Craft product launch tiers like an Atlassian PMM

23:34Ashley Faus:Yes. Step two is the categories of impact. Step three was the cross-functional inputs across your stakeholders. And then is there, is there a step four? And then the step four was mapping the tactics here. Yes. Mapping the tactics. That's right. Mapping. And then we're going to get in a little bit more to the playbook too for the smaller roadshows. But then what about step five? Yeah. So step five, per usual in Sass, We are never done. We have to iterate on this. One thing that I will say that's a pitfall, it is not uncommon for after a big launch or any series of launches. Then if there's one new tactic or if something didn't go quite right, everybody's like, we need to overhaul the entire framework.

24:24It's like, no, no, no, let's pause, right? There's always a hiccup in a launch because that's how life works. So I would recommend looking at your launch tiers and tactics annually. and giving it a refresh. So it's not to overhaul it. And in general, you probably should not significantly change what the categories are. You might change the definition of those categories. So the example of like, if let's say a business explodes in terms of like, it just rockets to the moon and all of a sudden this product line is making a lot of money. Maybe it shifts into, again, in our parlance, it would be a land versus an expand product because it's growing so fast.

25:04Or maybe we see that this customer segment is particularly sticky. And so it does make sense for us to go ahead and treat something as maybe a tier two launch when normally it might be a tier three or four because the customers are so sticky. Maybe we move this product or this style. Again, AI is a perfect example, right? Like it's so crazy right now in the market that we tend to treat anything related to AI at a higher tier than it might normally be just because of the market conditions right now. Right. Once AI becomes more ubiquitous, it might settle out into a lower tier or, you know, the range of tiers depending on what it is.

25:43Yeah, totally.

25:44Ashley Faus:So the tiering is flexible based on what the anticipated overall impact to the business could be. Even if you don't have the hard numbers to prove it, there's still conviction there. So things may get bubbled up to higher tiers or lower tiers. Yeah. And then same thing with the tactics. If we find that a certain tactic is just not working at all, even if we throw tier one level resources at it, if it's like this tactic is just not doing great, cool. Take it off or deprioritize it or say, hey, we're only going to do it. You know, maybe there's a certain tactic that really only works if you invest tier one level.

26:20And so instead of also doing it at tier three and tier two, we're just going to only put it in tier one, right? Or new tactics come online that we want to test. Cool. It's perfect to test those for tier four launches because it gives you something. It gives you enough data. Obviously, PM is very excited because they're like, you're telling me there's 10 tactics in my, you know, that I can do? Great, right? They get very excited. And so, but looking at it more holistically across, you know, the tactics and those kinds kinds of things in the market conditions to make sure that the same way you would do with your competitive research, your market research, your personas, you shouldn't be changing your personas every month, right?

26:56You shouldn't be changing your competitive set every month. So you shouldn't be changing your launch tiers and tactics every single month. Look at it annually and just make sure that like this is still working. Look at the data, see how the launches have gone across different tiers. And then that will help you adjust as needed.

27:12Ashley Faus:Got it. So re-evaluate. I like that a lot. I want to dig in. You mentioned, you've mentioned blogs a couple of times. Maybe I have, I don't know, blogs have come up. So I want to ask you a question about blogs. So if you were again, like let's just making up a new scenario and you can give an example from Atlassian if it makes sense to do so. But if you were in a new role, again, like rebuilding and your team was rebuilding the tiering, at what tier would you give a blog to a product release or are blogs dead. What do you think? Oh man, poor blogs. I know. Well, I had a PM team that was like obsessed with blogs and everything needed to have a blog.

27:53Ashley Faus:And I was like, guys, no, not everything needs a blog. But I want to hear your thoughts. Yeah. So my bigger issue is less about a blog and more about a written asset, right? Some, some things, it's just really hard to explain them in writing. You have to have screenshots. And by the time every other line is a screenshot, make it a freaking carousel, make it a GIF, make it a one minute video. Like, good Lord, quit trying to make fetch happen. So I think blogs are not dead. There's actually a lot of use in a blog now with LLMs and traditional SEO, right? Having something to reference. If that blog actually contains helpful information, then like, cool.

28:36So that's the first thing is like, step one, the underlying question is, does this need, what kind of asset, like the format does this need? Does it need a written, long form written content, or does it need a more visual asset? It might need a demo video, whatever. Step two, where does the audience spend time and who will actually be referencing this thing? So for us, our community is well-trafficked. And so actually community posts for some of these tier four and tier three launches are really useful from a community perspective because it's hitting a very specific subset of the audience. We have community groups for those people.

