Launch Products Like a Pro With PMM Camp’s Tamara Grominsky [+ Video]

I’d love to dive into how a product marketer like you sees the go-to-market  process. What do you think are the most important elements of a product launch?

That’s a really good question because, too often, people just jump into launch tactics without actually knowing if it will be successful. A successful product launch starts with a clear strategy. What are we working towards? What would be a good look at the end of this?

There are three main things to consider when executing that launch strategy: positioning, messaging, and alignment. 

Before you can jump into the tactics, you need to understand how this new product or feature fits into the market. What makes it unique? Who is this for? What problems are you solving for them? How are we packaging this value in a compelling way? Is this something that’s going to be available for all customers? Or only certain tiers? People often skip this step, especially marketers. They assume the product team has this all figured out. The most successful launches really spend time on this component.

Once we understand this, we can move into the messaging part. The messaging part is where you’re trying to translate the positioning that you just determined. So who is it for? And why? It matters when building a compelling story that will resonate with the market and with your audience. This is when you can actually start working on things like the value proposition, the features, and the benefits.

The last component of a successful launch is enablement or alignment. We need to make sure that things are aligned internally and externally. Internally, all teams need to be on the same page. They need to be singing from the same songbook, which is why that messaging step is so important. 

Externally, it needs to feel fully aligned to the customer. We have all these different teams working on launch, and sometimes, it can feel really disjointed. But to the customer, we want it to feel like one campaign created by one person from the beginning all the way to the end.

If you’re able to execute this recipe, then I think you have a pretty good shot of having an effective product launch.

You stressed that the internal part is one of the most important when trying to ensure a smooth launch. Which teams or roles should be involved in the launch process, and how can product marketers foster effective collaboration among these groups?

Generally speaking, the launch is a cross-functional activity, and it will include product marketing and maybe engineering if the product is very technical. Sometimes, we think of product marketing as the representation of marketing. But that’s not true, right? There are a bunch of different marketing teams that need to be there. Some companies will have an integrated campaign manager, and that’s the perfect representative for a launch team. 

If you don’t have an integrated campaign manager, then you might actually have a few folks from marketing representing the launch team. However, that becomes a lot to handle because everyone has different expectations based on where they’ve worked before or how they’ve launched products before. 

I think one of the best ways to foster collaboration is through clarity. I always start by aligning on an accountability matrix. So everyone knows why they are part of the launch team and what they are accountable for. One of the things I see go wrong is when someone from the sales team joins the launch team to represent sales but doesn’t actually take what happens at those launch team meetings back to their team. It’s a two-way street. 

From there, it’s just about getting that clarity. So, I always like to do a kickoff meeting. Then, I’ll have a recurring launch team meeting that’s on the calendar until the point of launch, so everyone knows what to expect, from shared documents and artifacts to the GTM plan. It’s really just about having one place where everyone can go to get anything related to launch.

Being clear about what decisions people will or will not be involved in is really important. I like to be explicitly clear about decisions that have already been made that are not up for discussion with this group or if there is a decision to be made with the group. It’s not always group decisions. Everyone owns certain things; it’s good to be clear about that.

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Product marketing often acts as a bridge between various teams. How do you see the role of a product marketer evolving throughout the stages of a product launch?

I love that you brought this up because I think this concept of evolving is a really important concept for us to understand. A lot of the conversation around the concept of launch in the product marketing space is the idea that product marketers aren’t project managers. We’re strategists. There can be a lot of tension there because, at the end of the day, the launch does need to be project-managed, and we don’t all work at large companies with a project management team. And so it’s really important to untangle this. 

The role of a product marketer evolves throughout the process. Early on, the product marketer wears the strategist hat. They are deeply involved with the product team on market research, trying to figure out what the opportunity is. They’re embedded with the product team to identify who we are building the product for and what problem we are solving. That includes doing customer interviews and market interviews, as well as developing that positioning piece.

Eventually, we don’t need a strategist the entire time. Next, we need someone who’s going to take that strategy and bring it to life. As we get closer to the launch day, product marketers actually become more tactical and more executional. The next step is ensuring that the messaging is aligned and that it’s communicated across all teams and channels. This is where we wear our communicator hat. 

