When I joined Totango, with new features being released every two weeks, internal teams were frustrated that they had little time to prepare themselves or their customers. Customer admins were also frustrated because they didn't have enough time to then enable their end-users on new product functionality.

In an effort to improve the experience for both our internal teams and our customers, I partnered with product operations to develop a scalable launch process organized by launch stage (alpha, beta, general availability) and tier (1-4). For each category, we defined the required operational, enablement, and marketing tasks needed to effectively bring a new offering to market. Over the course of several weeks, we gathered feedback from a cross-functional group of senior leaders and refined the process before submitting it to executive leadership for approval.

We immediately began leveraging the process for tier 1 and tier 2 feature launches, greatly improving our collaboration, timeliness, and effectiveness. Each launch included a launch brief, project plan, and copy deck to create clarity and accountability. I also implemented an executive communications strategy to ensure that our leadership team remained aligned with the latest decisions made by the working team executing against each launch. With each subsequent feature, we further tweaked the process based upon our latest learnings.