29:14So go talk to the people who are going to nerd out with you about this feature. So even if you're doing a written asset, it might be better to have it be short form or long form in the community. And so a blog is kind of a specific format in a specific place. It's basically a long form piece of content on the company website is effectively what it is. But a short form written asset in the community might actually be perfect for the audience that you're trying to reach. The other thing that tends to happen, like maybe it's kind of hard to understand or hard to implement this feature. And so the community allows people to ask questions.

29:53Blogs generally, yes, they can have comments, but blogs are usually a one-way communication. So like, that's another question. Do you need a two-way communication in this? Okay.

30:02Ashley Faus:That's a good point. Maybe it makes more sense to do a LinkedIn post or an ask me anything on Reddit or a community post than it does to do basically a one-way broadcast blog. The Atlassian blog doesn't have comments. So if you want feedback, maybe this is actually an alpha or a beta release, and you're looking for feedback. The Atlassian blog is not the right place to get feedback because there's no comments. Put it in the community and ask for the community feedback. So I think the question is less to your point of these PMs were insistent that everything needs to be a blog. I think it, it sounds like they're falling prey to a pitfall of conflating a channel, a format and a checklist of like activity instead of understanding again, what is the goal?

30:50Who is the audience? What are you, what is the, what, how is, how is the information best served? So yeah, blogs are not dead. I think there's, but the question of like, which tier deserves a blog? I'm like, well, I actually can't answer that because I think in general, we do include blogs for tier one and tier two. And then tiers three and tier four, we basically depend, like it kind of depends. The other thing too, it might be that, and this is something again, spoiler alert for the playbook, but like bundling a couple of the tier four launches. If you wait and you bundle them together into a single marketing moment, that could up-level them into a tier three launch.

31:31So we might do a feature roundup from the last quarter or like 20 things you didn't know you could do in the product. And that might get a blog versus if we had just done each individual thing, it's like, well, one thing you can do in confluence. Like that's not impressive. Even three things you didn't know you could do. Like why would that be a blog versus 10 things, 20 things or like everything last quarter might have enough substance for a longer form written asset.

32:02Ashley Faus:Yeah. I just want to validate some things you've been saying with examples that I'm aware of. So my own example is that I've done the clustering around clustering of small releases around a theme. We've done that at Cisco a lot so that we can, we do end up having a blog, but it's around a specific like thought leadership theme that we're trying to reinforce for the company. And then it's funny that you mentioned Reddit and the use of communities because my very first episode of this podcast that I ever released was with a product marketing leader from Reddit. And that's exactly what she talked about.

32:39And she talked about how she leveraged, it was for like

32:43Ashley Faus:a small-ish, like not a tier one, but like, you know, a meaningful, but like it wasn't a tier one or two, but it was still like a meaningful update. And they launched, of course, through the Reddit community and Reddit itself as the entity didn't, wasn't the voice of the release, the customers were. So they actually picked like quote unquote influencers in, in the Reddit community to give the update. And then they had like Reddit PMs go in and being kind of like the commenters, you know, for not necessarily MA, but, um, anyway, engagement to kind of ask or point to more technical info as needed.

33:25Ashley Faus:But I just wanted to reinforce a lot of what you're saying. Like, yeah, other like rockstar PMMs are doing that. Yeah. Oh, that's very cool with the, and I mean, and we do talk about that in terms of does something get potentially, you know, influencers or a customer story or customer reference or like, you know, UGC content and how do we think about doing that in our community champions. So we do talk through that as well. Yeah. Okay. And one other thing you mentioned, you mentioned, so you talked about AI, but because you mentioned it, it reminded me, um, if you were going to like recreate like a tiering structure or, or if you were trying to figure out like, you know, building a product launch or something, you know, where does, how does AI play a role in your planning, shaping strategy and all of that from a PMM's perspective?

34:18Yeah. So there's a couple of ways you can do this. Um, one, if you don't have the tiers, right, you can basically get it to help you with a draft. So, um, show it past launches, show it past tactics, show it, um, past data and say, given all of this, I think we need, and four tiers tends to feel good. Most of the people that I've talked to, they're like, yeah, four tiers. It's usually four. It is. For a reason, four seems to be like the right amount. To anyone listening, they're going to be like, I heard that Atlassian, you must use four tiers. I'm like, I'm not saying you must. I'm just saying.

