What are the key stakeholders you need to align for a successful product launch?

I think the earlier that Product Marketing can start collaborating with the PM, the better. Things like product goals, prioritization, value prop, and differentiation are all things that a PMM should help shape and communicate internally, then externally.

One of the biggest areas of alignment between PMM and PM is agreeing, before engaging on launch planning, on what the phases of the launch process (ex - alpha, beta, general release, market release) are and what how a feature, enhancement, product will progress through those phases. Agreement on both sides of the house will keep the GTM motions progressing AND give a clearer perspective to the PM on the requirements a PMM will need at each step and vice versa. Additionally it will help set up an environment for shared goals around product adoption from bringing awareness to beta programs to going live to the broader market.

Go to market strategy for any product is a critical phase in ProductManagement! Positioning of the products and offerings with a clear use case well defined with metrics is a priority task for any PM. Knowing the end customers and targeting the pain points in the existing product and telling the USPs to all internal stakeholders is the right approach .

Product managers help decide the what and why. What’s the gap, why are we producing this? This is fundamental for product marketing to run with the who, how and the why to external stakeholders.

Product, Business & Customer Support/Success teams are the most important stakeholders whom Marketing team should keep engaged and actively aligned for a successful product launch. 1️⃣ As Marketers, you are executing the Product Team's vision. Hence, their alignment will not only be essential but also add value to your GTM strategy. 2️⃣ Business / Sales teams are the ones who will ultimately bring monetary value for the product and the organisation. Don't miss out on their ideas; it's them who spend the most time with the customers. 3️⃣ Proactive support by Customer Success team is crucial as a new product that is being launched might not give the best customer experience. This can negatively affect the future of your product.

The product manager must know all about the key of product and how to develop product include strategy online and offline. And the product manager must be lead the product knowledge.

Product manager is the leader of the team. They give momentum and internal drive to whole team and each team member to reach the final goal. They are and should be the most pro-active person in the team to follow through each process, bottlenecks, challenges with the team. Product managers dynamically align the roadmap, strategy and activities over the team on the way where are changes and updates. What they do is a kind of what project manager does for a project. They are responsible for commercial, financial, physical and strategic part of the product in the middle management level.

Think of the key stakeholders as being in these 3 areas: those who sell it, those who take and process the orders, and those who service/support it. Within these 3 groups, you need to have clear processes and instructions on what they can do to help make the product as appealing as possible to customer adoption. Any breakage will lead to a disappointed customer.

🎯For any product launch to thrive, its core stakeholders must be aligned. Essential Stakeholders to Engage: ✅Product Management: Ensure the product meets market needs. ✅Marketing Team: Craft the narrative and promote effectively. ✅Sales Team: Equip with tools and training for optimal selling. ✅Customer Support: Prepare them for incoming queries and support. ✅Supply Chain & Distribution: Ensure timely product availability. ✅Executive Leadership: Garner support for strategic guidance and resources. Aligned stakeholders drive momentum, ensuring the product launches and flourishes in its market.

Product launch is a cross-functional activity and product marketing acts as a central point to bring together different stakeholders for a successful launch, be it product, engineering, customer success, marketing, or sales. For a successful, you would like to on-board all relevant departments so you don't miss out on anything. Also, it's important to develop a framework so you're not distracted or going off-track with some many people and different opinion around.

While most think of the PM and PMM relationship, setting up alignment with engineering is critical. By building a strong relationship with engineering product marketers can bring a ton of context to the team on the "what" and "why" of each feature/enhancement build. When product marketing acts as the bridge between engineering and the broader market/customer base - better alignment happens when it comes to roadmap planning, prioritizing releases, and build a product strategy that both meets current needs and builds toward the future North Star.

Engineering team acts like mother of the product and responsible for whole product life cycle from idea till launch. Like new mothers they have many concerns, needs, questions and insecurities that should be solved and met by product manager. Listening to engineering team carefully, trying to understand them in the initial steps helps you avoid many challanges and failures in the future.

