At the time this was created, our marketing team was mainly an acquisition engine for live cohorts. We had a super lean marketing team and no product marketing function at all. But at the same time, the product team was shipping a lot. New features like highlighting, collections, and the cohort viewer were coming out all the time, but were solely dependent on organic discovery within the product. I found out that the product team was struggling with adoption, and I saw an opportunity for the marketing team to be able to help out with that. 

While we were grappling with these questions, the 

 came out, and they had a framework for creating a tiered system for marketing different feature launches. It was perfect timing for us to learn from our own content and try it out for ourselves.

Tiering and prioritizing things is always a sensitive conversation. You're essentially trying to save the business resources, but a team working on a feature might not have the same perspective as we do. A team may have just dedicated a full sprint working their asses off to create something, and then we come in and say, "This is a tier three launch, and we're gonna provide minimal support for it." It's a delicate conversation because you don't want to offend the scale of anybody's work. We needed to have clear hypotheses for these tiers and what they meant so that we didn't offend anyone, but it was also realistic for us to execute on with a lean team.

It was really important for the marketing team to come to the product team and say, "Hey, we recognize this adoption issue that you're facing. As a marketing team, we could both support our goals of activating and engaging our members and your goals of driving additional traffic to this new feature. Is there an opportunity for us to work more closely together?" So first, we found overlap between our goals and the product team's goals. And second, we came to them with a 75% baked proposal for how we might work together. That allowed us to start the conversation rather than just pointing out the issues that we both faced and hoping that they might be the ones to devise a plan.

These tier names and definitions were taken straight from the Reforge program. Where we had to look elsewhere for inspiration was on the second two rows. We started by looking across some product marketing blogs and talking to people in our network, and then just put down our first hypothesis across all three tiers. We started with this pretty basic list for tier 3, and built out the other tiers from there.

The tier 1 guidance is still unproven because we haven’t yet had to launch a tier 1 product. I actually think for a product that’s still trying to find PMF, this might be too robust. We’ll likely revisit this when we see a tier 1 release coming down the pike.

This might seem like a lot of assets for a tier 2 release, but the workload ended up being sustainable and we were able to impact adoption.

We created this doc to be used by any marketer who's assigned to a product pod, but it’s also in part for the sales and customer success teams. As soon as I know a feature is coming out, I’ll fill in this table with a basic debrief, any relevant copy, and an analogy in case it comes up on a customer call and the customer’s not quite getting it. So it’s for marketers to use, and customer-facing roles to consume.

Because we'd never put muscle behind product marketing before, we didn't have a great benchmark for what success would look like. Does success mean that we can easily execute the list of assets we have for each of these tiers? Does success look like adoption metrics for each of the features? Does success just mean a better relationship between marketing and product? 

We saw both positive and negative signals for each of those three categories. With Collections specifically, which was a tier 2 feature, we saw a significant spike in Collections created when the email went out, and we saw high engagement from the community on the member Slack and LinkedIn. That helped us prove that members do care when we release a feature and we can drive meaningful adoption of these product features through marketing activity.

Chris Eberhardt

When I learned that Reforge's new features had low adoption, I saw an opportunity for marketing to collaborate more closely with product.

Product Marketing Plan for Reforge Feature Releases

Upcoming Feature Releases for Teams

Reference Table for Tiers of Releases

Sign up to see more