How to Organize Communications when Launching a Product [with Useful Examples]
When it comes to product launches, it has been a big year at Lime. Between announcing brand-new features in Lime CRM, launching KPI (a digital reporting tool), and Automated Flows (more on that soon) last year, it’s safe to say that we’ve explored a healthy mix of product launch tactics.
Planning for and executing a product launch is a great undertaking. To stay on track, it’s important that team members communicate with each other: who is responsible for what actions, what is the time-plan and expectations, and more. In this post, I’ll take you through the “highlight reel” of what to consider from a communications standpoint when launching a product.
Covered in this post:
- How to stay on track as a cross-functional team? 🎯
- How to navigate internal communications? 💬
- Where to start when developing external communications? 👀
- Featured jobs at Lime 🍋
How to stay on track as a cross-functional team?
As Product Managers, one of the best parts to planning a product launch is the collaboration with cross-functional partners. Let’s dig into these internal communications by pulling from a real product launch at Lime. Last year, we launched Automated Flows (our new product for building marketing automation workflows) alongside a new “Product Launch Template”. Having a collaborative template in place facilitated better communication by allowing us to asynchronously share information with teammates across different departments and markets. It also served as a project management tool to track responsibilities and milestones.
The goal of having a structured approach is not to force a product launch into a strict playbook, but to serve as a flexible, buffet-style menu where our team picks the appropriate deliverables for the scope of the launch. Not all launches are created equal — so before diving into launch goals, we weigh each launch as “big”, “medium” or “small”. Having this hierarchy helps us gauge the time investment we need to prepare to spend on the launch while also managing expectations. Being that Automated Flows was a brand-new product offering, the appetite for this launch was big.
How to navigate internal communications?
While it’s tempting to jump straight into external communications, prioritize internal communications. Teamwork and open communication is essential to a successful product launch. First, we focused on knowledge sharing within three key stakeholder groups at Lime: Sales & Marketing, Support, and Expert Services (Lime’s CRM consultancy). Here are some things to consider when communicating within your org:
- For Sales & Marketing: Your teammates in these departments have the unique skill and expertise to make a product launch shine in the eyes of your customer. These functional teams should understand and rally behind the product’s value proposition and key messaging.
- For Support: Plan for a technical deep-dive of the product to prepare your customer-facing colleagues once the product launches. For the launch of Automated Flows, we organized two sessions where Engineering took the lead.
- For Expert Services (aka Delivery Experts): When preparing to launch a new product, collaborate with your partners on the delivery side early on. In the pre-launch of Automated Flows, the goal was to define what internal-facing communication needs to be codified and shared with the delivery team before the product launched.
Where to start when developing external communications?
Product marketing is often a combined effort between Marketing, Sales, and Product in the context of launch planning (but of course, there should be clear owners for the deliverables!) Here at Lime, we can lean on experts across different departments to deeply understand our customers’ challenges and develop messaging that resonates. Due to the “big” product launch appetite for Automated Flows, our external communications plan involved a lot of prep. Here are few things to consider when boiling down your external communications plan:
- Email communications and/or segmented email campaigns — what’s the timeline?
- Webinars or other live presentations (for the launch of Automated Flows, Sales held a “webinar-meets-product demo-meets-FAQ” that was shared with our target audience) — which team will develop the content?
- Marketing assets — what is the scope and investment for the creation of new landing pages, blog posts, social media content, video assets, or other visual design?
- If the launch is in the “big” bucket, what criteria will you use to prioritize certain marketing deliverables?
All in all, communicating with your team is the red thread that will pull together your planning process, take you through the finish line, and let you have a great time while doing it!
Featured Jobs at Lime
If you are interested in being a part of product launches at Lime, check out these opportunities with a few of the different functional teams involved in bringing our products to life:
Engineering
- Experienced .NET Software Engineer (Gothenburg, Sweden)
Marketing
- Performance Marketer (Lund, Sweden)