34:52No, no, no. Wait. What tiers can you use a good amount? So maybe tell it, right? Like, I think it should be four tiers. You know, given all of this data about past launches, help me build a framework. And so it can actually help you build out kind of that criteria. Or if you say, I already, here's the criteria I have given all of this past stuff that we've done, what tactics would you map into each of these tiers? And it can help you map those tactics. So that's one way it can help you build the framework. The other way it can help you build it. And this is something that like, I want to start testing more and I don't, I no longer sit directly in PMM.

35:26So I'm, I'm less, less influential in choosing which tier something goes into. But now I sit on the managing side and kind of life cycle side. So I'm like pairing with product marketing in terms of, okay, you're doing a tier one launch. Here's all the tactics or we're doing a tier four launch. Right. But one thing that I think would be super interesting and I'm biased, I would use like basically build a rovo agent that you tell it, here's what I'm doing. Here's all the details of like what this launch is. tell me which tier it is and then generate the associated work back plan. Right. So we also have that tier, basically like the minimum number of advanced notices.

36:09Is it months? Is it weeks? Is it days? Whatever. So, um, getting it to basically build out a page that's a work back to say, work back to say, okay, we want to, um, we have our big conference. It's called team. Team 26 is happening in May, it is often common for us to GA or make big announcements at team. And so now is kind of the time where we're starting to look through the roadmap and saying like, what will be announced at team? What's the big thing? So putting all of that in, like now we're in January and saying, give me a work back plan for an announcement. Basically by, you know, team is like the second week of May.

36:45So we say, you know, last week of April, give us a little bit of buffer, Right. But to get it to build out the project plan of like, OK, this is when you need to start talking to press if it's a tier one launch because they have to get the story and you have to pitch them and blah, blah, blah. Right. Like this is when creative needs to start working on if it's going to require a whole new visual library or, OK, we need screenshots because this is going in the keynote for team. You got to do the work back plan. Well, when are you going to have product ready to get your screens to feed into the keynote that has to go to design, right?

37:18Like, so this idea that, oh, it's totally fine. We can hit go live on the product on April 15th or April 30th and like, it's done in time. No, no, we need screens, you know, and like, we need a demo. okay, what level of dummy information needs to be in the demo environment for it to actually populate? This is particularly like data analytics things. Anything that's doing anything with data,

37:43Ashley Faus:you have to have dummy in there. You need to establish the data. Yeah. Populate the data environment, right? So like, or the demo environment. So getting it to pull together that work back plan. And then someone more capable than me can probably do this. I need, I need to go, I'm talking to our program managers about it because I'm like, guys, I have this vision, but the vision is basically now with rovo, get it to write the initial announcement blog, because, you know, they all have a format, right? Like there's maybe a couple of templates for these things. Yeah. Right template for the tier draft, the initial thing for me based on here's the messaging.

38:21You have everything. Yeah. And like draft. And then once you have that, then you can use that and you can say, okay, pull out some social posts for our execs or for PMs or product marketers, whoever. Right. So that's the big thing that I'm like, I don't know if it, if it's really a full on like orchestrate it where the agents basically you feed it once and the agents orchestrate it. Or if you do it at each step and then you use the combination of agents and like chat and generated AI to pull it together. But I'm like, yeah, there's a master planet here. And obviously we're doing some of this. Something is there.

38:57Ashley Faus:Yeah. But yeah. the master like end-to-end plan of it yeah I that to me is like the grand vision but I haven't had I haven't yet executed I should ask around Atlassian to see if somebody else has but yeah I'm really excited because I have an episode coming out that's on this very similar topic oh that's very very similar it's not like launch related but it's super similar yeah yeah excited about it. Yeah. But basically going both ways of like, what tier should this be? Or it is this tier, therefore make me a work back home or help me start generating assets or templates. I love it. I love it. Okay.

39:37Ashley Faus:And I know you've spoiled a little bit, but in a good way, all of the, or given some sneak previews of your tier four playbook, launch playbook, but tell us more about it. I like, what are the tactics and how do I make sure my tier four launch is successful? My PMs are happy and the product is, you know, getting the attention it deserves. Yeah. Like I mentioned earlier, empowering the employees to share themselves. So, um, making sure that we do have kind of, you know, the features aligned to that standard message house and aligned to the bigger product messaging. That's huge. That way they feel confident when they go create their own copy or create their own creative assets in terms of, you know, videos, demos, et cetera.

