Product Release Communication Strategy - Do You Have One?

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.

Product and CS: The Intersection Begins

By Lauren Costella

Do you know what gets me jazzed (yes, I said it, jazzed)? Seeing the continued overlap of Product and Customer Success teams! This is a monumental time in Customer Success because software companies are popping up everywhere to help us better understand who our customers are, what they are doing within our software (or how they are using our products and services - non-SaaS based), where they get stuck, and more importantly, where they derive value! Here are just a few that I’ve come across as a CS leader: Amplitude, Pendo, Mixpanel, and Piwik.

As CS Leaders, if we aren’t driving value for our customers, we aren’t doing something right. The difficulty comes with understanding what is actually valuable for our customers, especially given a diverse portfolio of needs. And if you’re like me, you know that sometimes what customers say and what they do are totally different things. What signals are you using to understand customers and whether they are getting value? At the end of the funnel, you might be looking at retention and growth, but you need earlier signals...data driven signals that differ by different cohorts of customers...you need the same insights that product and engineering teams have, and that’s usage data!

This has been topic of discussion in the CS space for some time; however, it’s one that isn’t the simplest to start. It’s critical, then, we not only keep that conversation going, but that we also keep pushing each other toward getting more analytically, data-driven insights into our health scores. We need to trigger actions and playbooks (risk and growth) based on that data, and we need to strive to be truly “proactive” by getting to a point of “predicting” value achieved (or not), instead of reacting to it.

In the spirit of helping you to start simple, let me offer a few tips to get you going in the right direction. And if you're looking for more insights, check out more blogs on The Success League or check out another group of which I’m a part, the Customer Success Leadership Network (CSLN) meet up from January of this year.  That meet up had both CS and Product leaders providing their unique perspectives on how best to work with each other.

3 Tips to Help You Get Started with Product & Engineering

1) Make Friends

When was the last time you met with your head of Product? If it wasn’t in the past week, think again. If you’re going to start building the foundation of insights, start by talking about issues on a regular basis. Set a cadence and stick to it. As an executive leader for Medrio, I meet with each of my co-executives once per week to discuss issues uniquely between our departments. It’s revealed gaps and insights and creates better alignment as we develop customer strategies that require resources on both sides.

For example, when I first started meeting with our CPO, we began with support ticket data. I could easily show our CPO that product releases were killing the team. Why? Bugs and/or “expected” functionality that presented like a bug or let’s face it, missing essential functionality all together. By starting with some simple data, we were able to identify gaps in process and systems for improvement.

2) Co-invest in User-Friendly Systems

Which leads me to my next point: co-invest with Product teams in software/systems, which are user friendly and give you insights into what your customers are doing, why they are doing it, when they are ready for more product/services, and where they get stuck. Your Product teams are (or should be) looking at these types of insights all of the time. The issues I’ve seen is that the information is typically siloed and difficult to decipher.

For example, our Product teams uses Splunk to track a lot of our customer analytics. To use Splunk, however, you need to understand SQL and programming language to produce any meaningful insights for customers. In other words, our CSMs or CSRs (and sometimes our Product Managers), can’t simply go in and get a list of all studies with more than our best practices for variable counts on a page or skip logic used in a study. Forget about it, you need a engineering degree to pull that data! Which means, we (as a CS team) are constantly bugging our Product and Engineering teams to create those insights for us with dashboards and reports. What a drag for both teams!

Which is why I say: co-invest. Put up some of your CS budget to get the insights you want in a user friendly way, and it’s likely you and your Product and Engineering teams will be thrilled to get you what you need without having to do the heavy lifting.

And let’s face it, with a user friendly system, both teams don’t have to guess what they think is the greatest value to a customer; rather, we would be able to just see it (and see it by different cohorts). And armed with that information, our product teams can either create better product based workflows or we (in CS) can create better best practices to achieve winning customer strategies.

3) Share Joint Success Metrics

Finally, I recommend sharing joint metrics with your Product teams. Our Chief Product Officer is held to joint metrics with my team including Net Retention (Upsell + Retention) and Customer Satisfaction. At the same time, my team is held to metrics that help his team drive efficiency and results. My team keeps mis-classified bug tickets below 10%. At one point this was 30% and by reducing that to under 10% and keeping it there, we’ve reduced costs in Product and Engineering by $160K per year. That’s significant savings in costs and time that could be used elsewhere. Additionally, my team is held to helping with product adoption: a metric the product and engineering team follow after every release. We educate customers, help them use the product, and ensure they are well trained. Joint metrics keep us both incentivized to ensure great communication and working together, which only produces better results for our customers.

