Most companies either ship quietly and hope people notice, or over-engineer a launch and miss the window of opportunity. At Dock, product launches are a deliberate, repeatable system that has driven a lot of our growth. In this episode, we pull back the curtain on exactly how it works.
We walk through Dock's complete product launch playbook, from the first roadmap conversation to the post-launch sales follow-up, including:
Enjoy the show!
Eric Doty: Hey everyone, welcome back to Grow and Tell. I'm Eric Doty here with the world famous Alex Kracov. How you doing today, Alex?
Alex Kracov: Doing good, doing good. Happy Friday.
Eric Doty: Yeah, happy Friday. I just watched Canada win the semi-final of the Olympics. I think this episode will be after the Olympics are over, but I'm hoping that flash forward a couple weeks to me celebrating, like running around in my Team Canada jersey after they win the Olympic gold medal. And if not, then I'll look really stupid.
Alex Kracov: And I just watched the US women beat Canada yesterday. So I'm feeling pretty good about the US-Canada thing. Yeah.
Eric Doty: That didn't happen. My TV stopped working during that, so sorry. Okay, so today we're going to talk about product launches. So we're going to walk through the full anatomy of a product launch at Dock, everything from product development to how we develop messaging, sales training all the way through to marketing. And then I'll try to get some spicy hot takes from Alex on things like who should own a launch, whether like big product launches are overrated, how we think about priority tiering and what role sales should play in a launch. So let's get right into it, Alex. Let's just like walk through all the stages of a launch at Dock, so that kind of orient our listeners here. So maybe that's actually to start with, like, what is our typical actual product launch schedule in terms of how often we're shipping features, like major features versus minor features, and what does that look like?
Alex Kracov: So at Dock, it's sort of, I mean, it's evolved over time and we're shipping stuff all of the time. So it's kind of hard to say like what exactly our schedule is. But what the rhythm it's kind of come down to is like one really big thing every quarter, I would say. The pace that we build product, I would say like our big sort of new offerings or things, those builds usually take like three to six months and just the size of our engineering team, we're able to kind of get a bigger like tier one launch out every quarter-ish, I would say. And then we're constantly shipping stuff on the product side of things. That's one of the beauties of the SaaS model is we probably do deploys to production twice a week, I would say, that's fixing little bugs, then a lot of little features and things. And then we're sneaking out different product announcements in there too, bigger things.
Eric Doty: Yeah, for sure. And I think one of the benefits in our situation is that just to call out is that you are our product manager, you are the CEO, you are deeply entrenched with me in marketing. So I think a lot of the launch stuff actually gets easier. And it's like maybe a little more casual than at some companies because like we just have such a tight working relationship and you have the whole product roadmap in your head. You have the marketing roadmap in your head. So in some ways things are a little easier there.
Alex Kracov: It's very fluid and I guess I've developed, I've always had the marketing empathy because that's where I came from where it's like, okay, let's separate the launches and give you time to work on making the marketing collateral. But now I really also have the product empathy of how long these things take and why, you know, EPD teams always miss their deadlines and stuff like that. So I try and pad our launch schedule appropriately on both sides to give the engineering team that extra time to kind of get the QA done and finish those final bugs we got before we get things into production, but then also to hopefully give you some time where I'm not just like, we got to launch it tomorrow. Go, you know, it's like, it takes time to like write the blog post and make the video or whatever we're doing.
Eric Doty: Yeah, exactly. Okay. So let's just like walk through the process here. So you already have like the product roadmap and then normally you send some sort of like warning shot over to me, like, as head of marketing saying, okay, we roughly want to launch this product. Right now we're working on LMS, which will be launching very soon. And so for that, that was like a bigger launch. So that was more like, okay, it's December now, Eric, I think we're going to have this done by the end of March. Let's just like get the engine moving. So there's normally that kind of like warning shot sent over.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, and the way I think about our product roadmap, I basically have an Airtable, a huge list of all of the features that everyone's ever requested of Dock, and then there's things that we want to build too. And then I've tried to get ahead, as far ahead as possible. I have a rough sense of what we want to build overall a year ahead, 12 months ahead, but our roadmapping is really three months, quarterly at a time, because things are just changing so fast, and what we're hearing in the market, then everything that's going on in AI, we're constantly kind of, it's a big jigsaw puzzle, right? And then like certain projects like take longer than we think they're going to take. Some things are faster than we think. And so I'm like trying to kind of give you a rough sense of things like a quarter ahead of time, but inevitably it's all going to change and the exact timing switches up.
