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Is your product marketing team struggling to coordinate marketing resources to support an endless stream of product launches, with vague release dates and a chorus of product managers demanding tons of marketing attention for each release? What if there were a better way?
In this episode of Growth Stage, we interview Braden Steel, Sr. Product Marketing Manager at FastSpring, to discuss his thoughts on what is wrong with traditional product marketing and how FastSpring is using quarterly thematic product launches to:
- Give the best best attention to all product releases.
- Tell an overarching product story where the whole is more valuable than the sum of its parts.
- Help marketing be planful and thoughtful so they can provide their best work for product releases.
If you’re running yourself ragged with over-active product roadmaps, endless “t-shirt” sizing for agile project estimations, slipping product release dates, or being worried about letting your product managers down, it may be time to consider thematic product releases. Learn how in this episode of Growth Stage!
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Podcast Full Interview: Audio
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Podcast Full Interview: Video
Transcript
David Vogelpohl (FastSpring) (00:04)
Hello everyone! Welcome to the Growth Stage podcast by FastSpring. I’m your host, David Vogelpohl. I support the digital product community through my role at FastSpring. And I love bringing the best of the community to community to you here on the Growth Stage podcast. In this episode, we’re going to be interviewing someone who’s uh, really special for me. He works with me here at FastSpring. He’s going to be talking about product marketing is broken and how you can fix it with thematic
product releases, and I’d like to welcome to Growth Stage Mr. Braden Steel. Braden, welcome.
Braden (00:39)
Thank you, I appreciate the intro. I’m excited to chat about product marketing today.
David Vogelpohl (FastSpring) (00:44)
Awesome. Well, I love working with you here at FastSpring, Braden. And I had a moment of panic because I rarely say your last name out loud. And I’m like, what if it was some weird pronunciation I forgot to, I forgot over the years or something, but welcome here. Yeah, of course. And what Braden’s going to talk about are his thoughts on what is wrong with traditional product marketing and how FastSpring, what we do here, are using quarterly thematic product launches.
Braden (00:58)
Yeah. Yeah, thank you.
David Vogelpohl (FastSpring) (01:14)
to give the best attention to your product releases, tell an overarching product story where the whole is more valuable than the sum of its parts, and help marketing be more planful and thoughtful so you can provide your best work for your product releases. I was at Spryng put on by Wynter, W -Y -N -T -E -R, I think, and S -P -R -Y -N -G, but it’s a conference.
We were at a roundtable talking about the different challenges and marketing and the topic of product marketing came up. And people were feeling they were running ragged, you know dealing with every little feature release, new product releases, and trying to make a big splash for all of it. And the topic of thematic product releases came up somebody else in the group had suggested it and we had adopted that here at FastSpring a few quarters back and
And so I thought it would be neat to talk about that topic here today. So, Braden, are you ready to kick it off?
Braden (02:18)
Yeah, let’s do it. I’m excited to talk about it. it. it. it.
David Vogelpohl (FastSpring) (02:20)
Alright, good deal. I’ve been here for awhile now, but I don’t know the answer to this question. What was the first thing you bought online?
Braden (02:28)
Yeah, this is a cool question. I spent some time thinking about it. And it was in junior high. eBay was in its heyday. And I bought a PlayStation 2 with a bundle of games. It had like some sports games and some other stuff. And I agonized over whether or not I should buy it. But I did and I enjoyed it. I got a lot of use out of that console and had a lot of fun.
The other option was with my own money I ever earned was a didgeridoo was the first thing I ever purchased with my own money online. So that was the other option there.
David Vogelpohl (FastSpring) (03:06)
All right, I love how you differentiated between your own money versus, I guess, your, what was it, like, your parent money? How did you fund the PSP?
Braden (03:14)
Yeah, I may have earned it through weeding the garden or mowing the lawn or something. But the other one was like my actual real job money that I earned on my own.
