Product Marketing Is Broken -Make It Right With Thematic Product Launches
Is your product marketing team having trouble coordinating marketing resources to manage an interminable stream of product launches, with vague release dates and a chorus of product managers demanding tons of marketing attention for each launch? Is there an easier 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 parts.
- Help marketing be planful and thoughtful so they can provide their best work to promote new products.
If you're running yourself ragged with over-active product roadmaps or incessant "t-shirt" size adjustments for agile project estimations, slipping product release dates or worrying about failing to keep your product management team down, it might be time to think about themes for your product launches. Find out how to do it on this episode of Growth Stage!
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Podcast Full Interview: Audio
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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 support the digital product community with my work as . and I am awed by bringing the best of the community back for you on the Growth Stage podcast. This episode, we're talking to an individual who is uh, truly special for me. He works with me here at . He's going to be talking about the way that product marketing has been broken and the best way to solve it using thematic
new product launches we'd appreciate having you join us at Growth Stage Mr. Braden Steel. Braden, welcome.
Braden (00:39)
Thanks for the kind words, I really appreciate your introduction. I'm eager to talk regarding product marketing this morning.
David Vogelpohl () (00:44)
Awesome. It's great to work together here at Braden. It was like I experienced an instant of anxiety since I don't often pronounce your name loud. Then I thought, what if it might be a strange pronunciation that I did not remember to do, forgot over the years or whatever, but I'm glad you're to the forum. Of course, it is. And what Braden's going to be discussing are his opinions regarding the flaws in conventional product marketing and the ways in which we, here, are using monthly 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 that is worth more than its parts, and help marketing be more planful and aware so that you deliver the highest quality work on your product releases. I was at Spryng organized by Wynter, W -Y -N -T -E -R, I think, and S -P -R -Y -N G, however it's not an event.
We were at a roundtable to discuss the many issues and challenges in marketing, and the topic of product marketing came up. Many felt they were running ragged, you know dealing with every little feature release or new product launch and trying to make a big splash for everything. The topic of thematic releases for products occurred to me. Someone else in the group had proposed it, and we taken it up some time back.
Therefore, I thought that it would be fun to discuss the topic here today. Also, 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 around for some time now, but I don't know the answer to the question. Was the first item that you purchased on the internet?
Braden (02:28)
It's an interesting topic. I was thinking about it. And it was in junior high. eBay was at its peak. And I bought the PlayStation 2 with a bundle of games. It had like some sports games and some additional games. Then I debated whether or not to purchase it. However, I bought it and loved it. I got plenty of value from the console and had a lot of enjoyment.
Another option is to use my own cash. The first thing I earned was a didgeridoo was the very first thing I purchased using my own money online. That's the third option there.
David Vogelpohl () (03:06)
It's all right. I like the distinction you made your personal money from what you think is your how was it as a parent's money? What was the method you used to fund your PSP?
Braden (03:14)
It's possible that I gained it from weeding my lawn or cutting the garden or something. The other was like my actual income from my job which I made on my own.
David Vogelpohl () (03:24)
If you're trimming the lawn, you're making money. Braden. This is fine. It's true that I gave it away a little bit in the intro, but could you share with the audience what you're doing at or in how you work here?
Braden (03:27)
Sure, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, sure. So I'm the Senior Product Marketing Manager at . My responsibilities include everything that goes to market for all of our products and the industries we are in. When a new product is launched that's when we're able to handle all the messages that go with that product and around the product, as well as providing support for things like video games or B2B or other fields that we're looking forward to selling to. Merchant of Record.
The way we do it is we take everything right from the click of a button to into a selling experience. We collaborate together with SaaS businesses, gaming companies AI-based companies B2B companies, and other things like this. that. that. that.
David Vogelpohl () (04:18)
Excellent, excellent. Now, when you describe the kind of work you performed it was that you covered many different aspects. You touched on product releases, feature releases. Additionally, you mentioned verticals. You mentioned B2B SaaS and video games. And the modern product marketer is often embracing this type of vertical positioning in relation to a particular product. And I think that just even further amplifies the complexity of the product marketing.
So, what could be broken in the marketing of products? What wasn't working for you with the traditional approach?