Alex Kracov: And so that's like how I sort of think about the roadmapping process and the way things actually get onto the roadmap is sort of two big inputs, I would say. The first is like our customer feedback, people start using Dock and then they're like, wait, I need, usually it's little things. Like I need this button to be blue instead of green, right? Silly example, but you get the idea. They need like little tweaks to make the product work for them. And those things are usually smaller launches. But then there's things that like the market is demanding from us and that could be something that we see maybe our competitors or an adjacent competitor is doing, something that's happening with AI, something that our sales prospects are asking for. These are usually like new product things that we need to build. And so that's where I sort of have to use my taste and judgment to decide, okay, here's what we're doing and here's what we're building. And I sort of map that against our overall company strategy and our ICP and the category we're building for, which is revenue enablement, to make sure it sort of all fits in that paradigm.
And then the nice thing is like, I'm the final decision maker, I sort of suck in all of the information from everybody, right? The internal team, the external folks in the market. And then I can kind of just make the call and negotiate with myself. And I'm often wrong on those things in the order, but I, you know, generally have been directionally correct.
And one thing I do come at it from is a marketing and commercial brain, I sort of envision the launches in my head. I envision the category and the product that we're making. We're not quite as formal. Amazon does this thing of they write a press release before they do the product, which I think is really interesting, of what do we want the marketing and the messaging to do? I sort of do that in my head, I think, where it's like the reason why we want to be a revenue-enablement platform. To do that credibly, we need to build learning management. That is one of the three big components of it. And so we didn't write a formal press release, but I'm thinking it really from that commercial perspective in mind when we think about our roadmap, especially the new big things we're launching.
Eric Doty: Yeah, for sure. That's a good segue into the next step, which is basically like you and I normally sit down and look at the marketing calendar and say, where would the roadmap kind of conveniently slot in in terms of our next few months of planning? So like I said, at Christmas time, we said, okay, end of March, let's launch LMS. We have all these smaller features that we've recently launched kind of quietly. So let's like slot those in on the calendar, kind of one a week or one every two weeks to sort of — those ones aren't as timely versus, then we have those big kind of like tent pole launches that we're like, okay, let's plan the whole quarter around getting to this.
And I think like when that happens, that's normally where like I'll take like LMS is a good example where I say, okay, like let's start building the website page. And that's almost like the Amazon thing too, if they're working backwards of, okay, what do I need to build the new landing page on our website? That's like, I need to understand the messaging first. And normally like you and I have either like async or we get on a call together and you say, okay, here's like the messaging I'm envisioning, like LMS, it's whatever, you know, train your sales team with minimal effort, like whatever the messaging is. And then I take that and like digest it, go look at all the competitor websites, look at the market, think about like, how are we positioned against all these other tools? And there's kind of like this multi-layer brainstorming that happens.
One of the other things I do when I do that too, is I watch all your demos of the features and I go through actual design files and how you were talking to our designers about like, okay, I want the flow to feel like this. I want, you know, when I click this, this happens. And that gives me like a really nice feel of, yeah, like even if the feature isn't live yet, like how it will actually feel to the end user. And then I start doing like, okay, here's like the interesting features, big list. And then for each of those features, here's the so what for the audience, right? It's not just that like we're adding courses to Dock, it's we're adding courses so you can train your sales team in the same tool that you do content management or whatever the value prop is. So there's this kind of like mapping exercise that happens.
Alex Kracov: And I give you credit too, because you definitely build the plane as we're still flying it, whatever that saying is. You'll look at these half completed products and design files that don't have everything, and then you're trying to piece together my Slack messages about what it's about, or our quick conversations in our one-on-ones. It's a messy process, but it works. I think it works because we're working together so tightly on it.
