This article is based on Derek’s brilliant talk at #GTM23 in San Francisco. GTM Blueprint subscribers can watch the full recording here.
Welcome to space camp! Today, we’ll be talking about launching products and how to turn that process from a chaotic cost center into a revenue-driving, repeatable competitive advantage.
The cost of chaotic launches
Let’s play a quick game of word association. What words or phrases come to mind when you think about the launch process?
Sleepless nights?
Stress?
I talk to product marketers about this all the time, and the most common word I hear is ‘chaos’.
All this chaos not only has a negative impact on our well-being but also that of the company. Let me give you an example. Have you ever heard of Netflix Games? If not, you’re not alone – three months after its launch, less than 1% of Netflix subscribers had even heard that it existed. Unsurprisingly, it was a huge flop. Still, Netflix is in good company – more than 80% of launches fail.
While failed consumer-facing launches are the ones that get all the negative headlines and public shaming, B2B launches are equally at risk. You cannot afford to run a failed launch; it’s extremely costly.
Just think about the underlying costs of a bad launch process. Think about all the internal teams that end up frustrated. I've talked to plenty of people who have left their companies because of the shoddy launch process, and replacing an employee costs twice their salary.
And then there’s the cost of confusing customers. That’s a great way to make them churn, and it costs five times the value of a customer to replace them.
Plus, there are the hundreds of hours of product development time, hundreds of hours spent repairing the launch, and the revenue opportunity – all of it, up in smoke.
Even very small launches that go wrong at very small companies can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. For bigger companies, it can be hundreds of millions of dollars. According to IDC’s research, for every $1 billion in corporate revenue, $100 million is lost due to ineffective go-to-market processes.
The power of viral product launches
But enough about the downsides – let's talk about how launches can catalyze growth.
The best companies in the world use launches masterfully. Think Apple, PlayStation, and Salesforce – launches are the core drivers of their annual performance, with up to 60% of their revenue coming during launch windows.
And this isn't just the domain of big companies – even very small startups can harness the power of launches. Look at early-days Uber, before they were the Uber we all know today – they were driving growth through small launch campaigns in each local market.
Similarly, Slack attributes a lot of its early growth to the effectiveness of its release process.
I've even got some fun startup launch stories of my own. When I was at an eight-person mobile keyboard app developer called Flexi, we turned one of our future releases into an opportunity to set a Guinness World Record. It drove five million downloads.
So what are these successful companies actually doing differently when it comes to launches? Well, first they approach launches with a wildly different mindset. They don't view launches as just another project to check off. Instead, they see them as opportunities to catalyze step-function changes in growth.
Think of company growth like a race car. You're constantly optimizing to push the engine faster – sales selling, running ads, and improving features. But there's a top speed you'll max out at.
Launches are like gear shifts – they give you sudden bursts of speed when you most need them. A new product line or market expands your total addressable market (TAM) by giving you an entirely new audience. A major new feature plugs a retention gap.
Launches also make your other growth activities more efficient for a period by capturing customer attention. The companies that excel at this recognize that nailing launches is the difference between winning and losing.
Why launches go wrong
When launches fail, companies default to blaming strategy – did we build the wrong thing? Did we target the wrong audience? Use the wrong channels? Did we not spend enough?
But strategy isn't usually the problem. The real issue is whether the company can actually execute that strategy. Even the best strategies fail if you lack the operational readiness to activate them across your org. That comes down to thorough cross-functional planning and alignment, which tends to be the weakest link.
McKinsey looked at the launch processes of hundreds of companies, from Fortune 100 corporations to tiny startups, across industries like tech, CPG, and entertainment. They found little correlation between launch success and things you'd expect, like company size, launch frequency, and budget.
Here are the three things that did matter:
- Having a proactive, repeatable launch planning process
- Utilizing research throughout the process
- Internal coordination and communication.
Alignment is key – marketing can't promote what they don't know is coming, sales can't sell without the right materials, and no one will prioritize the launch unless they understand its importance.
Diagnosing where your process breaks down starts with asking three questions:
First, are people constantly questioning the strategy or arguing over it? If so, they likely lack visibility into the research and context driving your product roadmap and go-to-market strategy. There may also be unclear ownership of the process, leading to dropped handoffs between siloed teams.