40:23And then we do curate some key assets. So if we know we need, like, let's say we're going to update the product tour with some product screenshots. Great. Make sure that those are obviously available to anyone who wants to share those on social and that they've got, you know, basically they're in a demo environment so that it's not dummy data, so that that's shareable. So that's the first thing. And then drafting off of that, we swarm on personal posts. So basically on the launch day, when the person shares, so let's say I'm the PM, when I share on my LinkedIn, we've got you and all of my peers and all of my PMN peers on deck to basically go comment, engage, to help kind of juice that from an algorithm standpoint.

41:06And then we also give a heads up to our organic social team to engage from the Atlassian handles. So you came from Cisco, you know, like, That's really nice. It probably has however many followers. Same thing. Right. Atlassian, I think, has 2 million followers. So if the Atlassian handle engages on your post, it's skyrocketing. It's a big deal. Right? Yeah. And that's an easy thing for the organic social team. They're like, cool. You want us to just leave a comment to say congrats on the launch? Like, we can do that. You want us to just like the post? Happy to do that. Right? And that's a much lighter lift and a much lower ask than saying, we need to post every day about this new feature on the Atlassian handle.

41:41Like, I'm sorry. Right. Right.

41:42Ashley Faus:Especially when they're getting those requests from like 20 other teams. Exactly. And they've got their own whole social first or social only strategy that they have to deal with. And they have to serve talent needs and stakeholder needs and investor needs and all the things. So that's a much easier entry point, particularly for, I called it a micro launch. That's the other nice thing. Don't call it a tier four. Call it a micro launch. And it's like, oh yeah, like, you know, who has launch in the, in the, in the name. Right. Um, so that's another tactic that has helped really boost those things.

42:20And then the other thing that we've done is, um, kind of across the business is created ongoing engagement, um, for places where people can plug in. So, um, one of my colleagues actually pioneered this demo den series, and then I kind of helped scale it across a couple of other teams, but the demo den, it's basically, uh, usually happens at a monthly cadence and it's a short video that a PM product designer or, you know, engineer, basically somebody who is in kind of the ICP records a video. Um, and they're only usually about five minutes long, but that's a really easy way. If you get something that would be in that tier four to be like, Oh, perfect.

42:55You can, we'll, we'll add you to the demo den calendar. And it's close enough in most cases that, you know, it's not like, okay, in six months you get to talk about this. Oh, next month though. We'd love to have you. And because that happens so frequently, we constantly need content. And so it's like perfect to be able to spot in. Yeah. We do a number of like community roundups or community series. And so being able to show that and be like, Oh my gosh, this would be perfect for community. We pair those dimitins with an ask me anything.

43:25Ashley Faus:And then basically the PMs will come back for like 24 hours to answer questions. So that level of like constant engagement is a nice, like, oh, your PMM might actually have a whole community series planned. And because they're constantly wanting to post something in community, like roughly once a month, they're constantly looking for contributors. And so having those ongoing touch points, if you've got a newsletter and there's always a spot for like the demo of the month or like feature of the month, that's an easy way to be like, oh, we need something for this slot. And then obviously if we're not getting an inbound request from PM, we can then put it out there to be like, Hey guys, we have a lot of opportunities.

44:08What are you interested in featuring? And then somebody is like, I have this thing coming out. And so it's also a way to proactively see the roadmap of what's coming for some of those things that might be more to be here for.

44:20Ashley Faus:And some of those PMs who hold the roadmap so close to their chest, it's hard to like get access to it. But then you tell them we have this opportunity to promote and they're like, oh, I got to raise my hand for that. And you're like, well, we need to copy the screenshot of the CTA, right? Yes. So PMMs in your next one-on-one or like monthly, weekly, whatever, PM, PMM check-in, like tell them what opportunities are coming up so you can get access to the roadmap. Yeah. A question about Demo Den for you. Yeah. Is that, it sounds like I'm just confirming, that concept. Is the audience like existing customers who are in the community?

44:55Ashley Faus:Is it external? Can anyone, like I'm not a community member, can I go and like look up Demo Den or like is it internal? Like who's the audience? Yeah, it's generally for a broad audience. You don't have to be an existing user. One fascinating thing, and this is like a whole conversation from a strategy perspective about our community, you can read in the community without joining. But if you want to participate in the community, then you have to join. So that's the other nice thing. I love that. We put the demo dens on YouTube and then we also embed those videos directly in the community with, you know, frequently asked questions or whatever.

45:30So like you could still read all of the questions and answers and watch the video. And then we cross link those. So if you want to see more demo dens, cool. Pop over to YouTube. Here's the playlist or from the YouTube playlist. If you have questions, pop over to the community. We'd love to hear from you. And then obviously we've got product tour links as relevant in both of those places.