Eric Doty: Yeah, I think my advice for marketers in this position is to get in the tools that your team is working in. So rather than you just throwing something over the fence to me, I'm going into Linear and looking at the design files, looking at our staging where the developers are working right now and actually clicking around. And I learn a lot from seeing the whole development process that went in.
Alex Kracov: And seeing the marketing message come together too, like forces me to make sure the product is actually living up to expectations. I think marketing like sets the expectations of what even is this thing? What's Dock? What's courses? What's the new product? And so I want to make sure that like, you know, whatever Eric is saying on the marketing website or in the blog matches the reality of the product. And there's, there's, you know, probably times I don't have enough example off the cuff where I've slightly evolved the product to sort of match the marketing or said, hey, we got to like delete that copy from the marketing website. Not true yet in the product, something we want to do, but it's not quite there yet.
And then we'll move things up and down the roadmap — one thing, I think in the marketing message, it was very clear with the LMS launch, which is about certifications, that sort of word is a really big part of the final step of a course. And so it's like, we actually weren't gonna — it's not in the V1 of the course launch, but it's in the V1.1. We moved it up the roadmap because to make sure that we're telling this full marketing story. So there's a lot of marketing and product collaboration. And I think more companies need to operate in that way. Product marketing is so important, especially for software companies.
Eric Doty: Yeah. And this recent launch was interesting because we actually started earlier than normal with working on the marketing launch because we found, you know, there's always a bottleneck you don't expect, right? Like our web developer is busier than we thought they would be. And so this time I started like quite early in the product development process. It's a double edged sword because yeah, like we got more ahead of the actual launch. Like now that we're a couple of weeks away, I'm already ready and it's sitting there, which is nice. But on the other hand, there was a lot of like, no, that's not going to be in there anymore. That's not going to be in anymore. Or like that'll be in a later launch. So there was a bit of like a give and take there.
Eric Doty: So there's this like internal messaging that's been developed. Now I think normally I hand things kind of back to you for the training content like internally with our sales team. So can you walk through kind of how you typically go about training our team?
Alex Kracov: Yeah, so I feel like there's two different types of training for your sales and customer success team. I can talk about them kind of together. Two different types of training, right? The first, and they kind of come from different departments. Like one is more marketing-led training, right? It is like the why, right? Like why is this product important? Why would anybody care? Why is anybody going to use it? And then it's probably the why and then who, like who is it for? Who's going to use this thing that's built?
There's sort of that side that comes from sort of the more marketing brain. And then there's the more like product side, which is like the what? Like what does this product actually do? Like how do I use it? How will users use it? What do the buttons do? And sort of there's two different styles of training there.
What I've seen successful, we used to do this at Lattice is, you know, set up your classic training meeting and sort of marketing starts the conversation, the best sales teams are going to do value selling. They don't need to know the product as in depth as your customer success team. And so starting with the why and who it's for is almost more important than what the product actually does, which is funny and sort of unintuitive, but that's the reality. So you sort of need that at the beginning of your training sessions and you got to keep it super simple, a couple of slide decks, a leave behind, things like that.
And then usually the product manager, whoever actually built the product, can start to explain the what, right? And like, how does the product actually function? What do the buttons do? And sort of walk through the demo click path, right? That the sales team should take their buyers through as they're talking about the product.
So that's kind of like the two sides of the training. And what I found successful is you need to do a live training just to get everybody in the room. It should happen ideally before the product even launches or maybe in your beta period, but very close because if you don't do it close, then you're just going to start fielding a bunch of annoying questions from the sales team of how do I do this, customers are asking, blah, blah.
And so you should do some sort of live training. Then you definitely need some sort of leave behind. So in Dock, we use our own product, our playbooks to do this, but a pitch deck can work. You need something that people can go back and reference, like the live session recording, some materials where they inevitably forget some things, they have a place to reference or some AI chat that they can go ask questions to.
