Product Marketing Is Broken -- Fix It With Thematic Product Launches -
Is your product marketing team having trouble coordinating marketing resources in order to handle an unending flow of new product launches with a lack of release dates, and an endless stream of product managers demanding tons of marketing attention for each new release? What if there were some better ways to do it?
- Pay the highest attention to all product releases.
- Create a compelling product story that is more valuable than its components.
- Marketing should be organized and logical so that they are able to do their best for product releases.
If you're running yourself ragged with over-active product roadmaps, incessant "t-shirt" sizing for project estimates that are agile and slipping release dates for your products, or being worried about failing to keep your product managers down, it may be time to look into themes for your product launches. Learn how in this episode of Growth Stage!
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David Vogelpohl () (00:04)
Hello everyone! Welcoming to The Growth Stage podcast by . I'm your host, David Vogelpohl. I am a part of the digital product community through my role as . and I am awed by bringing all the great things happening in community-to-community and to you through this episode of the Growth Stage podcast. This episode, we're going to interview an individual who is uh, truly important to me. He works with me here at . We'll be discussing about product marketing is broken and what you can do to fix it with thematic
new product launches, and I'd like to welcome to Growth Stage Mr. Braden Steel. Braden, welcome.
Braden (00:39)
Thank you for your time, I appreciated your introduction. I'm eager to talk about product marketing today.
David Vogelpohl () (00:44)
Awesome. It's great to work with you here at , Braden. There was an instant of anxiety as I never pronounce your name in public. And I'm like, what if it was some weird pronunciation I didn't know about, or have forgotten over time or something. But welcome here. Of course, it is. And what Braden's going to discuss are his views regarding the flaws in traditional marketing for products and , what we do 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 to ensure that you tell a coherent product story where the whole is worth more than the sum of the parts. This will assist marketing to be more organized and careful so that you are able to provide your best work for your product releases. I was at Spryng hosted by Wynter, W -Y -N T - E -R I think, and S -P -R -Y -N -G, but it's the name of a conference.
We were at a roundtable talking about the different problems and issues in marketing. The subject of marketing for products came up. Many felt they were a bit grumpy and had to deal with every little feature release, new product releases, trying to make a big splash for everything. And the topic of theme-based product launches was brought up by someone was in the group who had proposed it, and we taken it up some time back.
Therefore, I thought that it would be fun to discuss the topic this morning. That's it, Braden, are you ready to kick it off?
Braden (02:18)
Yeah, let's do it. It's a pleasure to discuss the topic. it. it. it.
David Vogelpohl () (02:20)
Alright, good deal. I've been around for some time however I do not have the right answer for the question. What was the first product that you purchased on the internet?
Braden (02:28)
This is definitely a cool topic. I spent some time thinking about it. It was junior high. eBay was hot. It was also when I purchased a PlayStation 2 with a bundle of games. It had like some sports games and some other games. And I agonized over whether or not I should purchase it. But I did and I loved it. I gleaned a lot of enjoyment from that console, and also had lots of enjoyment.
Other options were with my own money I ever received was a guitar. This was the very first thing I bought with my own money online. So that was the other choice.
David Vogelpohl () (03:06)
It's all right. I like the way you distinguished between your own money versus what you think is your how was it as a parent's money? Which way did you finance the PSP?
Braden (03:14)
Yes, I could have made it by weeding the garden or mowing the lawn or something. However, the second one was just like the salary that I earned on my own.
David Vogelpohl () (03:24)
If you're cutting the lawn, you're making cash, Braden. This is fine. Okay, so I gave it away a little at the beginning But, can you talk about your thoughts with viewers about what you do here at or what does and the work you do?
Braden (03:27)
Sure, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, sure. As a Senior Product Marketing Manager here at . My job is everything go-to-market for all of our products as well as the industry we work in as well. So when a product launches, you know, every aspect of messaging that goes under the product, and surrounding it. And then providing support for things like B2B, games and other fields that we're eager to market into. Merchant of Record.
What that means is we take everything from the buy button onwards into a sale experience. We partner with SaaS companies, gaming companies AI-based companies B2B, etc. that. that. that. that.
David Vogelpohl () (04:18)
Excellent, excellent. When you talk about the kind of work you performed, you touched on various areas. The releases of products and feature release. You also touched on verticals. You also mentioned B2B SaaS or video games. And the modern product marketer is often embracing the vertical position for a particular product. This, I believe, adds to the complexity of the product marketing.
What do you think could be broken in the marketing of products? Was there something that didn't work for you using the old model?
