<aside> 🚁 Fly-in and “why?”

Pushing a new feature live is not where the work of building something new ends. To get the full value of our efforts, we must take our current and new customers on the journey of adopting new capabilities. It’s also how we ensure they get the total value from the money they pay us.

Communicating new product releases is a discipline that requires collaboration between almost all teams in Autouncle, product, engineering, design, sales, customer success, technical integration, and marketing. These principles are set to align us on how we approach this across all of these different teams.

The principles are co-owned by Niklas (VP of Product and Engineering) and Tony (VP of Sales).

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Clear value proposition

• Before discussing an upcoming product externally, we must clearly understand and document the new feature's value and impact. The ideal versions are testimonials from beta customers, but less is okay with smaller features.
• Describe the value with low context. Make sure that everybody internally and all our customers and prospects will clearly understand the value delivered by a new feature.
• All new features should have an adoption goal that is evaluated after launch.
• Each new feature or product has an internal champion within the Heads of Sales and Technical Operations who gives feedback on pitches and ensures their team is trained on upcoming features.

Write early

• Writing is key to a shared understanding of upcoming features. We aim to write Pitches for problems we start working on and use the Pitch as an ever-evolving document framing what we are building.
• Share pitches as soon as you are done writing them. Getting feedback on the problems you identify and the potential solution is key to making aligned products. Invite collaboration while it’s cheap to change.
• We should always include feedback from all Heads of Sales before building.
• We use visuals as often as possible to support our writing and to create clarity.

We work directly with customers.

• Product and marketing work directly with customers to ensure that our solutions solve their problems and that we frame the value correctly.
• We are not afraid of inviting customers to see prototypes and work with beta versions early in the process.
• We are excited when our interactions with customers spike change.
• We speak with customers on a human-to-human level as peers.

Focus on audience value.

• When communicating about upcoming features, always focus on the value that the audience (both internal and external) is getting out of the communication you are delivering.
• Keep technical details out of the conversation if they are not core to the product.