Second, does launch planning feel scrambled and reinvented each time? That signals an unstructured process without dedicated roadmapping or automated timelines, which means you constantly end up in reactive mode.
Third, do sales and customer success seem off-message? That's a communication issue – you can't expect teams to seek out your launch plans and messaging; you have to proactively inform them.
Fixing these problems can be challenging, but it’s well worth it. It allows you to make your launches more strategic and scalable. The right process can lead to higher sales from upsell opportunities, better retention through customer engagement, and improved marketing efficiency from cross-functional alignment. But it starts with addressing where communications are breaking down.
How to set your team up for launch success
So, let's dive into how you can build a process that sets your team up for launch success.
Step one: Fix your team structure
It all starts with taking an honest look at your team structure. Chances are, like most companies, your company has underinvested in product marketing and scoped the role too narrowly.
You may have seen that Airbnb recently rebranded product management to product marketing. At the same time, they expanded the role to be an end-to-end owner of the launch process. This aligns with how the most effective product marketing orgs operate.
In many companies, product marketing is an enablement function, plugging gaps in various orgs but lacking any operational influence. This means execution becomes disconnected and tactical, with teams pulling in slightly different directions. Not exactly a recipe for alignment!
In more mature marketing orgs, like those at Apple and Airbnb, product marketing and product management are practically joined at the hip. More importantly, they’re empowered to be true strategic orchestrators of the launch process.
They often even own the product P&L, allocating budget to executing teams for tactical planning within their channels. Campaign plans and content route through product marketing for approval. The executing teams still own evergreen work independently, but go-to-market planning and campaigns involve product marketing much more centrally.
By adopting this kind of centralized approach, you’ll create a unified strategy, streamline operations, and ensure everyone is aligned. Crucially, you’ll also give product marketing the ownership they need to drive an integrated launch process.
So, take a look at how your product marketing role is scoped and where it sits within your broader team structure. Empowering it to be a true strategic owner of the launch process could be a game-changer.
Step two: Shift your mindset
Step two is to shift your mindset from a project approach to a product approach for launches.
It's important to think of go-to-market not as a one-off project, but as an ongoing enablement exercise. When you view launches as projects, you focus on checklists over outcomes.
Instead, you should think of the go-to-market process as a product that you need to sell to internal teams. Give those internal teams what they need to buy into and properly execute launches. That means having a single source of truth, driving consistency between launches, and delivering value through research-backed strategies.
Step three: Build great processes for great launches
It’s vital to build a repeatable cycle where research, planning, execution, and measurement connect. To make this work, you need the following components in place:
- First, make it consistently executable but flexible enough to adapt to different launch types and sizes. In practice, that means using a tiering system and a bill of materials for different launch types and sizes. This will allow you to minimize the amount of time you spend building and sharing plans and maximize the time you spend on strategy and execution.
- Second, connect context to content. All handoffs should explain the "why" behind plans, not just the "what." Centralize all this information into a single source of truth, whether that’s a giant Google Doc or a more specialized knowledge base.
- Third, communicate proactively. Rather than talking to teams in an ad-hoc manner, you need to be regularly pulsing information out to teams.
But what does that “pulsing” cadence look like? First, it should include targeted notifications to sales when new features ship – don't just expect them to notice on their own. Give them the intel they need, directly in the tools they use every day.
You also need monthly recaps of recent and upcoming launches blasted out to the broader company. Keep people in the loop on what's happened and what's ahead so they can plan accordingly.
The key is proactively reaching teams through the channels they live in. Don't rely on them seeking out launch info – actively push it their way.
This process also needs automation wherever possible. I’d recommend automating everything from handoffs to communications to research collection. Chances are, you’ve got a lot on your plate; if you systematize and streamline everything you can, it’s going to make your life much easier.
Optimizing your go-to-market processes like this gives you tremendous leverage and allows you to scale your launches, even as a small team. When I implemented these processes at Rippling, it allowed a three-person product marketing team to support 12 product lines with new features shipping constantly.
Key takeaways
Let’s recap the key steps we covered with a little acrostic:
- Launch with purpose
- Automate repeatability
- Unify a source of truth
- Narrate with insight
- Communicate proactively
- Have fun!
Finally, if you're leading this change, don't wait around for permission or consensus before acting – just do it. Roll out a structured launch process for a few launches and let the stellar results speak for themselves.