David Vogelpohl (FastSpring) (03:24)
Well, I figure if you’re mowing the lawn, it’s your money, Braden. So, all right. Well, I kind of gave it away a little bit in the intro, but could you share with the audience what you do here at FastSpring or what FastSpring does and what you do here?
Braden (03:27)
Sure, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, sure. So I’m the Senior Product Marketing Manager here at FastSpring. My job is everything go-to-market for all of our products and the industries we work in as well. So when a product launches, you know, all of the messaging underneath that product and around it, and then also supporting things like video games or B2B or other industries that we’re really excited to sell into. FastSpring is a merchant of record.
And so what that means is we take everything from the buy button onwards in a digital product sales experience. We work with SaaS companies, gaming companies, AI companies, B2B, things like that. that. that. that.
David Vogelpohl (FastSpring) (04:18)
Excellent, excellent. Now, when you describe kind of what you did, you touched on a bunch of different areas. You touched on product releases, feature releases. You also touched on verticals. You mentioned B2B SaaS or video games. And the modern product marketer will often embrace these vertical positions for a particular product. And I think that just even further amplifies the complexity of product marketing.
But what do you think is broken about product marketing? What wasn’t working for you with the traditional model?
Braden (04:56)
Yeah, it’s a really good question. You know, product releases hinge on a lot of moving factors that are outside of a product marketer’s control. Things like engineering, if there’s customer commits that need to happen, if sales suddenly has a big deal that’s like, hey, you need to finish this product before this other product gets released. And there’s a lot of moving pieces around these product launches. And so working with product teams to get commit dates and understand,
when are these products going to get released? What does release really mean? Is it generally available or is it in a beta stage? And then the question starts to come, well, when do we want to talk about it? And what are the things we want to say? And can we even talk about this because we’re testing it? So a lot of questions, a lot of uncertainty happens with this model of, you know, just the way that engineering and product works. And so I think the major thing that’s broken is that
there’s just so— it’s so hard to see the final product and plan around a release date and plan for a product to be ready to go. And so what happens is product marketers like myself end up, you know, a week before launch, a week before GA, the product manager saying, Hey, this is going to be ready. Finally, go do all of this work. And it’s like, okay, hold on. I got other stuff I got to do. You know, you mentioned verticals. We’ve been talking about that.
You know, that takes up a lot of time too. And so the question that, you know, I’ve had to solve and had to think about is how can I do the product launch work and also the other parts of my job when I have no control over that launch date?
David Vogelpohl (FastSpring) (06:40)
So you’ve got like these floating timelines and so the product’s not ready. They discover a bug at the last minute. They somehow power through the release and get it done early. You’re trying to coordinate resources with other marketers, designers and website people and content folks and things like that. And so it’s this orchestration with these floating dates is what I’m hearing there. What about the other side? Like I’ve…
you know, worked in product marketing and in many capacities over the years. I’m like, I feel like every time I talk to a product person, they’re like, I’m releasing X and we need to make a big blast about it. do you feel like the expectation around the level of effort for all these different product releases is sometimes overwhelming? Is that part of what’s broken with traditional product marketing?
Braden (07:28)
Yeah, for sure. I mean, these product managers, they’re product managers for a reason. They own those products. They’re super excited about it. They’ve oftentimes been working on these for, you know, up to several years that they’ve been trying to get these products to release. And so of course they’re going to want as much support as they can get for these products. And when it’s, it’s very challenging to have a product manager come to you and say, I’m really excited about this feature.
I want a lot of support, here’s all of my ideas, and to have to say, well, let’s pump the brakes a little bit for A, B, or C reason, I just can’t support you, or I can’t, you know, I don’t have the time, or, and that’s discouraging and hard to maintain a strong relationship sometimes with those product managers because, you know, they may feel like they, you don’t wanna help them or something, which isn’t the case, obviously, you don’t wanna help as many people as you can.