And then after those initial trainings, you need checkpoints afterwards to make sure that the sales team is actually talking about this new product in the right way. And this mostly matters for really big products, like the LMS launch for us. But you need to — the most formal way to do it would be like a certification process, right? Where the sales team is like, you know, they're going to digest all this information and they're going to be forced to go into a room with the VP of sales or the product managers or whoever and sort of pretend, you know, mock role play and pitch the product. The sort of less formal way to do it is just the managers checking in, right? And making sure and, you know, either listening to Gong calls or whatever it is to make sure that the sales team is sort of appropriately speaking to the product.
And that process is really important for like the net new sort of tier one products. When it's products, you know, like we're building relationship maps into Dock right now, like you don't need to have quite as formal of a training around it. It can be a little bit more lightweight. It can be a little bit more async, different things like that.
Eric Doty: Yeah, I think about the kind of artifacts that you send around to the team, there's normally this initial async video, like here's what the product does, and then we have the in-depth, more of a full training session, and then we end up with the playbook. And I think another thing to add to that too is you're normally setting up a demo environment along with this too, so that they can actually — we have to build the sample courses and give sales something to click around in, something the customer can look at. So I think that's kind of also happening before we do the training.
Alex Kracov: 100%. And that's a lot of work to set up the demo environment to maintain it. And I've seen that that role switches between product and marketing, sometimes it's probably more like the solutions engineer on sales at like a big company will set that up. But at Dock, it's usually I'm the one who's setting up an initial version of it. It's yeah, it's always tricky to kind of come up with a bunch of fake content to put in there. You always want to use real customer examples or even our own, but obviously can't do that.
Alex Kracov: And then one other thing that should be mentioned here is like too many product teams just like ship quietly and never tell anybody. Like especially a company is led by more like engineering-focused product folks, like not go-to-market minded folks, they're shipping a lot of valuable stuff, but it goes into some changelog that nobody's ever reading. And like one of the most simple things I've done at Dock is like when we release something new, whether it's a feature or big tier one product, I do like a Slack message to the whole company. Like in our general channel, I do @channel and I write a little bit like, it's super easy. One or two sentences about the product, a couple screenshots. Sometimes I'll do a few different products together if they're smaller.
And it's a great way just to tell people, like give them a heads up. It also like is good for our company culture, I think too. Like every time I shout out the engineering team, you know, the engineer who built the feature and you know, from talking to Victor, our CTO like that goes a long way because a lot of times these engineers are just sort of building stuff and shipping and never getting thanked for their work. And so this is always like a nice moment for that. But it also creates nice culture internally of like, hey, Dock is like moving and there's high velocity and there's a lot going on here, especially where we're a remote culture. Like you sort of need that touch point of like, hey, we are making progress towards this broader vision of we want to build the next gen revenue enablement platform.
Eric Doty: Yeah. And I think one thing you do nicely in those updates too, is you say like, here's the feature that we just shipped and here's why it's important to our company and our customers. Like there'll always be, and this really big enterprise customer requested it. You know, thanks whatever, Maddy for letting us know. And like, this will be a big deal. Like there's always the why attached to those launches too. And yeah, it's definitely like of everything in the company other than like our live company all hands, I think it's like the most cross team engagement happens because of those announcements. So definitely a nice culture moment.
Alex Kracov: And you touch on something important, there's like closing the loop with customers on like the smaller product launches too. Like most of the times like a customer requests something and three months later the engineering team might ship something and then they never close the loop on like telling that customer that this thing is new now. And we really try and do that. We'll often — in like we use Linear for project management on the EPD side of things and we'll often like highlight what customer this feature was important to and then Maddy and the team can follow up accordingly. And Maddy does a fantastic job of being like, hey, we shipped this thing that you cared about. And I think that, you know, helps our customers like, build trust in us that we actually listen to what they're asking for.
Eric Doty: Yeah, for sure. Should we — I think that's everything internal, more or less like up to the point of the actual launch. Maybe we'll just quickly rifle through like how we do a marketing launch at Dock. But before we do that, actually, I think let's talk about something that's interesting that we do, which is that we normally launch the product itself with some period of advanced time before we actually do the marketing launch. Can you talk about why we do that?