If CS is the map to driving value for Customers, then Product (and associated analytics) is the key for deciphering it. We must work together to manage how to understand leading risk factors and more importantly, reasons and paths for retention and growth! What path makes our customers stick? If you can’t answer that question, it’s time to start building toward answering it. Let’s commit to that quest. As the VP of CS for Medrio, and I’m committed to driving success of customers with Product and data driven insights. Can I get your commitment too? Let’s do this!

Need help figuring out how your Customer Success team can better collaborate with Product and Engineering within your organization? The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that offers a Leadership Training Program as well as Leadership Coaching. For more information on these programs and other classes and engagements please visit our website at 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 Medrio, 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.

Lessons Learned: The Importance of a Product-Led Customer Success Onboarding Strategy

Guest blogger Frederik Müller shares his experience with looping his product team into a redesign of the company’s onboarding process. We hope you enjoy his perspective on this critical part of the customer journey.

By Frederik Müller

A successful customer onboarding is one of the most important steps in the SaaS world. As with many things customer success-related, applying best practices is sometimes easier said than done. Here at Klara, our biggest “lesson learned” with respect to customer onboarding was realizing that the product team, not customer success, should define our customer onboarding journey.

Our product team is amazing and has been a key contributor to Klara raising an amazing Series A round with an even more amazing investor. Even with all the best of intentions, it is easy for a gap between the product team’s vision and the customer success team’s implementation of the platform to open up and even widen over time. As a small, growing company with limited resources, our product team had always been focused on pushing the product to new frontiers. The customer success team, meanwhile, focused on developing and refining the most effective way of onboarding customers to our product. If we needed to invent workarounds for deficiencies in the product, so be it.

At Klara, the gap between the product and customer success team was caused by not having the product team lead our onboarding approach. Here are some of the key takeaways from our work to correct this issue:

The product team, together with customer success, needs to define the onboarding process

Having the product team involved in identifying key steps in the onboarding journey will ensure that the product is configured to deliver on the expected outcomes. Importantly, it will also help create very clear goals for customer success during the onboarding stage.

For example, prior to these changes, the customer success team measured a completed onboarding to not only include training and installation of features, but also customer usage of the feature up to a certain benchmark. This caused a lot of frustration for the CSMs because while they could control the training and setup of a feature, they couldn’t always control user adoption. As part of our work with the product team, we reduced the customer success team’s responsibility during onboarding to just training and installation of features. Now, every CSM can directly control the redefined onboarding process, and we are able to quickly identify and remove bottlenecks, further streamlining the process.

Product and Customer Success should establish an Onboarding Service Level Agreement (SLA)

Once the customer success team successfully completes the onboarding steps defined with the product team, what should the product team deliver? For a long time at Klara, the leading indicator of success was the number of patients that our clients communicated with using our platform. Understanding what an optimal level of usage should look like enabled us to create clear SLA: Customer Success will handle the training and technical implementation of certain features. Product will then guarantee that these features create an optimal level of patient adoption.

A clearly defined customer onboarding process will show the product team if the product is achieving the desired customer adoption levels post onboarding. Without a clear SLA from onboarding to product, it is tempting for customer success to compensate for lack in product adoption with human interventions, which robs the product team of a great learning opportunity.

Our experience over the past months and my conversations with others in the customer success community has validated my belief that product teams should continue to define the onboarding process. At Klara, we are hiring an experienced Product Marketing Manager who will jointly own onboarding KPIs with the CS team. A conversation with a leader of a 40-person CS organization drove the importance of these steps home to me. She shared that her team kept having to “throw bodies” at a product that was not driving the desired adoption levels. Because the KPI was only owned by customer success, the product team did not prioritize customer onboarding until the company realized that a weak Customer Success - Product alignment would stand in the way of the company going public. Don’t wait until then!

Need help defining customer onboarding in your organization? The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that offers consulting engagements that focus on onboarding as well as the entire customer journey. Visit our Consulting page more details.

Frederik Müller - Frederik is the Head of Customer Success at Klara. He is passionate about Klara’s mission to revolutionize healthcare communication for everyone involved in the patient’s journey. As such, he has spent the last years researching how to maximize patient/user adoption of Klara’s platform and worked extensively with medical practices on streamlining their operations using better communication methodologies. In his free time, Frederik enjoys reading The New Yorker, cooking, playing sports, and traveling.