David Vogelpohl (FastSpring) (08:26)
Yeah. So it feels like then from your perspective in terms of coordinating a go -to -market around a product launch, you’re dealing with the floating dates in the traditional model and then every product manager and rightfully so, like you said, with all the investment and time they’re putting in it, it’s like, let’s make a big bang about this. but with all of those demands, plus the floating dates, it feels a bit like you’re not doing your best work. It’s like, you’re spreading yourself amongst all these things and it’s hard to really do your best work is kind of the gist I’m getting. Is that fair?
Braden (09:01)
Yeah, yeah, that’s right. you end up in a place where a lot of things kind of collapse all at the same time. And suddenly you have to figure out how to, how to achieve all of them. And not only is there only 24 hours in a day, not to mention, you know, working those full 24 hours, but also the, the stress of having to think about, keep all of those things in mind, take these highly technical things and.
condense them in something that is market facing. So yeah, there’s a lot of challenges there.
David Vogelpohl (FastSpring) (09:35)
So you alluded to this a minute ago when we were talking about supporting product managers and the relationship between PMMs and PMs, if you will. So do you feel like the traditional form of product marketing, is it fair to say it can have some tension with PMMs and PMs?
Braden (09:58)
Yeah, I think so. I’ve had experiences where, yeah, it’s certainly been a bit of a tense conversation to straight up say, I just don’t have the resources to support you. And, you know, in those cases, you want to listen and try to understand what the PM is looking for, but it certainly does create tension. And, you know, it’s all about good communication in situations where you’re, you know, you have to be there and have those conversations, listening.
being clear, being really good at tracking what you’re doing, and in our case, deploying the thematic launch process to help avoid some of that challenge that comes with traditional product.
David Vogelpohl (FastSpring) (10:41)
So you have the product managers asking for the biggest megaphone possible for their releases. You have the rest of marketing saying, can we be more planful so we can do better work? And you kind of talked about the shift to thematic product releases. So let’s just start simply. What is a thematic product release?
Braden (10:59)
Yeah, great question. A thematic release is a bundling of products underneath a umbrella of a theme. For example, B2B as the umbrella and all of those products are supporting that theme.
David Vogelpohl (FastSpring) (11:16)
So when we talk about thematic releases, I mean, I’m guessing we’re talking about not one every week. Maybe, I guess, if you’re really aggressive, but like, are you doing these on a quarterly basis, monthly?
Braden (11:30)
Good question. We do a spring, summer, fall release. People aren’t around during the holidays at the end of the year, so we don’t do it at that time. But yeah, just three of them a year with ad hoc releases occasionally in between.
David Vogelpohl (FastSpring) (11:45)
So the product org is aiming to say like each quarter we’re going to have this thematic improvement to this product or product line and we’re going to bring it in product marketing, we’re going to bring it to life in one big campaign. And I guess does it include the elements of each of the products and feature releases within that theme?
Braden (12:08)
Yeah, it does. It includes those elements. We look at our customer roadmap and we say, okay, what are we planned for the year? And that helps us categorize those products within themes. So we aren’t necessarily going from a top -down approach and saying, we need to solve for theme A, what are the products that fit under theme A? Instead, we look at what are the suite of products we plan to release this year?
And then what’s the theme that each of those products can fit under within these parts of the year.
David Vogelpohl (FastSpring) (12:44)
So you’ll have this, you’ll amplify it. You might be off by a quarter, maybe on the release date or something, but there might be a lag, I guess, before you know it. Yeah. So you’re decoupling the GA, if you will, from the promotion.
Braden (12:51)
That’s correct, yeah.
That’s correct. Yeah. And that’s a strategy, you know, we’ve deployed, we have GA activities that we do, because these features do need promotion when they go live. And so we, as a part of the thematic process, we have GA activities and then thematic activities that we can deploy for each product.
David Vogelpohl (FastSpring) (13:18)
So everybody, every product release, if you will, kind of gets to ride along in the thematic releases. And then you have kind of a smaller version for like the GA rollout effectively. So you kind of get a double dip there, it sounds like.