Alex Kracov: Yeah. Some of it is just to give you some breathing room, Eric, so you don't have to like do it. And we don't quite always know when the product is going to be live. Our other philosophy is, well, there's a few philosophies going on. One is we don't like products sitting in our staging environment for too long. Like once we get it working and it's QA'd, if we have sort of too much code sitting in staging, it can often lead to like random bugs and things. So it's better to get that going into production faster.
But I would say the real philosophy that we have is like, no product should be perfect at the beginning. If you're building a perfect software product when you launch it, like, that's bad, you've taken too long to build it, which is very unintuitive. But it is the truth, like building software is a super iterative process. There's only so much QA you can do. There's only so many bugs you can find on your local environment, right? There's inevitably going to be things that you have blind spots to, especially as the one building the product or you might not realize that the product doesn't work in this way on someone else's screen. And so you got to build products that are not completely finished. And so, you know, they got to be like working to an extent. I'm not talking about building buggy stuff, but there's inevitably going to be stuff.
And so it's nice to have a period where we sort of soft launch something. It's in the product. We usually will put a beta label on it if it sort of meets a certain caliber of feature. And in that like two to three week period, there's sort of a casualness of people might write in or notice it and start to ask questions. And we'll do a lot of testing ourselves when it's in production too to see like what else is wrong. And it sort of gives us another like two to three weeks of, you know, crisping up, like making that product a little bit better before we like blast it out to the whole world and make it marketing official.
Eric Doty: Yeah, and sometimes we gather a bit of sales feedback or CS feedback and change something in the product before we decide to launch it.
Alex Kracov: Or like we're making the marketing video, like me and you do this, like you're preparing for the blog post or I'm making a marketing video and you're like, whoa, I hit a bug or this doesn't make any sense. And then like that helps the product development too. Because you're sort of looking at it through like a fresh lens once we're out of like hardcore QA mode that we're in staging.
Eric Doty: Yeah, exactly. And it's actually funny enough, it's normally the small features that I end up having a lot of QA, like we reorganize the design panel in Dock. And that's where I'll find all these little clicky bugs or something. And so there's another level of QA that gets to happen because of the marketing launch, which is kind of funny, not on purpose, but it works out.
Eric Doty: Okay. So in terms of like what we actually do for a launch, I'll just like rifle off things pretty quickly and stop me if anything's interesting. So normally for a bigger launch, like you'll record a full demo video of like you talking, clicking through, we use something called Screen Studio that just gives us nice little zooming in clicking animations. For a smaller launch, we might just do like clicking through a screen or just pictures, depending on what it is.
Like I mentioned before, we do a new landing page on the website. If it's a major feature, sometimes it might just be updating a current page — like whatever, we ship a new feature to digital sales rooms. Then we can just add a section about that.
We always do a launch blog post. I think I've seen a lot of marketers ask like, should launch posts go on your blog? Does it just like gum up your blog? And I think to some extent, yes, but I think you also need a place where people can go on your website, pull up the top navigation, see what's new. And so we basically have more or less filtered them out from our content blog. We have something called the Revenue Lab on the Dock website where you have the blog post, but then we have a product updates button in our top nav, and there it's a feed of everything you can see.
I think people wonder, is it worth the effort to make a blog post for every single product launch? I think some companies only do it quarterly, but I think, especially when you're a startup like us, there's like this value in seeing someone just lands on this page and sees there's been a new feature launched like every quarter, like smaller updates every week. And that really gives people more confidence as a prospect in the product that like things are moving and things are developing quickly. Do you have any other feelings about that?
Alex Kracov: Yeah, I mean, it's a really deliberate strategy. Customers buy startup software because they want to be a part of the vision of where it's heading in the future, right? It's not about what the thing does today. It's that they believe in where it's going. And they don't want to use a startup that has stagnant software. And so they want to sort of feel that momentum.