Braden (04:56)
Yeah, it's a really excellent question. You know, product releases are dependent on numerous variables that are out of the product marketing manager's reach. For instance, engineering issues, if there's customer commits required and sales are suddenly a big deal that's like, hey, you need to complete this product prior to when it's released. And there's a lot of shifting pieces to these launch. And so working with product teams to get commitment dates, and to understand
when are these products going to be available for release? What exactly does "release" mean? Is it generally available or is it still in the beta phase? It's time for the next question to come, well, when do we want to discuss the software? What is it that we want to say? Do we have the ability to talk about this because we're testing the product? This raises a number of questions, a lot of uncertainty arises from this particular system of exactly how engineering and product works. And so I think the most important thing that's broken is that
there's just so-- it's hard to envision the end product, and then think about a release date and plan for a product to be prepared for launch. What occurs is that product managers such as myself get you know, a week before launch, one week before GA, and the product manager says, This is going to be ready. And then, get to and do this job. And it's like, okay, hold on. I got other stuff I got to do. I know you've mentioned verticals. We've been talking about that.
You know, that takes up a lot of your time. The question I've been forced to resolve and had to think about is how can I do the product launch work along with the other tasks of my job even though I don't have any control over the date of launch?
David Vogelpohl () (06:40)
If you're using floating timelines and so the software isn't ready. They discover a bug just before the deadline. They somehow power through the release and manage to get it out in time. 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 such. So this arrangement of these floating dates is what I'm hearing there. What about the other aspect? Just like the one I've...
You know, I you know, I've worked in marketing for products and in many capacities over time. I'm like, I feel that every time I speak to a product person you'll hear them say, I'm releasing X and I'm going to create a huge announcement regarding the release. do you feel like expectations about the amount of effort for all these new product releases can sometimes be overwhelming? Is that part of what's wrong with the traditional approach to product marketing?
Braden (07:28)
Yes, absolutely. I mean, these product managers, they're product managers for a reason. They are the owners of those products. They're super excited about the product. They've worked on these for, you know, up to several years that they've been striving to get the items to be released. Naturally, they'll want as much support as they get from these products. It's difficult to get a product manager come to you to say that I'm really excited about this feature.
I'm looking for a great deal of help, so here's a list of my thoughts as well as to tell you, allow us to slam the brakes just a bit to accommodate reasons A, B or C reasons, but I'm just not in a position to help you, or I can't, you know, I'm just not in the mood or I'm just difficult to sustain an ongoing relationship with the product managers since they might feel that they aren't worth helping their cause, or do something else. This isn't the case, obviously, you don't wanna help everyone you are able to.
David Vogelpohl () (08:26)
Yeah. It's like you're looking at it from the perspective managing a go-to marketing campaign around a launch You're dealing with floating dates of the conventional model, and every other product manager and rightfully so, like you said, with all the investment and time they're investing in, it's like, let's make a big bang over this. However, with all the expectations, along with the floating dates It feels like you're not doing your best work. The feeling is that you're distributing you across a variety of things which makes it difficult to do your best work is kind of the gist I'm experiencing. Does that sound right?
Braden (09:01)
Yeah, yeah, that's right. You end up at a place where a lot aspects fall down in a single moment. And suddenly you have to figure out how to, accomplish all of them. There are only 24 hours in a day, not to mention, you know, working for 24 hours and also anxiety of having to think about keeping all those things in mind, take this highly technological approach and.
make them more compact into something that is market facing. So yeah, there's many challenges to overcome.
David Vogelpohl () (09:35)
So you alluded to this a minute ago when we were talking about supporting PMs and their relationship between PMMs and PMs in the sense of. If you're feeling you are a fan of the old-fashioned model of product marketing would you say there is some conflict between PMs and PMs?
Braden (09:58)
Yeah, I think that's the case. I've experienced situations where sure, it's an a little uncomfortable conversation to simply say, I just don't have the funds to assist the way you want to go. You know, in these situations, you want to listen and try to understand what the PM is looking for, but it certainly can cause tension. It's true that it's all about good communication when you're in situations where required to have to be there and engage in those discussions, being attentive.
Be clear, be good at tracking the progress you're making being clear, tracking what you're doing and, in this case using the process of thematic launches to help avoid some of that challenge that comes when you launch a traditional product.
David Vogelpohl () (10:41)
You have Product managers asking for the biggest megaphone possible for their releases. There's the other marketing departments asking"Can we be more planful so we are able to do a better job? You've also mentioned the switch to thematic product releases. So let's just start simply. What exactly is a thematic release?
Braden (10:59)
Yeah, great question. A thematic release refers to a bundling of products underneath a umbrella of a theme. As an example, B2B as the umbrella and the other products support that theme.
David Vogelpohl () (11:16)
If we're talking about themes-based releases I'm guessing that we're talking about not one each week. It could be that if you're very committed, however, are you doing these in a quarterly manner, or every month?