Braden (04:56)
Yeah, it's a really great query. It's true that releases of products hinge on a lot of moving factors that are outside of a product marketer's control. For instance, engineering issues or customer commitments required or sales have significance that's"hey, we need to finish this product before the release of another product. And there's a lot of moving parts around these launch. Therefore, it is important to work with the teams from the product team to set commitment dates, and to understand
when are these products going to be available for release? What is the meaning of release? Is it generally available or is it in an early stage of testing? Then the questions begin to arise, when do we want to speak about the software? What are the topics we'd like to discuss? Do we have the ability to talk about it since we're testing it? So a lot of questions are being asked, and there's a lot of confusion arises from this particular model of exactly how engineers and products work. And so I think one of the main issues is
there's just so-- it's hard to envision the finished product and to think about a release date and prepare for the product that is ready to go. And so what happens is product marketers like me end up knowing, for example, one week or two before the launch date, a week before GA, and the manager of the product saying: Hey, this will be finished. And then, get to complete this task. Then it's like I'm holding the faith. There's other things I had to finish. You know, you mentioned verticals. There's been a lot of discussion about verticals.
It consumes a significant amount of time too. The question, you know, I've been forced to resolve and thought about is how can I do the work of launching the product and also the other parts of my work when I have no control over when the launch will take place?
David Vogelpohl () (06:40)
So you've got like these floating timelines, and the product's not ready. They discover a bug just before the deadline. They are able to push through the release, and they get the release out early. You're trying to coordinate sources with marketers from other companies web designers, designers as well as content people and stuff like such. This coordination with floating dates that I'm hearing. Which is the opposite side? Like the one I've...
It's true that I've you know, I've worked in marketing for products and various capacities throughout many years. I'm thinking, I feel as if every time I speak to a product person and they're saying, we're releasing X and I'm going to make a big blast regarding the release. Do you think that expectations about the amount of effort required to promote various product launches can be too much? Could that be a part of the reason why you're broken with traditional product marketing?
Braden (07:28)
Sure. I mean, the product managers are product managers because of a reason. They are the owners of those products. They're super excited about the product. They've been working on these products for understand, all the way to several years that they've been trying to get these items to be released. And so of course they'll want as much support as they can get for these products. It's difficult to get a product manager come to you to say that I'm really excited about this feature.
I'd like a lot of help, so here's a list of my suggestions I'm going the courage to say: we'll let the brakes go slightly for A, B, or C reason, I'm not able to support the idea, or, you know, I'm just not in the mood, or, and that's discouraging and hard to maintain relationships with those product managers because, you know, they might feel that they, you don't wanna help their cause, or do something else. This does not happen. Obviously it's not your intention to assist as many people as 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 the floating dates of the conventional model and then every product manager, just because of all the investment and time they're putting in it It's like, let's make a big bang regarding this. but with all of those requirements, and the dates floating around, it feels a bit like you're not doing your very best job. You're distributing you across a variety of things which makes it difficult to be at your most effective work. That's kind of the gist I'm receiving. Does that sound right?
Braden (09:01)
Yeah, yeah, that's right. You end up at the position where all of things kind of collapse in a single moment. Then you must determine how to achieve everything. And not only is there just 24 hours in a day, let alone the pressure of working for 24 hours and also the stress of trying to think about how to keep all of these items in mind. So, consider these highly technical things and.
make them more compact into an item that's market-oriented. There's certainly many challenges to overcome.
David Vogelpohl () (09:35)
This was something you mentioned a minute ago when we talked about supporting the PMs and their relationship between PMMs and PMs, in the sense of. Do you think that this is the typical form of marketing for products, is it fair to say it has some friction between PMs and PMs?
Braden (09:58)
Yeah, I think that's the case. There have been times when, yes, it's definitely been a bit of a uncomfortable conversation to simply say, I just don't have the resources to support your request. You know, in those cases it's important to be attentive and understand what the PM's looking for, however it does create tension. It's true that you need to be able to communicate effectively in situations where you're in a position where you must be present and be listening.
Be clear, be good at tracking your progress being clear, tracking what you're doing and, in this case, deploying the process of thematic launches to avoid a lot problems that are associated from traditional products.
David Vogelpohl () (10:41)
So you have the product managers requesting the most powerful megaphone they can get to announce their new products. You have the marketers saying, can we be more planful so we are able to do a better job? Also, you've discussed the move towards thematic releases of your products. Let's start with the basics. What exactly is a thematic release?
Braden (10:59)
Yeah, great question. A thematic release is a collection of products under the umbrella of a theme. As an example, B2B as the umbrella and the other products support that theme.
David Vogelpohl () (11:16)
So when we talk about thematic releases, I mean, I'm guessing there's not a single release every week. Maybe, I guess, if you're really aggressive, but like do you release these regularly, on a monthly basis or quarterly? monthly?