So there's like that side of it from sort of the buyer psychology of it. It's also just really useful content for us, like putting stuff on LinkedIn constantly building in public, feeling that momentum in the marketplace. It's something to talk about that is like, it's a way to sell Dock that is still feeling useful, I hope, where it's like, it's not just like, hey, buy Dock, buy Dock, buy Dock. It's like, hey, we shipped this new thing and it's interesting because of X, Y and Z. And it's a great way to keep our customers in the loop about all these new features. But then it's also a way to tell prospects and catch a prospect's eye on something interesting that we might have shipped. So yeah, it's a very sort of deliberate strategy to build in public the way that we do. And you've done a great job of like making it a very repeatable formula that we can sort of copy from launch to launch.
Eric Doty: Yeah. And people actually like seeing founders click around on the buttons on LinkedIn. I think there's this kind of popular marketing sentiment, like no one cares about your product and, you know, they don't care about your product. What they actually care about is achieving outcomes with your product, et cetera. And that's true. And I think that's really true during the sales process. But I think as just like a marketing artifact, people are kind of drawn to like, ooh, like screen on my LinkedIn feed of like someone clicking around buttons. Like, sure. I'll take a look if it's only one minute. People actually do like that content a lot more than I think marketers give credit for. Like not everything has to be super highly elevated thought leadership. I think people also, especially the type of people like we're selling to, they like the tools.
Alex Kracov: I guess one downside or one thing to be mindful of when you're doing like these rolling product launches all of the time is customers and your internal team too can only like digest so much information. Like they're busy in their days. They're barely paying attention to your software. Probably they're just getting in there and using it for whatever they need to do.
And so, you know, one potential downside to having so much like new product, right, is like over saturating your customer's brain around Dock things. But I will take that over saturation over undersaturation like any day of the week. And I think we try and do it tastefully where we, you know, we'll do our little things posts where we roll up a bunch of things. And then also one of the other benefits of just having that product update area on the website is people can always refer back to it. They might not be in the Dock head space now to pay attention to LMS or whatever, but they can always look back and see, okay, what are the new things that Dock has launched recently? So another thing to be mindful of is you want to be shipping product all the time, but you need to be thoughtful about how you communicate and package it to your customers.
Eric Doty: Totally. That brings me to the next sort of step in our launch, which is we always send an email announcement as well, which is basically just the blog post. And people actually don't really click through to the blog post in my experience, but they read the email. So it's nice. Like the blog kind of exists just as a historical artifact on the website versus the email is like the actual material that people are sort of engaging with.
We, to your point about not oversaturating people, like we try at Dock generally to like never send more than one email a week to customers. I think that gets harder as you get bigger. Like now we have a podcast and we have blog posts and we have all this content that we could be sharing. And when you're sort of competing with yourself for what are we going to tell customers about? Normally product launches win and we found that people care about those and we always see interest spikes in Dock when we do product announcements. So that does tend to win over other content. But yeah, we try to limit to one email a week basically.
Alex Kracov: I think you do a good job in those emails of actually making them useful. It's not just marketing crap. It is like, here's how you actually could use it. It sort of blends between marketing and CS a little bit. It's not written like a help center in sort of that most boring way, but you sort of tease how people can actually use the product, which is actually really nice and sort of making it useful.
And then on the flip side, when I do the marketing stuff on LinkedIn where I'm sharing the videos, it's not a true product demo of like, here's every little click thing. Like I try and talk more about the why we built it and sort of flash the product. I try and think of it more as like a little ad for the product or the thing we release rather than I'm gonna like show you exactly how it works in every way.
Eric Doty: Yeah, for sure. I always try to think about, especially like off the hop, like why should someone care? Here's the feature just so it's clear. Then why should someone care? And then here's some examples of how you could use it. And that's kind of like the mental checklist I go through. And then, you know, if you need help, here's where to find us.
Eric Doty: Just quickly, the other things we normally do — like an in-product pop-up for like bigger features, that's like, once you're logged into Dock, you see that little pop-up for bigger launches. We do a webinar, which I think has been really useful for us. It actually doubles as like, it's marketing and like people will come and check it out, but we keep the recordings of those walkthroughs on our website. So it acts as kind of like this longer accessible tutorial you can get.
