This article is based on a presentation given by John McKiernan at the Product Marketing Summit in Sydney. Catch up on all our product marketing summits, and others, using our OnDemand service.
John is now the Principal Marketing Manager at Postman
What if I told you that the most successful product launches don’t start with a grand plan but with hard-won lessons learned the difficult way?
Hey there, I’m John McKiernan, and I lead product marketing for a new product from Atlassian called Jira Product Discovery, a prioritization and roadmapping tool made for product managers (PMs).
I’m here to tell you about the mistakes I made while launching this product and share some helpful lessons I learned along the way.
Launching a hit product
We launched Jira Product Discovery last May, and it’s grown tremendously since then. It’s one of Atlassian’s most successful product launches ever. Customers love it, and it’s great for business. For me personally, it’s been a proud career moment to launch an enterprise product from the ground up.
I must admit I was quite naive coming into this enterprise product launch. I’d launched products in past roles at startups, so I figured launching a product within an established company would be easy. You already have an audience and supporting teams in place, so what could go wrong?
Plenty of things, it turns out.
As anyone who’s done this before knows, launching an enterprise product brings all kinds of unique challenges.
To navigate these challenges, I had to dig deep into my experience. One tool in particular proved invaluable: internal storytelling wrapped into an internal brand. I know that sounds odd, but bear with me as I explain.
Hope Horner
Falling into the trough of sorrow
If you’re familiar with the work of Paul Graham of YCombinator fame, you may recognize the graph below. It represents the trough of sorrow – the painful period when reality hits after you launch a startup. The initial excitement fades as you get stuck into the daily grind.
As I soon learned, the trough of sorrow applies equally when launching a product within an established company. It’s kind of like having a baby; the first few months are thrilling – then sleep deprivation kicks in and you enter the trough of sorrow for the next 17 years or so.
Charley Gale