I will appreciate the inclusion of external partners and affiliates, as well as shareholders and investors, who are often overlooked but can play a pivotal role in the success of a product launch. The focus on establishing feedback loops is also a vital point; it's an ongoing process that can provide actionable insights at every stage of development. One area that might benefit from further exploration is how to manage conflicts of interest between different stakeholders. For instance, the sales team might push for features that can be quickly monetized, while product development may be more concerned with technical feasibility and quality.

Product marketing is the glue between product management and other cross-functional stakeholders across marketing, sales, customer success, enablement, etc. Product marketers (PMMs) should collaborate with product managers (PMs) to develop clear and compelling value propositions that will guide the overall positioning and messaging for launch. Further, PMMs should own the launch process and align stakeholders every step of the way as they execute tactics for an effective launch.

The marketing team is pivotal for a product launch, bridging understanding between product features and market needs. They align with the sales team on narratives and positioning, collaborate with customer support to address potential queries, craft compelling stories with PR, and manage stock surges with supply chain. Financial alignment ensures competitive pricing, while leadership buy-in guarantees resource availability. External partners amplify the message, and feedback from consumers refines the launch strategy. Essentially, marketing harmonizes various stakeholders, ensuring the product's success from pre-launch to post-launch.

A PMM is instrumental in the success of a product launch. They play a multifaceted role in aligning market needs with product features and corporate strategies. They act as a strategic bridge between the product development team and the market, ensuring that the product meets technical standards and fulfills customer demands. PMMs craft compelling and consistent messaging, ensuring that the product's value proposition is clearly communicated to the target audience. Their role in devising comprehensive go-to-market strategies, pricing models, and distribution channels ensures a well-orchestrated launch plan. They empower the sales team with the knowledge and tools necessary for effective customer engagement, driving sales growth.

Sales content and tools alone are not enough. Content must be applied by sellers to be learned and adopted. This requires multiple learning modalities to properly enable sellers. I recommend spaced reinforcement training and coaching to enable sellers to practice their skills using live and virtual role-playing exercises (e.g., one-on-one and in small and large groups) and manager coaching. Increasingly, technology is used to deliver these capabilities (and others such as self-paced, just-in-time and microlearning paths) and bridge the gap between classroom training and the real world.

In my experience, it’s critical to get sales leaders and sales enablement involved early on. They are going to be the ones on the front lines with any new product. It’s important to understand how they plan to sell your new solution without disrupting sales motions for existing products. By talking to sales leaders early, you can identify critical components for enablement sooner rather than later.

One area a strong Sales Enablement team can help with that is often forgotten is acting as the "voice of the Sales Rep." Often your Sales Enablement team is close to the sellers, knows who will be a promoter or detractor in change, and understands when and how to engage them. Enablement goes well beyond training. They are an important channel for feedback - particularly insights from the field.

An enabled sales team is key for launch success. Train comprehensively on use cases so they can confidently articulate benefits. Through focus groups you've already learned what the customer considers a value prop. Share the vision to get them invested. Equip with demos, trials and collateral to showcase value. Incentivize prioritizing the new offering to drive adoption. Solicit feedback on messaging and customer reactions to refine approach. Post-launch, have sales provide input on buyer needs and objections to inform product roadmap. Communicate results and customer success stories to maintain momentum. When sales teams fully understand the product and are dedicated to it, they become the driving force for long-term revenue growth.

Working with customer support/customer success needs to be a two-pronged approach: internal enablement and external educational content marketing. Enabling customer support and success teams to be product experts is critical. In my practice, for example, I host one enablement session that is nitty gritty for CS to better understand the who, what, when, where, and why. By ensuring the internal team really knows the product features and benefits they are quicker to understand the product vision and value and share back meaningful insights from customers. By creating a strong feedback loop, the educational content marketing that a PMM puts out is better targeted, more focused, and delivers information that is aligned with CS knowledge.

