How ProdPad manages releases with Sales, Success and Marketing
Product teams don't work in isolation and it's no different here at ProdPad. Our Success, Support, Sales and Marketing teams are integral to the process. In this article, we talk through how Product manages feedback and ideas but what happens when those ideas are released?
Once an idea has been validated, specced and queued for dev, our product team creates a launch spec in Notion (our team's workspace of choice) which sets out a summary of the idea, a run-through of the prototypes and links to the idea information in ProdPad. We use a set template with a checklist of all the key areas we need to consider around who needs to be updated about the feature and how widely it needs to be communicated and how we will do that communication.
When created, the launch spec is then pinged in Slack to our "launch" team which contains a representative from each team (Sales, Marketing, Success and Support) to review and action any to do's and start to plan if needed, any marketing campaigns or communications that should run alongside the product launch. It's also a chance for anyone on the team to ask the product team any questions.
Once reviewed and okayed by the launch team, the launch actions are then in flow with the relevant people as the functionality or new feature moves through development with the idea being, once ready for release, everyone has had the time to get ready.
One thing we do at ProdPad is we like to consider the first few weeks a soft release. The product release is done and the functionality put live in the hands of our users, but very rarely at this stage will we do any marketing on said release. This gives us the chance to see how users are interacting with and using the functionality/feature and if needed, allows us to make any tweaks before we start shouting about it.
Once it is bedded in and had a good run through (around 4 weeks), any marketing campaigns will then go live, and our product and success team will go back to any of our customers who had feedback to see if what we released solved their problem - a great opportunity to check back on if we hit our target outcomes or if there are still problems that need solving and document accordingly. More on that process for how we close that loop with our customers here.
One thing to note is that this isn't the only communication between Product and the customer-facing teams. Product representatives join our regular customer catch-ups and keep us up to date with the progress of key features and areas of discovery. Using ProdPad, everyone has access to the roadmap and also ideas workflow.