Braden (11:30)
Good question. We have a spring or summer and autumn release. There aren't many people around in the Christmas season towards the end of the year, so we don't release it at that time. It's true, only three releases every year. We also do ad-hoc releases occasionally in between.
David Vogelpohl () (11:45)
This is because the product organization intends to announce that every quarter, we'll have this thematic improvement to the product line and then we'll integrate it into the product marketing, we're going introduce it through a large campaign. Does it include the elements of each of the product lines and feature releases within that theme?
Braden (12:08)
Yes, it is. It contains those components. Then we review our customers' map and ask, OK, what's planned for the next year? This helps us classify these products in themes. Therefore, we don't have to go using a top-down method in saying that we have to find a solution for theme A What are the items that are relevant to theme A? Instead, we consider what products we plan to release this year?
Then what's the main concept that all of these merchandise can fall under during those seasons.
David Vogelpohl () (12:44)
You'll be able to see this and you'll amplify it. You might be off by a quarter when the date of release is some other thing, but it could be a lag, I think, prior to you knowing you've got it. Yeah. You're decoupling the GA in the event you want to, from the promotion.
Braden (12:51)
That's correct, yeah.
That's correct. Yeah. And that's a strategy, as we've already deployed, we have GA tasks that we perform, because these features do need promotion when they are launched. Therefore in the thematic process, we are able to have GA tasks and then thematic activities that we can deploy for each product.
David Vogelpohl () (13:18)
Each product release, if you would like, is a part of the themes released. There is also a kind of a small version similar reasons, such as the GA rollout. 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 to make sure that our internal teams have access to GA. This means that customer satisfaction isn't just suddenly getting feedback from customers. They're like, Hey I'm using this awesome product. I want to know more about the product. Our team for customer service was not enabled. It's not the case since in GA we're constantly releasing FAQ documents as well as value-based messages to make sure that our internal teams understand the situation.
Then, the go-to marketing messages, as the one you cited, could be delayed at times. If you've got the product release in January and you do not have a theme-based release until April, that product may not receive the same amount of marketing attention in the beginning 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 include an X that is, an even bigger release in between the thematic releases in the event that you happen to be able to get a, like, GA dates for a similar super strategic thing you were in the process of waiting for?
Braden (14:30)
Yeah, absolutely. Therefore, we do have some ad-hoc release that we do assist with. we try to limit those to a couple of releases if we are able to. We've developed a procedure that we have together with the team of product developers where we engage in a conversation and we think, okay, we know, there's this really fantastic feature. It doesn't fit under the theme, but it's crucial for reasons A and B. So we've planned on that together as a team to make sure everyone's understanding what we're planning to accomplish. And then, you know, that does get separate treatment.
However, the advantage is there isn't a chance of 15 items suddenly crashing down at end of each quarter. That's usually the case when product is delivering everything at the same time.
David Vogelpohl () (15:08)
Thank you.
One of my favorite business quips is not a joke, but an observation. The idea that executives Q3 means the beginning of Q3 while engineering teams Q3 means the end of the Q3. So it sounds like they're all, well, getting in at the conclusion to meet those quarterly OKRs. Yeah. Okay. I've got you.
Braden (15:33)
Yeah, exactly right.
David Vogelpohl () (15:38)
There's this theme due out this quarter or next or something, but you have a big product or feature release which doesn't match with the overall theme. Could this be one of those rare releases you've been discussing that you might pop up during the theme release?
Braden (15:55)
Yes, precisely as you would expect. So I'll give you an example from the work we're currently doing. The release of payments was at the beginning of the year. and so we had a number of exciting payment features. One of those payments that didn't make it into the engineering could not get to it by the time that the theme launch happened included Google Pay and everyone knows Google Pay. Then we took a seat and looked at it and said, how can we promote Google Pay? The feature isn't really a business-to-business feature. And so, yeah we released a tiny release to Google Pay.
It was created with some documents FAQs, a blog post or blog post that is promoted on social networks similar to those.
David Vogelpohl () (16:29)
So what happens then in the event that you've got this sort of anchor product release and a thematic release that falls? I mean, it sounded like you were still using an anchor product, I guess that was the case within the thematic release Apple Pay slipped from or Google Pay slipped from. What do you do? Wait to release this thematic release until anchor products are in place? What else can you do?
Braden (16:54)
Yeah, I mean, it depends. Oftentimes it can be an open-ended wait and see. There have been instances of that. We've had that happen. speaking with the Product team this morning who told me, hey, B2B might be a wait and see coming up a little bit later this year. But the benefit of the thematic launch is A, it's not a deadline. The deadline is set by ourselves. If we have to push that back slightly in order to support the product and engineering's deadlines, we can.