Absolutely critical. We often forget to align with the support team. But as per the Flywheel model they are the ones playing an important role in the 'delight' phase and are making the flywheel spin. They are an important source of information for PM on the pains and challenges your customers experience (input into the roadmap) but also could inform them about the new exciting features or SW updates or new product versions and hence influence upsell or repurchases.

I believe the Customer Support team plays a pivotal role. Beyond providing post-launch assistance, these teams can make significant contributions during the user journey creation stage. With their intimate understanding of customer interactions, the support team offers invaluable insights into customer pain points. Their involvement enriches brainstorming sessions, ensuring that the user journey is finely tuned to address customer needs and expectations. By involving the customer support team early in the product development cycle, we ensure that the product not only meets technical specifications but also resonates with end-users.

My last employer referred to this team as "customer success," but whatever name you apply, your Go-to-Market Plan needs to include material for the customer-facing people.

While a product launch requires all teams to be aligned by core team (PM+PMM), its critical to have the key leaders aligned first. Never miss out the CXOs/VPs/Directors/regional PnL owners - their early buy-in will make or break the launch and its impact. Other key stakeholders are your Beta customers, advisory board customers, strategic partners. Product marketers and Product Managers collectively play a profound role in evangelising the launch plan.

Also involve your technology partners and strategic alliances. Update them on your roadmap and ensure your product is tested with their products so you can offer your customers an interoperable or integrated solution. Moreover they can support as well your launch from a marketing point of view.

I would add one thing: it's not exactly about aligning stakeholders, but rather about avoiding prolonged and exhausting alignment processes that can sometimes lead to worse outcomes. This is because sometimes marketing has to align conflicting opinions. When it comes to launching a product, it's absolutely crucial to engage with your users directly. And it's equally important to avoid playing a game of broken telephone with the sales or support department. They view customer interactions through their own lens and might miss or overlook important things that would be of interest to a product marketer. If you haven't had conversations with customers during the product launch process, it's like using a crystal ball.

Your Sales and CS teammates have valuable product information that you ✨simply✨ won’t find anywhere else. So, set up that internal advisory board, send out that feedback survey, or grab that overdue coffee with your teammate in the field. The first step to getting information from sales and cs is breaking down silos and making sharing insights easy.

Don’t forget to engage the broader executive leadership team to keep them informed about the launch progress. You’ll want to make sure they know where your priorities are and how they can engage their teams to help. Every department has a vested interest in growing the business and they all have a role to play. Try sending out an executive update to the leadership team on a regular cadence so they can stay up to speed on what’s happening.

From the start, clearly define each stakeholder's role and involvement. Although many frameworks can guide you, it's all about how you apply them. I lean on the RACI matrix for clarity. I initially set it during the opportunity validation stage and tweak as we progress. Not managing these expectations? Beware of decision-making pitfalls.

Not only is it the various areas noted here that matter. It is the agreed upon communication, contributions, feedback, and so on that will result in a successful launch. Once the contributing groups are identified, it is important that lessons learned be tracked and documented so there is a repeatable, scalable launch process amongst the contributors.

It really isn't that hard. You collaborate with everyone who has something to do with the product The engineering team who built it The product team who oversaw it The marketing team who will popularize it The BD team who will sell it The implementation team who will help activate it The CS team who will track adoption They've seen how this works, how people talk about it, how it was built, why it was built and everything in between. Simple.

Two other teams that need to be aligned for a go-to-market effort are Finance and Legal. The financial and legal ramifications of a new product or new product version may require new ways for these departments to do things - for example, if your previous products were on-premise products and you are introducing your first SaaS product.

Don't forget RevOps - to ensure alignment for product SKUs, pricing, packaging, and execution via contracts and salesforce/CRM for deal desk. Don't forget your enablement team (if you are lucky enough to have one) to coordinate internal trainings and accountability to internalize the value of the launch. Don't forget finance and legal - finance to ensure TAM, profitability, and accrual of revenue and legal in case there are any needs for naming trademarks, contract language, etc. And in customer support, don't forget the implementation team - they are critical to ensuring customer satisfaction from the beginning.