Braden (13:31)
Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. And it’s been really helpful to make sure that our internal teams are enabled at GA. So customer success isn’t suddenly getting feedback from customers. They’re like, Hey, I’m using this cool product. I want to know more about it. And our customer success team was never enabled. That doesn’t happen because at GA we’re releasing FAQ documents, value messaging to make sure that our internal teams understand what’s happening.
And then the go -to -market messaging, like you said, can lag on occasion. If you have the product release in January and you don’t have a thematically release until April, that product might not get as much marketing support early on, but it will get to tag along with that bigger push later in the year.
David Vogelpohl (FastSpring) (14:17)
If it was super strategic, would you like throw in an X, you know, a bigger release in between the thematic releases if you just happen to have some, you know, GA date for some like super strategic thing you were waiting on?
Braden (14:30)
Yeah, absolutely. So we have ad hoc releases as well that we do support. we try to limit those to one or two if we can. And we’ve built a process, you know, with you and the product team where we have a conversation and we say, okay, you know, there’s this really great feature. It doesn’t fit under the theme, but it’s really important for reason A, B and C. And so we plan for that as a team to make sure everyone’s understanding what we’re going to do. And then, you know, that does get separate treatment.
But the benefit again is we don’t have 15 products suddenly crashing down at end of quarter, which is, you know, oftentimes when product is delivering everything at the same time.
David Vogelpohl (FastSpring) (15:08)
Thank you.
One of my favorite business jokes is the, not joke, but observation is that, the executives Q3 means the beginning of Q3 and the engineering teams Q3 means the end of Q3. So it sounds like they’re all kind of, you know, of course sliding in there at the end to hit those quarterly OKRs. Yeah. Okay. I gotcha.
Braden (15:33)
Yeah, exactly right.
David Vogelpohl (FastSpring) (15:38)
So you have this theme coming out in next quarter or something, and there’s a major product or feature release that doesn’t fit in the theme. Is this just one of those special ones you were talking about that you might pop up in between the thematic release?
Braden (15:55)
Yep, exactly right. So I’ll give you an example from what we’re doing. We did a payments release early this year. and so we had a lot of cool payments features. One of those payments that slipped engineering just couldn’t get to it by the time the thematic launch happened was Google Pay and everyone knows Google Pay. And so, you know, we sat down and looked at it and said, how can we promote Google Pay? It’s not really a B2B feature. And so, yeah, we did a little mini release for Google Pay.
Created some documents for it FAQ documents a blog post or promoted on social things like that.
David Vogelpohl (FastSpring) (16:29)
So what happens then if you have this kind of anchor product release and a thematic release that slips? I mean, it sounded like you still had some anchor product, I guess, in the thematic release that Apple Pay slipped from or Google Pay slipped from. But what do you do? Just wait to do the thematic release until the anchor products can be included? Or what do you do?
Braden (16:54)
Yeah, I mean, it depends. Oftentimes it can be a wait and see. We’ve had that happen. You know, I was having conversations with the product team today that told me, hey, B2B might be a wait and see coming up a little bit later this year. But the benefit of the thematic launch is A, it’s not a hard deadline. We’re setting that deadline for ourselves. And so if we need to push that back a little bit to better support the product and engineering’s deadlines, we can.
or we can adjust those themes at any time. So if a key feature suddenly isn’t gonna get released, perhaps we can pick up one or two other smaller features to create a bundle that fits a theme in a different way. And so there’s flexibility that exists within this model that still allows for those changes that happen throughout the year.
David Vogelpohl (FastSpring) (17:47)
OK, that makes sense. So as I think of a traditional product marketing campaign for a feature release, it’s like an announcement blog post, maybe a press release, some social coverage, email our customers, email our prospects, that kind of thing. How does thematic release differ in structure?
Braden (18:07)
Yeah, I alluded to it a little earlier. A lot of those things still happen. And at the thematic moment, those things are still happening, but we have what we call the GA activities. So a lot more of like internal enablement, in -app notifications. You know, when someone could access that piece of software or technology, we’re enabling those customers and those— our internal teams. And we decouple that from this thematic release.