Finally, as you approach the launch, this is where your collaborator hat comes on. Your collaborator hat goes on because now you’re almost like an air traffic controller. All of these other teams are focused on their projects. The paid ad team is making sure their ads look the best. The website team is working on the website. Sales is working on the pitch deck. Your job is to make sure all of those things make sense together and will be done in time. It is a lot of coordination.

There is one final hat, which is the analyst hat. Often, we think that the launch ends on launch day. But launch is not a point in time; it happens before and after a release. After we’ve launched everything well, we need to measure the results. We need to measure the results in aggregate, not just channel by channel. This means gathering feedback, making sure that we’re adjusting this campaign, and learning for future campaigns.

I want to highlight your expertise as a coach in the product marketing space. In your coaching work with product marketing leaders, what are some of the most valuable lessons or strategies you share with them to help them lead successful product launches?

There are a few, and I think it’s good to highlight them. 

The first one, and we did hint at this, is aligning on a shared definition of success early. This is where I see a lot of launches breaking down for product marketers. Often, the CMO has a different expectation of what a good launch looks like. So do the CEO, the CPO, the head of sales, and the marketing director. 

The role of a product marketer is to work with the product manager as a team to identify the main goal and then communicate that with your stakeholders. Sometimes, you might have to have a definition of success that you disagree with. But that might be how the company views success. 

The second one is before you even start to launch anything, build a shared definition of a tiering system. How will we prioritize launches? Is this a tier one? A tier four? How do we treat tier ones versus tier fours? This removes all of the subjectivity. 

The product managers are always gonna think that their product is amazing because they’ve spent so much time building it. The marketing team is always going to push back because they don’t have the capacity. The CEO loves everything that comes out and wants to tell everyone. Having a framework really simplifies all of this because it just makes everything objective. It also doesn’t mean you can’t adjust it, but it’s a good starting point for that conversation.

The third one is to map the customer journey. We talked about this, but so often, as subject matter experts, we get so deep into how we can build the best web page or how to build the best messaging or the best ads. But what is this actually gonna feel like for the customer or prospect? 

As a product marketer, I like to map out the whole lifecycle of a launch campaign and review the assets in order with my final stakeholders. What’s the first thing that this customer is gonna experience? What message needs to come next? Is there a gap here? Does it make sense that we’re sending them to that location? Having those answers is gonna really elevate your campaigns.

Finally, prioritize ruthlessly. You’re always gonna want to do more than you probably have time, resources, and bandwidth to do. Your job as a product marketer is to make those hard decisions. Sometimes it means cutting one team’s project from the launch plan. But this is your responsibility. I think we can be afraid of being seen as mean. But your job is to do the prioritization. So at the end of the day, you need to do it.

It would be silly of me not to talk about what’s on everybody’s mind, AI. Some people might not think of product marketing as being heavily affected by AI, but it’s really touching every aspect of business. 

How do you see AI influencing product marketing and product launches specifically, and what opportunities or challenges do you think it will present for leaders in the future?

Well, first, AI offers the opportunity to personalize at scale. So, when we think about launch campaigns, we know that the more specific the message, the better it will perform. This is just true about marketing. Today, that would mean that we would have to create a lot of different versions of launch assets. AI is just making that so much easier. We’re no longer having to manually craft every piece of content for launch.

The second thing I’m seeing with launch is a lot of PMMs using AI to get a first draft of that messaging framework and even a first draft of some of the marketing assets. They are putting that positioning document that we talked about early on into AI and asking how we might market this from a messaging perspective. It’s never good enough right away, but it solves that blank page challenge.

If we go beyond launch, there are other things like data collection. As a product marketer, we’re heavily involved in research. That’s one thing that a lot of other marketers or other people in tech don’t realize is such a heavy component of product marketing. But we need to collect competitive insights. Let’s say you have five or ten core competitors. They’re constantly changing things and updating their website and their pricing. AI is now being built into a lot of tools where they’ll actually monitor all of that for you. That is another core area where we’re seeing it being incorporated early. But I think we’re gonna see even more.