45:51Ashley Faus:I feel like both of these tactics, right, like the demo den, the plus the community and well, all of the tactics with the like the social swarming. I feel like PMs who are doing tend to be more junior PMs who have the smaller releases. I feel like those are tactics that would really bring them a sense of pride and feel like they're getting a good amount of support from PMM. So curious. Now, Ashley, if you had, you know, if a PMM came to you and said, like, I'm so inspired by the micro launch strategy and the tiering structure, I'm working on it now, building this out in my role. Like, what advice do you have to that PMM who's working on it?

46:39Ashley Faus:Yeah. Biggest pitfall I see when people are like, could you review this thing? Like I've built it and I, can you review it? Do you have any feedback? Biggest pitfall that I see is that it's often too focused on tactics. It's like this huge checklist of tactics and frequently each tier just gets more of the tactics. And so like all the tiers get all the tactics, they just get more of them. So a tier one gets 10 blocks. A tier two gets five blocks. A tier three gets two blocks. And a tier one gets, you know, or a tier four gets one block. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. Not all tiers get all tactics.

47:16Like be strategic about the tactics mapping to the tiers. So that's the biggest thing I see is that a lot of the times the way they're basically scaling the tiers is they're just adding more of all the activities instead of being strategic about the activities. So it's not to say that we don't do the individual posts and the swarming and all of that stuff in a tier one stance. But for tier one, we're likely going to have someone from the C-suite or a VP or above being the person making the announcement. We're likely going to do a thought leader ad or boost their post from a paid perspective. so like we don't actually need all the employees to go like that post i mean it's great if they do and obviously we share all that but like we're gonna make sure that post gets seen like we're gonna already right versus the reason that you need all the free promotion and free engagement at the tier four is because it doesn't have they're not getting it right and even for some of the tier one launches right we might not actually put that in community because it's so broad and we have so many other touch points.

48:29We've got a webinar, we've got a keynote, we've got a breakout session, we've got five press articles. We might have three blogs, you know, at different depths for this thing. So we might not actually put that in community for like months until all the tier four stuff starts coming in that relates to the tier one. And then we can cross link back to, if you remember, we announced this huge thing back at team 25. and we're super excited to share, we've got 20 other awesome things for you. We've released five additional things. That thing goes to the community and references the tier one, right? So the relationship, a tier one launch tends to kick off a tier two and a tier three and multiple tier four over the next six months, right?

49:13So you should necessarily have different tactics, not just different quantities in your tiers.

49:22Ashley Faus:Right, right. I love that you mentioned that because it has, there's something to say about when you kick off a tier one, and then as you said, it kind of sets off this cascade of like tier two, tier two, tier four, et cetera. All of that is, should be mirroring the narrative that you're trying to tell for the company's vision, the impact, et cetera. And so when you're being strategic about building out those tiers and thinking through the tactics, I think you said this earlier, but it's worth saying again, like you should be thinking about impact over like volume for what those tactics look like for each of the tiers.

50:06Ashley Faus:Correct. And matching each of those metrics and impact with the intent. So if something, and this is another perfect example, right? Like the launch of a premium version of your product or an enterprise version of your product, it's quite common now to have different tiers. You have the free tier, standard, premium, and then like enterprise, super premium, whatever it is, In a lot of cases, you wouldn't go to the enterprise tier unless you are already a premium user. Enterprise tends to include the feature set of premium at scale. So it's got the user gates and the feature gates at scale. So like, yeah, it doesn't make sense for you to measure net new logos of the announcement of enterprise when realistically most people are probably going to be premium users first or even standard users first.

51:08Like very few companies, especially if it's like kind of the first launch of this, are going to land in an enterprise version of the product versus a standard or premium version. So looking at expansion, looking at existing customers is likely going to be the more relevant metric, not net new logos. And same thing for like a tier four launch. If you can only use these features, if you are an existing customer or if it's a paid feature, you shouldn't necessarily be looking at like net new Mao as the key indicator if they have to pay you first to get access to it. right? So if you want to look at increase in Mao, but you have to be a paying customer to get access to the feature, then you're naturally constrained into the Mao number, right?