And then at the thematic moment, instead of focusing on a lot of the more like, you know, hey, this feature is available, you know, at bits and pieces, we can tell more of a narrative story about the value broadly of all of these features together. And so that’s a big difference that I see that you can’t really do when you’re releasing something, you know, at piecemeal throughout the quarter or the year.
David Vogelpohl (FastSpring) (19:04)
Yeah. And it helps, it feels like it helps you elevate the story. Cause I, I like the perfect example for me is this quality of life improvements that were like really hard for engineering, but don’t necessarily make the product more marketable. Cause it’s, you know what I mean? The person on the outside doesn’t even know that was a problem or something. And, and so it’s often hard as Phil, as a product marketer to go out and say, Hey y ‘all, we, we fixed this. when in reality it was really valuable for the business and for the customers.
Braden (19:08)
Yeah.
David Vogelpohl (FastSpring) (19:34)
And so it feels like thematic releases not only allow you to kind of share the megaphone, but also kind of elevate the story of some of these more quality of life improvements.
Braden (19:43)
Absolutely, yeah, you get to, you know, a lot of features benefit from this that otherwise wouldn’t get marketing activities or might get, you know, a quick announcement in Pendo. Instead, they live on a landing page alongside these bigger features that, yeah, they get to, as you said, share that megaphone. And there’s a lot of benefit for the smaller, you know, quality of life improvements.
David Vogelpohl (FastSpring) (20:08)
Okay, so has this approach, how many quarters in are you?
Braden (20:13)
This is our third, we’re coming up on our third thematic launch this, in July.
David Vogelpohl (FastSpring) (20:20)
Okay, so three quarters in, would you say that it has improved your ability to coordinate marketing resources and support product launches, or is it too early to tell?
Braden (20:33)
I would say that it’s definitely improved, you know, from my side. I think the improvement I see is not only am I able to better support, the product team, and not only support them, but also coordinate with the rest of marketing, specifically demand gen. you know, they have a lot of lead time now that they didn’t have before about these products.
and we can slot things into campaigns that we used to struggle to do. So I would say that would be the biggest benefit. But then the other benefit is it’s opened up time for us at FastSpring to focus on other vertical expansion, like into video games, that we might not have had as much time to do or not as much manpower to push those verticals forward.
David Vogelpohl (FastSpring) (21:28)
So you mentioned the video game segment for FastSpring for a while, and FastSpring’s had video game customers for a good long while, almost since the start of the company. You talked about the company kind of leaning into this segment. Do you feel like segments could play a role in thematic releases, or do you think that it’s more around the feature sets?
Braden (21:51)
Yeah, segments absolutely play a big role. You know, I mentioned our next launch is around B2B, a vertical that we want to sell into, that we’re excited about expanding into. I can see a world where we’re doing that around video games as well. You know, we mentioned we’ve improved our Apple Pay and implemented Google Pay. So yeah, expanding, having these vertical themes not only opens up that ability, you know, to…
you get the benefits of the thematic launch, but you also get the benefit of coupling things like thought leadership into the thematic launch that you might struggle to combine with traditional product release. And so you can get a bigger, potentially a bigger campaign push and more value out of these product launches for the broader organization.
David Vogelpohl (FastSpring) (22:44)
Excellent. Well, this has been really interesting, Braden. I really appreciate you coming on the air and talking about this. It was such an interesting discussion at Spryng here in Austin. I thought it’d be neat to kind of bring it on the show, but that was awesome. Thank you so much for joining.
Braden (23:01)
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. It was super fun.
David Vogelpohl (FastSpring) (23:04)
Awesome. And if you’d like to check out more about what Braden is up to, including maybe his next thematic release, you can visit fastspring.com. Thanks everyone for joining this episode of Growth Stage. I’ve been your host, David Vogelpohl. I enjoy supporting the digital product community as part of my role at FastSpring. And I love to bring the best of the community to you here on Growth Stage. Thanks everybody.
