How to Build Your Launch Goals From Scratch in 4 Steps w/Tamara Grominsky

Speaker A: Product, uh, marketing for you. Product marketing for you. Product marketing for you. Product marketing for you.

Speaker B: Okay, so, uh, I was in PMM camp the other day, and there was this great thread about product launch goals and how to set that. Uh, someone was asking, hey, how do I even go about this? And you, Tamara, jumped in and almost perfect timing, because this is one topic I needed to cover still. You just laid out this beautiful run of things that we're gonna actually talk about on this episode. I'm really excited about it. Cause I think it's gonna help a lot of PMMs to either pick apart or understand how to approach this. Because it is. It can't feel like wizardry. It can feel a little bit of like, crazy science. And in reality, it's probably somewhere in between, but you have the expertise. Thank you for joining me on first and foremost.

Speaker A: Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Speaker B: Yeah. Fellow PMM campers, of course, you're the queen of the PMM camp. But my first question for you. Um, you've probably seen a lot of things, as have I. Um, and you have a treasure trove of experience and learnings. Um, but you said one thing that caught my goal, caught my eyes, is that you always start when you think about a product launch, connecting things back to the company goal, whether it be to acquire new customers, keep them expand, enter a new market. Um, um, talk us through that. What does that conversation have to come first before anything else?

Speaker A: Yeah, it's a great question. And honestly, I've just seen this happen so many times with the people I've managed. Someone will come to me and be really stressed and anxious and be like, I know I need to set a goal for this launch. I don't know what to do. It feels like they're just like picking a number or even a category of KPI out of a hat. And there's a lot of anxiety for product marketers because they feel like they're going to be held accountable for whatever this thing is, but they have no idea how to do this thing. And so, as you mentioned, yes, part of it, it is like art and science, but it's actually much more logical than you might think. And so that is the first question I'll always ask them for, is like, what are we trying to support with the company goal? Like, what is the company trying to achieve by creating this? Um, and let's just link back to that, right? So are we creating this feature because we want to unlock a new market, or are we trying to solve a problem within our existing market are we trying to minimize, uh, churn? We have to understand, like, the underlying company goal. Reason being that in order to get alignment, uh, across the company and in order for us to actually drive something meaningful, we need to know, like, what we're working back towards. Right? So if we think it's one thing, but the company actually wants us to be working on something else, regardless of the number that you hit, it's going to be bad. You know what I mean? Um, you're not going to get the recognition that you actually want. And so it's almost just like coming back to basics.

Speaker B: No, that's great. And it's so viable because no one wants to be running the wrong direction. Speaking of the wrong direction, there's also something that caught my eye in this post. Specifically. Um, you actually have gotten really comfortable with asking, why are we building this? Now, that's a question that not a lot of PMMs may be comfortable asking, especially if you're in a new job, you're new to a role, you're associate pmm, like, there's a lot of factors. Um, but there's a bigger problem if that question isn't asked and you don't understand that. Can you unpack for this? Like, what does that alignment actually unlock once you have it?

Speaker A: Totally. So this often is like part of that first conversation. So let's say I'm a PMM and I'm not sure what I should be measuring with this launch. So I go to the product manager and I'm just saying, you know, what company goal are we supporting with this? That seems like an easy enough question. Right? Um, and if the product manager can't answer, well, this is meant to unlock this new target Persona we just talked about. Or we've been getting, you know, X amount of increase in churn. And so we're building this to do that. You should start to be worried. Right? Oftentimes you will hear something like, this feature is going to unlock everything. This is actually going to be a full life cycle thing. This is going to be usable by every segment that we have. And while that might be true, especially for like a tier one launch or a larger feature or say like a net new product that you're bringing out, there's still a reason that we built this. Yes, we might get, you know, retention impacts, but we built it for acquisition and so it's all about getting really clear. Um, and I would say, you know, how do you handle this conversation with a product manager, especially if you're a Little bit more uncomfortable, or maybe there's a tense relationship there already ready. You want it to not come across as accusatory. You don't want it to be like you are an idiot. You don't even know why we're building this. Right. I would say like approach with a sense of curiosity and almost position it as a team effort. So it's like, how do we both position ourselves as a team to get the highest impact outcome for the business so that everyone views this as a successful launch? Um, so you know, I kind of put in my post, yeah, why are we building this? I probably wouldn't say that explicitly to the product manager unless I had an amazing relationship with them. But that's the answer I'm trying to get for myself and I'm just trying to peel back the layers a bit. Um, so it is a bit nuanced and it does take practice. But I think that is what you're trying to optimize for is getting the answer to that question and ideally not just getting the answer to that question, but getting your product manager on board with you so that you both are giving the same answer. Because again, if you kind of have two different perspectives, they might be optimizing for one thing and you think you're optimizing for another and, and you're just going to be moving in two different directions, reporting on two different things and it's going to end in a bunch of confusion.