51:59So you shouldn't use the Mao benchmark for a product at the free tier if you have to be a paying customer to get access to this feature, right? And again, when I say it, everyone's like, well, duh. But again, when you get into these conversations and you have both, and I think this is a struggle for both PM and PMMs, everybody wants to show whatever the biggest possible impact could be. So of course you want to set that benchmark is like, whatever the new free feature is, you know, for free users, like, of course the Mao is going to skyrocket. And you, of course, you want to say this is like a million now potential well is it though right like right let's make sure so um you know again when i say these things in this context and in theory and how it should be of course everyone's like oh 100 i know how these conversations go when you actually get in a room and like yeah and and obviously on either sales or leadership side they're like are you sure it couldn't be this much pipeline are you sure it couldn't be this much now are you sure i know this many seats right and you you start to be like yeah this this is an amazing thing it could be and you're like okay so right yeah well we got we got carried away with

53:15Ashley Faus:ourselves there like yeah okay well this was so helpful i love the micro launch playbook for our tier four smaller releases and just the way that you set up in the team at atlassian set up the the tiering with the tactics and the categories and getting feedback and your tips to always be reevaluating is so helpful. So thank you so much for guiding us through your case study. So now I want to switch gears and get in to the next segment of our show, the messaging critique. Yeah. This is where we as product marketing experts get to analyze real world messaging. And the fun part is, Ashley, as my guest, you get to pick the company that we are looking at today.

54:01Ashley Faus:So before we get started, just to share some ground rules for anyone who may be new to this podcast and new to this segment of the show, we're picking a company that we are somewhat familiar with the context and the customers for. Wouldn't be fair to critique messaging on a company that we didn't understand the audience. And Ashley, you're going to walk through what you're loving about the messaging, what you think the PMM should have done differently and maybe iterate and come up with some creative ideas for how they can take their story to the next level. So without further ado, tell us the company that you would like to critique today.

54:38Yeah. So I am doing a little bit of a different play on this segment. So I actually kind of criticized some messaging from a company. The company is ContentStack. They are a content management system. We'll actually need to pop over to their website to see what they're saying about themselves now. A couple months ago, they had a huge billboard on 101. I live in the Bay Area, so I was driving, tons of tech billboards. And I would have to go back and look at my post, but it basically said something about like, what if AI could do this for you? And I was like, how would AI do this for me, right? And so I went to the website and it was completely disconnected.

55:16And so I posted about that on LinkedIn and said, you know, the billboard and the website were very disconnected. And I struggled to connect it. And, um, their CMO actually reached out to me and was like, I'm pretty sure you're talking about us and actually messaging. So your feedback is super helpful. Um, within like eight hours, they got new messaging that was much better up on their website. Right. He actually publicly came into the comments and said, Hey guys, it's me. Um, and you know, I appreciate the anonymous call out, but like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna publicly say like, thanks for the feedback.

55:57Here's what we have put together. Um, we would love for you guys to take a look at what we've got. And that response time, the openness to feedback, listen, I mean, I am the ICP, my audience is the ICP. And so he looked through those comments and was like, Oh no, oh, we did not do it right. And then the fact that we were able to get it swapped within like a day. So yeah, I -

56:18Ashley Faus:That's really impressive response rate, especially for a CMO. I feel like CMOs are just usually, you know, they think they're too busy to do anything like engage on a LinkedIn comment. So that's really cool. That change went from gain your experience edge. And I was like, I don't know what that means. And then they shifted it to the first AI powered CMS platform. So CMS stands for content management system, basically the back end of your website. That is way better than, I'm sorry, what was the original one? The other one was gain your experience edge. Gain your experience edge. And what, sorry, I know you mentioned this already.

57:03what did the billboard say? The billboard said, want to publish content 90 % faster. Yeah, you can do that. And then when I went to the website, it said, gain your experience edge as like the top headline.

57:15Ashley Faus:Oh, that's disappointing. It was quite disconnected, right? But now if you want to publish content 90 % faster, yeah, you can do that. And then you land on the website and it says the first AI powered CMS platform that's connected. So now I'm curious to see what they currently have let's go over to the website i just went there so um hopefully i didn't click on an ad it's so frustrating when you click on the ad and then it gives you like a get a landing page not the actual home page yeah and with a caveat that like pmms sometimes don't have input on what goes on the home page right they should but sometimes they don't okay so i'm at content stack.com.

57:56Ashley Faus:Yes. And what I see is a carousel as the hero image or as kind of like the hero section. Yeah. And there are huge letters and it says the world's best digital experiences start here. The thing that also pulls my eye is the animation directly above where it says content, data, and then adaptive DXP. So I don't actually know what adaptive DXP is. I think, I assume it's basically like dynamic digital experience. I have enough knowledge of this space that I can make that leap. So I actually think this is great. And I think that like where it talks about, it's like the adaptive digital experience era.