So for example, like we will launch LMS. We'll do — you'll probably do like a 45 minute webinar and like clicking through all the buttons, all the use cases, some slides, like the full feature set basically. And then that acts as like this secondary education piece for customers, even as they come like months later, we can say, hey, we did this webinar, like go watch it. And so we've found a lot of value in that too.
Alex Kracov: And it's been surprisingly successful. I feel like we've gotten 50 to 150 people showing up to those things every time. And it's always a mix of customers and prospects even. And it's a great way to — on the prospects side, like demo a bunch of people at once and sort of really show them both like sort of, you know, a person behind the company, but also go really in depth around the thing that we're building and show them how we're going to support them. And then on the customer side of things, it's a great way just to teach them about the new thing we launched. And there's always great conversation in the chat of customers building love for Dock there, which is always really nice to see.
Eric Doty: Yeah, for sure. I'll just tie sort of a bow on the steps here. So we do LinkedIn posts, like you mentioned. There's kind of a mix of like product announcements and then we try to do some like related content. Not thought leadership might be too strong, but not just like here's the new feature, here's the new feature, but also like here's how we think sales training should happen. Or here's why traditional LMS is not the right play. And here's why — not always tying it back to Dock, but you know, just sort of product philosophy stuff too around it. Try to do like two or three posts like that for every launch.
Alex Kracov: And then one other thing on the LinkedIn side, just while you're talking about it, is we do run a lot of thought leadership ads on LinkedIn. And the way we think about that is the big tier one launches, like when we launched our AI enablement agent, or we repositioned it as revenue enablement. Those videos, those big launches, we will use in both our prospecting ads, but then also in retargeting. So those we blast out everywhere. It's like, it's a new thing we're doing, this is big, we want everyone to pay attention.
And then the smaller feature announcements we'll usually put in retargeting ads, because at least my hypothesis there is the people who are visiting our website the most are actually our customers. And then it's even nice for our prospects to see that too, of like, wow, this company is shipping a lot, there's a lot of new things. We want to give off that vibe, because it's the truth, it's what we do, we're shipping a lot.
Eric Doty: Totally. Some other things we do, like we have our Dock sales room template. Well, if it's like a bigger feature, we'll go and like add a section for that or a page for that so that sales has that built into what they're sending to customers. Then depending on the size of the feature, of course, there's going to be some like, do we have to update our competitor comparisons? Do we have to update our pitch deck? Do we need more case studies now? Like there's sort of this sales and even like content refresh depending on the impact there. And then for me as marketing, I also sort of have some like downstream content strategy things that might come of it. So yeah, if we launch a new product category, then I'm going to care about like SEO, blog posts and things like that too. But we'll leave that for another day.
Eric Doty: Okay. I'm going to ask you some sort of hot take questions here. So like you've — when you were at Lattice, there's a bigger company, bigger structure there, like how do you avoid product just throwing things over the fence to PMMs and enablement? What did a good collaboration look like in that case?
Alex Kracov: A really hard challenge, especially as the company gets bigger and there's more people involved. Like, you know, all the things that we were talking about at the beginning of this podcast of like how me and you can collaborate are just so not true at a bigger company when there's multiple PMs, multiple product marketing managers, different sales teams and segments. There's just like the sort of classic management collaboration challenge that happens at a bigger company.
I think one strategy I found successful is if you can pair your product managers with a product marketing manager, that is a really nice setup where those two people can sort of be in lockstep, especially around some of the like little or mid tier things. All the tier one features everyone's gonna know about, you're gonna talk about that, but it's often these like smaller mid tier things that can kind of get just tossed over. And so, you know, usually having a product manager, a product marketing manager, maybe somebody from CS involved there too, depending on the PMM's role and the CS team's setup, can be a really good setup.