Braden (11:30)
Good question. We do a spring and summer release, as well as a autumn release. People aren't around in the Christmas season towards the end of the year, which is why we don't release it in that period. However, there are only three releases every year. We also do ad-hoc releases every so often in between.
David Vogelpohl () (11:45)
So the product org will say that each quarter we're going to see this improvement in the theme of this particular product or line of products and we're going to bring it in marketing for the product, and we'll try make it real through a large campaign. And I guess does it contain the components of all of the product lines and feature releases within that subject?
Braden (12:08)
Yes, it will. It contains those components. When we look over our customer map and ask, okay, what are we planned for the next year? And that helps us categorize those products within themes. Therefore, we don't have to go in a downward-facing direction and saying, we need to figure out for theme A What are the items that are relevant to the theme of A? Instead, we will look at what are the suite of products that we're planning to introduce in the coming year?
Then what's the main concept that all of these merchandise can fall under during these seasons.
David Vogelpohl () (12:44)
So you'll have this, you'll increase it. You might be off by a quarter, maybe at the time of release or some other thing, but it could have been a delay, imagine, and you'll be aware of that it's. Yeah. This means you're separating the GA, if you will, from the promotion.
Braden (12:51)
That's correct, yeah.
That's correct. Yeah. And that's a strategy, that's why we've implemented the strategy, and we've got GA activities that we do since these products require promotion after they go live. So, as a part of the thematic process, we are able to have GA tasks and then thematic actions that we could apply to each of our products.
David Vogelpohl () (13:18)
Every new product, if you would like, is a part of the thematic releases. Then you can have a sort of a smaller version for like the GA rollout. This means you have the double dip, it sounds like.
Braden (13:31)
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And it's really helped in ensuring that our internal teams are able to access GA. Therefore, customer success doesn't come about by receiving feedback from our clients. The customers are saying, Hey I'm using this amazing product. I'd like to know more about the product. The team for customer service was not set up. It's not the case since during GA we're releasing FAQ documents as well as value-based messages to ensure that our employees know what's happening.
Also, go-to marketing messages, as the one you cited, could be delayed on occasion. If you have the product release in January and you don't have a thematically release till April, your product won't receive enough marketing coverage early on however it'll be able the chance to be part of an even bigger marketing push later on throughout the year.
David Vogelpohl () (14:17)
If you thought it was extremely tactical, would you include an X you know, a bigger release in between the thematic releases in the event that you happen to have some, like, GA dates for a similar extremely strategic item you've been looking forward to?
Braden (14:30)
Yeah, absolutely. So we have ad hoc releases as well that we do support. we try to limit those to a couple of releases if we can. We've developed a procedure, you know, along with your product team where we have an exchange and discuss, okay, have this great product. The feature doesn't belong to the category, but it's really important for reason A, B and C. We plan to discuss it as a group to make sure everyone's understanding the process we'll follow. You know this will get a separate attention.
The benefit is that you don't need to worry about 15 different products suddenly crashing down at end of each quarter. That's, you know, oftentimes when product is delivering everything at the same time.
David Vogelpohl () (15:08)
Thank you.
One of my top business quips is actually, observation is that, the executives Q3 is the time to start Q3 and the engineering teams Q3 is the time to end Q3. This suggests that the teams are all sort of you know, of course sliding in there at the close to reach those quarterly OKRs. Yeah. Okay. I gotcha.
Braden (15:33)
Yeah, exactly right.
David Vogelpohl () (15:38)
So you have this theme that's due to be released in the this quarter or next but there's a significant new feature or product that isn't compatible with the theme. Are you referring to one of those unique ones you mentioned which might come up within the time between the release of the thematic theme?
Braden (15:55)
Yes, precisely as you would expect. Therefore, I'll provide you with an example from our current work. The release of payments was early this year. We had number of exciting payment features. One of the payments which slipped through the cracks of engineering and couldn't reach it at when the launch occurred was Google Pay and everyone knows Google Pay. Then that we got together to look at the feature and thought, how could we help promote Google Pay? The feature isn't really a business-to-business feature. And so, yeah, we did a little version of the feature for Google Pay.
I have created some documents to accompany it FAQ documents, blog posts or blog post that is promoted on social networks similar to that.