58:34And I'm like, okay, cool. As soon as I scroll down, it basically tells me what that top layer is. And then as I scroll down seeing, it's a headless CMS, which I know what that is. I'm, you know, adjacent to the ICP. So I know with real time customer analytics. Okay. That's cool to improve the way you understand your audiences and deliver content to them. So it's branded its best, faster, smarter, and always personal. So this basically to me says I can do like dynamic personalized journeys on my website for people, for the audience. That's what I'm interpreting from this. And then obviously as I scroll down, I'm like, all right, let's see.

59:15Right. And it's, it's giving me, um, you know, some, some highly personalized data and automation, delivering the right message in the right place, right? Like that all dovetails like it should. So I think this actually looks really good. I should send a note to the CMO to be like, Hey, now I'm like, I think that this is super cool. Right. The other interesting thing for them, as I mentioned, I, on one hand, I'm a, I'm an ICP in the sense that I am like a stakeholder into these. I have to use this once it gets chosen. I am not the ICP. I'm not actually the economic buyer for this decision, right?

59:51But I work very closely with the person who is. And so I know enough and then I have to use it. Basically, if she goes and looks at this, she'll know exactly what this is and she'll go and vet But if it works, the way she's going to bet if it's going to work is she's going to come talk to me and be like, here's the mock-up. Here's the requirements. Here's what we would want you to do to populate this. Can you do it? Are you willing to do it? Does this make sense to your team? Right? So it's super interesting because I'm kind of an adjacent ICP for them. I'm more of a deal breaker than a deal maker.

1:00:27But I'm highly connected to the deal breaker. It's pretty important being a deal breaker. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So the fact that I'm like, oh, I know what this is, or like, oh, this catches my eye, or like, oh, these are connected in contrast to kind of the initial billboard and messaging that they had where it was so disconnected, like, I'm very pleased to see that it is quite connected. and they are using the right jargon to signal to their ICP that they are actually selling to someone who is quite sophisticated. This is not, they're not, it's not Wix. It's not Squarespace, right? Where it's like, DIY, you have no idea what you're doing.

1:01:06No worries for you. Like they're, they're actually using jargon in a strategic way to show that they are attracting a sophisticated buyer. And again, my colleague, if I showed her this, she'd be like, oh yeah, I know exactly what all this is. Right. So I actually think it's, it's, it's really good.

1:01:24Ashley Faus:I really like their storytelling. I really like their storytelling. I think they've done a really good job, even with their, like their CTAs are really good. They're not generic. They feel like it feels, I have, I can sense like, like the attitude and like, to your point, like that they're talking to a sophisticated buyer. So, and I can feel that I like that they put like, and I know that again, this is less PMM, but focus, but I like that they have the, some product, you know, little gifts and animations in there. I think that's really helpful. Like they have the little chat function gift that pops up or animation pop up.

1:01:57Ashley Faus:That's really helpful in providing context, which is so funny because their, their whole point is that they're providing context. Right.

1:02:06Ashley Faus:Yeah. One thing, my one little like critique, and this is less on the PMM and more for the copy itself is leaving something to be desired, but that's being really nitpicky. Like for example, like unlock your future, like seamlessly integrate, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, again, this is really, really, really nitpicky. I just prefer to avoid those types of that type of copy, but that's less of a PMM's job. Well, funny enough, because I agree with you. I don't think that one's as strong, but if you, the third one in the series that says, if you can't see them, you can't serve them. I really like that.

1:02:47Personalization like that. That's like spot on. Right. So it's really good.

1:02:53Ashley Faus:I really like, I'm glad you called that one out because I specifically really liked that one. I felt like that was a powerful statement. I almost wish I get why they have to have the, the one that they have at the top. I get why they have to have it at the top, but that one that's buried on the third, third image of the, of the carousel here. I wish it was more front and center. Cause I, it did feel there's some power in that statement. Yeah. So I totally wonder though, if the concern is that if that was first, you might think that their competitive set is like six cents or like demand or like bomb or like, yes, right.

1:03:35Or like like a Zoom info or something, right? Right. And so making sure that they were in the right competitive set. So like, again, these are all the questions. And to your point that it's not fair to critique messaging when you are not the ICP or you are not in the industry.

