By Lauren Costella
As a Customer Success leader in a SaaS-based environment for start-ups and SMBs, I have found the product release process to be a tough one. Why? Because often there’s a lack of a company strategy around the communication of a release, ownership of the process, or shared outcomes and metrics. As a result, there’s confusion about what is happening with the product, why these changes are happening, who and how various audiences benefit from those changes, and when those changes will take place.
As part of my blog for The Success League this month, I’d like to share some best practices for putting in place a communication strategy for a product release or, at the very least, a guide to asking the right questions internally to see if one already exists within your organization.
Please note that these best practices don’t cover the process for building products: I leave that to my colleagues and leaders within product and engineering. Rather, this is more closely aligned to how to prepare internal and external audiences for product changes or additions.
Find an Internal Owner for the Communication Plan
Ownership of communicating about a product release and the education of both internal and external audiences falls somewhere between product, marketing, and customer success.
Product may train internal teams and explain why a release impacts customers, but they may leave the external communication to marketing. Marketing may create materials for supporting demand generation and sales, but may not think or create materials about how those newly released products impact current customers and what the company will need to consider to get new customers to pay or adopt those new products. Customer Success may think of the customer needs and training, but may not have the bandwidth to create all the materials necessary to make the customer base successful. The point is, all teams are impacted, and most of the time if there’s not one holistic owner, it can be painful and messy.
A great owner for this would be product marketing, and that person or team should be strongly supported by other internal groups of representatives to ensure a holistic view. However, in smaller companies and startups, this may be a gap.
From my point of view, it doesn’t necessarily matter from which team you choose an owner, so much as it matters that the person you choose has great project management skills to delegate and ensure all aspects of the strategy are created and completed.
Create a Release Team with Representatives from Various Internal Organizations
Once you have an owner, that person needs to have a release team. This team can be a standing one with the same representatives over time, or it can be a stand up-stand down team that varies for each release. Regardless, make sure you have representatives from each organization sitting on the release team.
These representatives should be the Subject Matter Expert (SME) for their department. Their responsibilities should include communicating with their department about what is happening when, and sharing how internal folks can learn more. They are the point of contact for questions within that organization for information. They are also typically responsible for executing certain parts of the plan.
Set up Regular Meetings with the Release Team
You’ll want to meet with the release team on a regular cadence to create and discuss the strategy. It can be helpful to develop and use a tactical timeline until the release is complete. Afterward, you’ll want to set up a debrief meeting to review results, challenges and changes for the next release. I would suggest meeting more often as you set up the strategy, messaging, and timeline.
This group also shepherds the education and communication metrics, created in the strategy document. It’s critical to ensure not just that activities are being done, but that each activity being done has an impact. For example, if one of the goals for your communication strategy is education in order to achieve awareness, you need to know how you’ll measure that both internally and externally. Are you going to quiz all internal employees? Are you going to poll customers externally about whether they’ve heard about your upcoming release? By understanding which methods of communication are working and what metrics best gauge success, you’ll know whether you’re achieving the desired result.
Create a Strategy Document:
Below is an outline of the major points within a Strategic Communication Plan that I’ve used to run a product release:
Goals for Release
Map out the goals for the release; what do you want/expect to happen?
Strategy for communicating?
Are you going to capitalize on existing capabilities or create new capabilities for communicating?
Will and/or how are these communications capabilities going to be aligned?
Who are the audiences with whom you need to communicate?
Internal stakeholders: which teams are impacted?
External stakeholders: who are the primary targets, customers, segments (both current customers and new prospects)?
What methods of communication are you going to use to reach those audiences?
Website? Intranet? Internal Training? Webinars? Blog?
How do those methods change whether they are internal or external audiences?
How are you going to know these methods worked? (metrics of success?)
Attendance? Quizzes? Adoption?
What are the overall key messages?**
What is the purpose of the release and why?
How do these messages change by audience?**
Does a product release impact prospects differently than current customers?
Do some segments have the feature or features enabled or will they have to pay for it?
Will it impact data?
Q&A**
What are the likely questions internal and external audiences will ask?
Prepare the answers to those questions
**The messages and Q&A created will be the foundation for all of the materials that will be built for education - blogs, webinars, one-pagers, talking points.
Map out the Timeline and Tactical Milestones and Assign Owners
With the strategy in place and the high-level messaging outlined, you can start building the various materials you’ll need such as blogs, webinars, one-pagers, trainings, and presentation decks. You can start assigning owners and putting them into place when the execution will occur.
You’ll use these milestones to meet with the team before and during the release to ensure you’re hitting these milestones on time and within budget, and they are having the desired effect (you’re achieving your metrics).
I’ve included a quick picture to give you an idea of what a timeline should look like:
Release Debrief
Post-release, you’ll want to bring the team together one last time to discuss what went well and what didn’t. Think about what you’d start, stop, and keep doing for future releases. Note any metrics met or missed and discuss whether they were the right metrics and what could have been improved. Document this information for the next release.
And there you have it! A few tips and best practices for running a successful release communication strategy. Hopefully, you find it helpful, and I’d love to hear your own suggestions and practices!
Want to add more tools to your Customer Success Leadership toolkit? The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that offers a CS Leadership Training Program. The classes in this program will cover core customer success leadership topics. For more information on this program and our other offerings, please visit TheSuccessLeague.io.
Lauren Costella - Lauren is a change agent, communicator, leader and passionate champion for Customer Success. When she’s not working as the VP of Customer Success for GoodTime.io, you can find her serving as an advisor for The Success League, a board member for the Customer Success Network, and blogging on the CS Playlist. Lauren has her MA and BA from Stanford University. She was a former USA National swim team member and enjoys staying active in the Bay Area.