David Vogelpohl () (16:29)
Then what do you do if you have this kind of anchor product release and a thematic release that isn't as good? I mean, it sounded like you still had some anchor product, I guess, in the thematic release Apple Pay slipped from or Google Pay slipped from. But what do 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 waiting and seeing. There have been instances of that. You know, I was speaking with the team behind product today who told me, hey, B2B may be an option to wait and see coming up a little bit later this year. However, the advantage of a theme-driven launch is that A, there's no deadline to meet. We're setting that deadline for us. And so if we need delay that deadline a little bit to better support the product and engineering's deadlines, we can.
or we can adjust those themes at any time. If a major element suddenly doesn't get launched, maybe we could pick up one or two lesser features to form the perfect bundle to fit a theme in a different way. This is why there's some the flexibility in this model that still allows the possibility of changes during the course of the year.
David Vogelpohl () (17:47)
That's a good idea. So as I think of an old-fashioned marketing campaign to promote the release of a feature is like an announcement blog post, maybe a press release or a social media post or email our clients, send our customers emails, this sort of item. How is thematic release different in structure?
Braden (18:07)
It's true, I've mentioned the issue before. The majority of these events continue to happen. In the current thematic time these things continue occurring, but there is what we'll call GA actions. This means that we have a variety of like internal enablement, in -app notifications. If someone could access that piece of software or technology We're providing that technology to our customers and also 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 the more like the same features it's readily available at bits and pieces it's possible to create an even more compelling of the overall value of all of these features together. And so that's a big difference that I see which isn't possible with a release, you know, at piecemeal through the course of the quarter or year.
David Vogelpohl () (19:04)
Yeah. It also is like you are able to elevate the story. Because I think an example that I think is perfect for me is the improvement in quality of life that have been extremely difficult to engineering, but don't necessarily make the product more marketable. Because, do isn't it? Someone who's on the other side doesn't realize there was a problem or something. And, and so it's frequently difficult as Phil or the product manager, to announce, Hey y 'all, we've fixed it. when in reality it is actually beneficial both for the business as well as customers.
Braden (19:08)
Yeah.
David Vogelpohl () (19:34)
And so it feels that thematic releases don't just let you share the megaphone, they also help to enhance the narrative of a few additional quality of life improvements.
Braden (19:43)
Absolutely, yeah, you are able to access, a lot of features benefit from this that otherwise wouldn't get marketing activities or even the benefit of a quick announcement in Pendo. Instead, they're displayed on a page that is a landing site alongside these bigger features that, well, do, as you said, use the megaphone. And there's a lot of benefit for the smaller things, such as enhancements to quality of life.
David Vogelpohl () (20:08)
Okay, so has this strategy worked? How many quarters of your time are you?
Braden (20:13)
This is our third. next month we'll have our third thematic launch this during July.
David Vogelpohl () (20:20)
Okay, so three quarters into the program, do you consider that this has enhanced your ability to manage marketing resources and support launches of products? Or is it too soon to judge?
Braden (20:33)
I would say that it's certainly improved, from my side. I think the improvement I see is not only am I able to better support, the product team, and not just support them, but also coordinate with the other departments of marketing particularly demand generation. They have a lot of lead time now that they did not have prior to the products.
and we can slot things into campaigns that we used to struggle to accomplish. This is the most significant benefit. But then the other benefit is that it has opened the door for us to work on the other ways to expand vertically such as video games, that we might not have had the time or as much manpower to push those verticals forward.
David Vogelpohl () (21:28)
So you mentioned the video game section for a while as well. The company has had video game customers for quite some time from the very beginning of the business. You talked about the company kind of leaning into the video game 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)
Yeah, segments absolutely play big roles. It's true that I've mentioned our next launch is around B2B, a vertical which we're hoping to sell to, and are excited about expanding into. It's possible to imagine a future in which we're doing it with video games too. We've mentioned that we've improved Our Apple Pay and implemented Google Pay. Also, the expansion the vertical theme does not just give you the possibility, but also allows you in terms of...
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 that you might have a difficult time integrating with a traditional launch. So, you'll benefit from a greater, perhaps larger campaign, as well as more value from these launches for your larger organisation.
David Vogelpohl () (22:44)
Excellent. This has been really interesting, Braden. I appreciate the fact that you came to talk on air about this. This was an amazing discussion at Spryng right here in Austin. It was my thought to have it on the show, but this was fantastic. Thanks for being a part of the show.
Braden (23:01)
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for inviting me. It was really fun.
David Vogelpohl () (23:04)
Awesome. Also, if you'd like learn more details about the things Braden is up to, including maybe his next thematic release, you can visit .com. We thank you all for being part of this episode of Growth Stage. I've been your host, David Vogelpohl. I am a huge fan of the community of digital products as part of my role at . It is my pleasure to bring what's best from this community here on the Growth Stage. We appreciate everyone's support.
