden (19:08)
Yeah.
David Vogelpohl () (19:34)
It's that thematic releases don't just give you the ability to share the megaphone, they also help to elevate the story of some additional high-quality improvements to life.
Braden (19:43)
You have the opportunity to that a variety of functions benefit from this, which would otherwise not be able to benefit from marketing or an, say, quick announcement in Pendo. Instead, they're on a page that is a landing site alongside these bigger features that, yeah, they get to share that megaphone. make use of that megaphone. There's plenty to gain from the less, you know, improvement in quality of life.
David Vogelpohl () (20:08)
Okay, now that you have this method worked? How many quarters in are you?
Braden (20:13)
This is our third. and we'll be launching our third theme launch, in July.
David Vogelpohl () (20:20)
Okay, so three quarters later, can you consider that this has improved your ability to manage marketing resources as well as support new product launches, or is it too soon to judge?
Braden (20:33)
I would say that it's certainly improved on my part. The improvement that I see is not only do I have the ability to more effectively support the product team, and help them out and coordinate with other marketing departments particularly demand generation. You know, they get a lot of lead time that they didn't have before about the products.
We can also incorporate things in campaigns we used to struggle to achieve. This would be the biggest gain. But then the other benefit is that it has opened the door for us to work on other vertical expansion for example, such as gaming and other games, which we would not have had as much time for or enough manpower to push those verticals forward.
David Vogelpohl () (21:28)
So you mentioned the video game section some time it was in existence, with customers who play video games for quite some time from the very beginning of the company. The company was being a bit more entangled in this segment. Do you feel like segments might play an important role in thematic releases, or do you believe this is more akin to features?
Braden (21:51)
Segments definitely play an important role. It's true that I've mentioned the next release is centered around B2B, a vertical that we want to sell into, that we're excited to expand into. It's possible to imagine a future where we're doing that in the video game space as well. We've mentioned that the improvement we've made to our Apple Pay and implemented Google Pay. This is why expanding, having these vertical themes not only opens up that possibility, but also allows you for...
The benefits are the same as the thematic launch, but you also gain the benefits by incorporating aspects like thinking leadership to the launch. This is something you'd struggle to combine with traditional launch. And so you can get a bigger, potentially an even bigger push for your campaign and gain more value from this type of launch for the overall organisation.
David Vogelpohl () (22:44)
Excellent. This has been a lot of fun, Braden. I appreciate the fact that you came on the air and talking about this. This was a fascinating conversation in Spryng here in Austin. It was my thought to have it to the show. this was fantastic. Thank you for coming on.
Braden (23:01)
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. It was super fun.
David Vogelpohl () (23:04)
Awesome. If you'd like to check out more about the things Braden is up to, including maybe his next thematic album, go to .com. Thank you for taking part in this episode of Growth Stage. I've been your host, David Vogelpohl. I love supporting the online product community as part of the role I play at . It is my pleasure to bring what's best from this community to you here on the Growth Stage. Thank you everyone.