Speaker B: And that's a great point. And we almost always internally as a company, drink our own champagne when it comes to the features we're developing, thinking it's going to be the best. Uh, it's going to do X, Y and Z. It's oftentimes product marketers role to help hopefully bring things a little bit back to reality, ground it out. So that's such a perfect point. Okay. You've got your company goals aligned, you've got an understanding of why we're building something and getting ready to launch something. We'll call that alignment M, at least in this first phase. Right. Um, but then you start to think about breaking into assumptions from my understanding and you know, that could cover segments, customer count, upsell percentage, sales. There's a lot of different things. Like do you have a real life example where you've taken uh, you know, those preset ups and translating to a hypothesis of hey, what does this actually look like in the real world?

Speaker A: Totally. So I'll just take a step back and walk through like theoretically how I think about it and then we can Bring in an example if that works. Um, because oftentimes the output of the conversation we just had with our product team is, I actually don't know, like the product manager is going to say something like, hey, I was told we had to build this. It came, we had some customer tickets. The CEO was really passionate about it. It was on the roadmap. Um, I've been told it supports the full life cycle. And again, from the product manager's perspective, that could be true because they're just thinking of like an evergreen product. But from our perspective as a product marketer, the launch needs to be focused on something in particular and it's our responsibility, as just kind of hinted, to surface the right opportunities back to the product team. So that's where these like, assumptions come into place. So, you know, either you have a very clear understanding like, hey, this is a revenue driver and it's actually for expansion revenue, or probably more likely, I actually don't know what we should focus on for launch. Is this a acquisition thing or a retention thing? Is this an expansion thing? Um, in which case you need to bring a few potential options to the table. It will. Both of those scenarios are going to bring you to this step here. So, um, what you want to do is you literally just want to start putting some numbers to it. It's like market sizing but for a launch. Right? So I'll give an example. I can give a couple different examples. But going back to unbounce, this is taking me way, way, way back. Um, when I joined actually we were already in development of a, ah, product called Smart Traffic. And Smart Traffic was basically like a B testing on like juiced up. So instead of just saying A versus B, it was like a multivariate testing. And again, it had a scenario where like the product team was amazing, the product was awesome. But the answer I was getting is like, well, anyone could use this and it's going to help all of our customers and we're going to throw it in every plan. And so what I did was I actually just took a step back. I understood the functionality, worked with the product team to understand, and I started to think about, okay, is this for small customers who, you know, don't know what a B testing is and this is like a pathway in for them. Is this for larger customers, like enterprises who um, know what a B testing is, but they just want like a different approach, try to like break it down a couple different ways. And we actually did some, some math and we said, okay, well how many customers do we have in each of those groups. Great. How many of those people are actually doing AB testing today? Okay, it's 20% of this group. It's 80% of this group. Now what's the business opportunity? If we put this into a package that's one package up, do we think we could actually get this amount of people to expand? Now does the math work? If we take 2000 customers and only 20% of them are doing a B testing, so we assume only 50% of them might even be interested in a better way of AB testing and we can convert X percent. Well, is this worth launching if we're going to only get four customers to upgrade? You know, and so it's literally just backing out multiple scenarios and trying to get to a realistic path forward that is, you know, reasonable for the business, exciting for the business and will allow you to be successful in your launch goals. Does that make sense?

Speaker B: It does. And I love the multivariate portion of battle. I've used it for years. So it's always fun to come across these stories where like you are part of that. Um, and so that makes total sense. Now you've gone through, you've aligned, you've done a heat check on why are we building this. You start to make your assumptions. The last step from your point of view is how do you bring in your cross functional teammates to basically heat check, hey, are these realistic? Are these sane? Do these make sense? What does that look like? I'm assuming that's been born out of experience of some pain points too and learning over cycles of taking this. But how do you bring those teams in to help refine your goals?

Speaker A: Yeah, that's another great question. And again, the reason I think a lot of people don't do this today is that they're scared of being held accountable for something that they come up with. What if you did overestimate what percentage of people might use this? What if you did overestimate what percentage of people might expand? And the more senior you get and the more context you have about the business, most likely your assumptions will be higher fidelity because you will just know more and have seen more. But especially let's think you're a product marketing manager. Maybe this is one of your first large launch as you're responsible for, you're like, you're really putting together swag. So I remember when I was at FreshBooks, my manager was like, it's a swag. And it's like, what's a swag? It's a sophisticated wild ass guess, right? And and so what we want to do is we want to take our swags and we want to get to a high confidence part. So that's where we bring in the people who know more than we do. So ideally you're working with your product manager already, so hopefully they're helping you validate some of these assumptions. But if they're not, now you want to bring them in, but then you're looking around the org and you're saying, well, who el needs to buy into this? If you're in like a sales led organization, um, you're going to want to go and talk to the sales team. Like, you know, typically, what's your close rate with this type of segment that we identified, we might want to launch for. Okay, great. Do you see any, um, challenges with the metrics, like how I'm thinking about the pipeline breakdown? No. Okay, good. That you're going to finance and you're saying, well, do we have any historical data on something that was similar to this? Are these percentage assumptions correct? Is there anything that you could bring to me that I don't already have plugged in? Can you just pressure test my thinking? And you're just wanting to kind of get the missing pieces of the puzzle that you don't already have now just to say it. Also, if this is a super big launch, you might even be bringing some of these folks in from the very beginning, especially if you're, uh, lucky enough to work with the product team during discovery. This is often the type of work I'll do as a product marketer during discovery is sizing these multiple opportunities to help guide the product from the beginning around, like, what should we be optimizing for? Like, okay, we know we want to, um, drive revenue with this launch, but what should we be doing? And so I'll try to negotiate and try to figure out all of the right opportunities to kind of guide them in the right spot. So just to point that out that it doesn't have to come at the end. They could also be brought along, but that's probably more rare, to be honest.