Or we could alter those themes at any moment. If a major feature suddenly isn't gonna get or isn't going to be released, we might pick up one or two lesser features to form the perfect bundle to fit to a particular theme in an alternative way. This is why there's some flexibility that exists within this model that still allows for those changes that happen all through the time.
David Vogelpohl () (17:47)
That's a good idea. As I imagine an old-fashioned product marketing campaign for the release of a feature is like an announcement blog post, maybe a press release or a social media post and emailing our customers. email our prospects, that kind of thing. How does thematic release differ in its structure?
Braden (18:07)
Yes, I mentioned this in the past. The majority of these events still happen. In the current thematic time they are occurring, but there is what we call the GA actions. So a lot more of like internal enablement, in -app notifications. When somebody is able to access this piece of software or technology, we're enabling those customers and those-- our own internal teams. We separate that access from the this theme release.
And then at the thematic moment, instead of paying attention to a large portion of the more like the same features it's accessible, at bits and pieces, we can tell more of a narrative of the overall value of the elements. This is a huge contrast that I've noticed which isn't possible in the case of releasing something you know, at piecemeal throughout the quarter or the year.
David Vogelpohl () (19:04)
Yeah. It also seems to help improve the quality of your story. Since I'm a fan, an example that I think is perfect for me is the enhancements to quality of life which are really difficult for engineers, yet don't always improve the marketability of the product. Because, do are you aware of what I'm talking about? Someone who's on the outside isn't aware that there was a problem or something. So, it's frequently difficult as Phil or the product manager, to say"Hey, y'all! we've solved this. when in reality it was really valuable to the company and customers.
Braden (19:08)
Yeah.
David Vogelpohl () (19:34)
So it's felt that thematic releases don't just allow you to kind of share the megaphone, they also help to enhance the narrative of a few of these more improved quality of life enhancements.
Braden (19:43)
Absolutely, yeah, you have the opportunity to, a lot of functions benefit from this, which otherwise wouldn't get marketing activities or, you know, a short announcement from Pendo. Instead, they live on a page that is a landing site alongside larger features. So, well, do, as you said, make use of that megaphone. There's plenty of value in the small things, such as improvement in quality of life.
David Vogelpohl () (20:08)
Okay, so has this method worked? How many quarters are in?
Braden (20:13)
It's our third launch, we're coming up on our third launch of thematic themes this year month, which will be in July.
David Vogelpohl () (20:20)
Okay, so three quarters later, can you agree that it's increased your capacity to organize marketing resources and support the launch of new products, or is it too early to tell?
Braden (20:33)
I would say that it's certain that it has improved, from my side. I think the improvement I've seen isn't just am I able to better support, the team behind the product, but not just support them as well, but also collaborate with the rest of marketing and demand generation. They have a lot of lead time that they didn't have before about the products.
and we can slot things into the campaigns that previously we struggled to achieve. So I would say that could be the greatest advantage. The other advantage is that it allows time for us to work on the other ways to expand vertically, like into video games and other games, which we would not have had the time to do or not sufficient manpower for pushing those verticals forward.
David Vogelpohl () (21:28)
You mentioned the video game section for a while, and 's had video game players for quite some time, almost since the start of the business. The company was being a bit more entangled in this segment. Are you of the opinion that segments could play a role in thematic releases, or do you believe they are more focused on feature sets?
Braden (21:51)
Yes, segmentation plays an important role. As I said, that our upcoming launch will be focused on B2B. It's a niche that we'd like to market to, and are excited to expand into. There's a possibility where we're doing that with video games too. You know, we mentioned how we've upgraded the functionality of Apple Pay and implemented Google Pay. This is why expanding using vertical themes not only opens up that ability, you know, for...
you get the benefits of the theme-driven launch, however you also gain the benefits of incorporating things such as thoughts leadership into your thematic launch, which you may have a difficult time integrating with a traditional product release. And so you can gain a larger, possibly an even bigger push for your campaign and more value out of this type of launch for the broader organization.
David Vogelpohl () (22:44)
Excellent. Well, this has been a lot of fun, Braden. I really appreciate you coming to talk on air about this. It was such an interesting conversation in Spryng here in Austin. I was thinking it would be cool to have it on the show, but that was awesome. Thank you for joining.
Braden (23:01)
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. It was super fun.
David Vogelpohl () (23:04)
Awesome. And if you'd like to check out more about Braden's work, you can visit www.braden.com. Braden is doing as well as his upcoming thematic release, you can go to .com. Thanks everyone for joining this episode of Growth Stage. I've been your host, David Vogelpohl. I love supporting the digital product community as part of my role as . and I am awed by the opportunity to present what's best from this community to you on the Growth Stage. Thanks everybody.