1:03:49Ashley Faus:Yes. Yeah. Now that I sit on the demand gen side, I know that that whole see them, serve them could accidentally put them in the wrong category. You're so right. But you from a PMM perspective, don't generally deal with those tools. Don't know that. So you wouldn't see that as potentially putting them in the wrong product category, right? So it's super interesting in terms of like, depending on which lens you're taking, if I take a PMM lens to it from a messaging, copywriting or, you know, flow standpoint versus if I'm taking, sitting in my current role on a Demandian side. You're right. Different lens, right?

1:04:27Ashley Faus:I stand corrected. And I like, I reiterate then or reaffirm my like strong storytelling. Yeah. Like I think it's pretty solid. Okay. Any like last, maybe just like creative ideas or thoughts that you have for the content stack PMMs? Like how can they take this storytelling? It's super powerful. They've obviously done a really great job. Like how can they take it to the next level? Yeah. So one of the things they have on here, which is super cool in terms of like the digital experiences, they have an example from Elements Athletics and like the imagery is really powerful. it looks like it's an athletic brand yeah they sell clothes yeah um and they are doing a lot to show like how this shows up on mobile or how this kind of shows up in a dashboard like what all of this does um it feels like there could be some really interesting like basically taking some of that imagery and turning it into um instagram reels or tiktok videos or like linkedin lives right like the imagery is really cool the gifts are really cool and so it feels like there's and and maybe they are, I haven't, I haven't gone and looked at their social, right.

1:05:35But there feels like there could be some really interesting things, um, where they do those as like standalone social posts. The other thing that they could do that's interesting, um, if they were to do some like creator collabs, they already have really good animations and screenshots. And so there could be some really interesting, like creator brand collabs, um, internal influencers also like having some of their PMs or having the product designer, um, share kind of like the process, how they paired with like a motion graphics artist or an animator to pull those things together. Right. Like there's some, they have some really cool elements on the site that I think how they get those to show up properly is actually indicative of how I assume their platform, you know, they're using content stack for their website.

1:06:18So like that level of, um, you know, animations, gifts, et cetera, could actually be a really great use case for almost like a content stack on content stack. That is so cool.

1:06:30Ashley Faus:Yeah. So that's, that's, that's a one thought for them. And again, maybe they're doing that. I need to go look at their social to see if they are, but they could be, if not, it's a, it's a fun, you know, story that they could run across different channels. So fun. Okay. What a great critique. Shout out to content stack PMM team, really strong storytelling. We like what we see. Okay. So one thing that I like to make space for on this podcast is a moment of gratitude because in product marketing, none of us ever get to where we are alone. We're always learning from each other and stealing each other's playbooks and growing and we're all better for it.

1:07:10Ashley Faus:So I wanted to wrap up and say a genuine thank you, Ashley, to you for being so generous with your time and your insights and coming on and walking us through your both guidance on how to create product tiering and then also how to do the micro launches for our like smaller tier four releases. Thank you so much. That was really, really helpful to the PMM community. Yeah. Well, thanks for having me and asking all the hard questions and diving deep and yeah, super fun. It's so fun. And we'd love to turn it around to you. Are there any PMMs that you want to give a shout out to who have brought you to where you are today?

1:07:46Ashley Faus:You're obviously super or accomplished marketing leader, but how'd you get here? Who are the PMMs or marketers who helped you get here? Yeah. I will shout out two awesome PMMs. They are both quite prolific on LinkedIn, so I'm sure they get shout outs all the time, but Mary Sheehan and Hattie the PMM, both of them, I learned a ton from them in terms of, again, if you want more like the goat of product launches, Mary Sheehan wrote the pocket guide to product launches. She's got a whole book on this. So tons of great tactics there. And then obviously Hattie runs a great community of PMMs and shares a lot about dealing with some of the kind of friction that we deal with when we're, when we're working through things from a cross team perspective.

1:08:29Ashley Faus:Totally. Yeah. I'm so honored to say that Hattie has been a guest on the show and she's just, her insights are also just invaluable to the PMM community. And Mary, I think I need to, maybe this is my shout out. Like we got to get Mary on here. Yeah. Oh, Mary's great. You definitely need to talk to Mary. Amazing. Well, thank you so much, Ashley. This was a lot of fun and we're so lucky to have you. One last question for you. Where can my guests reach out to or my listeners reach out to you if they want to learn more? Is it best to just find you on LinkedIn? Yep. LinkedIn is the place. I tend to be quite prolific and engaging frequently there.

1:09:04Ashley Faus:Because you're so generous with all your insights so we can keep learning more by following Ashley. I love it. All right. Thank you again, Ashley. And thank you PMM listeners for coming on this adventure with us today. I hope this episode leaves you with inspiration to take in the next step of your own journey.