Speaker B: No, that's perfect. And so I've also learned that lesson is sequencing does matter, especially on the larger ones, but, ah, even the smaller ones where you need to set expectations of, hey, this is not going to drive a hundred new signups. It is a Tier 2 minor feature release. Let's be realistic here. Uh, we've crushed things and this has been the most efficient, like 13 minutes I think I've ever done on this so far. Um, if there's one thing that, hey, there's a PMM that's looking down the barrel of a, uh, product launch and they want to say, hey, I'm listening to what you're saying. Still not comfortable with where to start, who to talk to. What's your number one thing to just get over that hump and get moving?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's getting a really good understanding of the levers that you can pull to drive revenue growth inside of your business. Most people, it's actually kind of scary to say this, but most people don't understand what those are for their business. Like, they understand at the highest, highest level. Like, yeah, we want acquisition and then we want to convert those new people and then we want to retain them. But, um, the one thing I always recommend that people do do is they build out a KPI tree for their business. And now this doesn't have to be for anyone else. You don't need to like get the executives on board, you don't have to use it as a team tool. But like, you yourself should be able to plot out what your KPI tree is. And so what does that look like? Which I'm sure is going to be your next question. So a KPI tree just goes down branch by branch. So we're going to start, we're going to say, great, how does this business work? If you're a PLG business, it might work different than a sales LED business. We're just going to map out those like level one metrics. So let's just go with acquisition, conversion, engagement, retention, expansion. Now we want to understand, well, how do we actually drive acquisition in this business? How do we actually drive conversion in this business? So we could click down and we could say, okay, acquisition. We want to like, get in front of new people. We also want to drive more people to our website and then we want to convert website views or leads in general into demos or trials. Okay, great. We're probably still not at an assumption that's going to be helpful for a product marketing manager. Right. Um, unless you're working on a super massive project. So we want to go one level down. Well, what are all the things we do to convert someone off of the website? Okay, well we can do X, Y and Z. And so you want to do that for like every metric that the business has. And if you don't know what those are, that's a great thing to bring to your manager and say, oh, I'm trying to get a really good understanding of the business. Here's what I've mapped out, like, where have I gotten this wrong? Or where are there other levers that you view? And then once you have this KPI map, this is the thing that I pull up every time I'm doing opportunity sizing for a project, whether it's a launch or any other initiative I'm working on. And I'm isolating where on the KPI map do I think we can impact, uh, for this particular project that I'm working on. And so not only does it give you a menu of options, which I think is where a lot of people get stuck, they're like, I don't even know what the options are. But it allows you then to connect your menu Item back up, 1, 2, 3, 4 levels to a much larger company goal.

Speaker B: Okay, go on. All this sounds familiar because there's so many great resources I've actually used from PMM camp. Uh, who lovingly is the sponsor for this season, a partner. Thank you, Tamara, for that. Um, and it just goes to expand, like, hey, this is kind of like this. If this is your first jump into this, there's resources out in the wild. Um, which brings me to the point of like, hey, go follow Tamara on LinkedIn. I'll leave her bio link in the notes because she drops stuff like this. It seems like nonstop every week, especially with cool little graphics that still, I'm not totally sure how you do all this, but I digress. Um, there has been so much of this that has been crushing in 16 minutes. I'm so thankful. Uh, first of all, thank you, uh, for dropping in, being so gracious with, sharing all of this from your experience, your insight, and walking us through how to set and how to think about setting goals and targets for a product launch. Second, um, of all, if people do want to connect with you, LinkedIn, any other places, that would be a great place to jump in.

Speaker A: I also send out a newsletter every Sunday. It's free. Over 9,000 product marketers get it. And I always say it's kind of like having a cup of coffee with me on Sunday mornings. And I talk about literally product marketing strategy, but I also make it super actionable. So that would be another great resource. People could it.

Speaker B: I love that. And I'll leave the link in the show notes for that too. I read it every weekend. I love it. And, uh, as so many other PMMs do as well. Tamara, thank you for dropping by. This has been awesome. Exactly what I was hoping for. And then some out of this episode. And if you're still listening, thank you. It's been another episode of product marketing for you. Uh, and if I can't officially say this, you could feel free to go follow and rate a five stars on Spotify or Apple Podcasts wherever you listen to this. Uh, other than that, that. Tamara, thank you for hanging out and have a great one.