And it can be done by, depending on how your PMM and product teams are structured, it can be done by product line, which is the easiest way to think about this. So for Dock, if we had a product manager for deal rooms and content and learning, those are three different product managers. You could have three different PMMs related to that. But it also could be that the PMM is supporting the sales enablement versus CS enablement.
But having a one-to-one relationship is the best way to do this. If that doesn't work because your team's small and you don't just have enough people like that, it's honestly just like a recurring meeting is a good way with a nice spreadsheet that's tracking all the things that are coming or about to launch and so on and so forth. And you just need a recurring meeting with either, you could do it with just a leadership team and then they need to communicate to their subordinates, like head of product, head of product marketing, head of CS and have those people meet and sort of talk.
But I think it's even better if you just get everybody in the room on some cadence and product can present to product marketing on what they're building. And hopefully PMM was actually even informing what was being built in the first place. But if not, just a meeting where everyone's getting together, talking about the roadmap of things, that's sort of step one.
Alex Kracov: And then it becomes how do you enable the field team, right? Sales and customer success. Because they have very little time in their day to pay attention to the new product stuff that you're releasing. And not all of it is important to the field team. A lot of it's probably more important — like the small things are being more important to the CS team because they're trying to make a customer happy and fix something there. You know, the best way to do sales is value selling. And you're really talking about your product at like a higher level. And so they don't care about everything that product is shipping.
And so there needs to be tight collaboration between product, product marketing, and then sales. And in sales, it could be the sales leadership team or sales enablement. And they are working together to figure out what products sales will actually care about and what is most important to teach them. The sort of best strategy, especially as it scales, is there's a recurring training session on the books for the sales team, whether that's monthly or weekly, that sort of depends on how much is going on. And the enablement person will sort of manage that calendar and is sort of the person who can deem whether something is sort of worthy of the sales team's time and then work with the product manager and the product marketing manager to create the content for those trainings, but also to figure out the launch schedule. And as you get bigger, this is a much more delicate dance and you can't just ship stuff at the frequency like Dock does, you have to really give people training ahead of time and after it launches and things like that.
Eric Doty: Sure. Okay, so next question is about launch tiering and priorities. Did you have a rubric or something for like, how did you decide what was like a P1 versus P2 versus P3, or was it just like those people you talked about in a room deciding this is gonna be really impactful in revenue? Like how did you think through the priority of a launch?
Alex Kracov: It's somewhat those people in the room, but it's more of a feeling, I would say. And it's usually like tier one, it's like the CEO needs this feature to get shipped. It's like not a feature, it's a product, right? It is like, if it's tier one, it is a company strategy. It is a big deal. Like the board is talking about it. The exec team is talking about it. Like it's pretty obvious what a tier one feature is. Like there shouldn't be a lot of — there's a lot of debate around that, then you have probably a bigger problem.
When it gets into the middle tiers, depending on how many tiers you got, there's some room for debate. I would say the bigger tiers are the ones that maybe the commercial teams actually care about. And then a lot of just like the lower level tiers are easy because they're just like little features, like tiny little things that mostly just like a couple of customers cared about, but it's not going to matter from the market perspective or the sales team's not quite going to care about it.
Eric Doty: Yeah, totally. Was there ever disagreement over at Lattice over like, this should be bigger priority, like there should get a bigger launch? Or was it like pretty kumbaya?
Alex Kracov: No, it was always so obvious. Yeah, like the big ones were like our engagement launch or when we launched Grow or when we launched compensation. Like it was just always like super, super obvious. The debate maybe in marketing is like, how big do we go? You know, how much budget are we putting behind it? Are we going to make a crazy launch video?
Alex Kracov: And then one other thing that happens and maybe this is slightly off topic to the question, but I do think it's relevant to the overall episode we're talking about is like user conferences. So Dreamforce and Salesforce is a huge example of this, but Lattice turned into this as well is like often that's the pinnacle of the year, right? Dreamforce or Resources for Humans at Lattice, whatever Lattice ended up calling it. That was the place where you would launch those tier one features, right? And so the entire product and commercial calendar was oriented around Dreamforce, let's say. And that's the place where they're going to launch those giant tier one features. And so that sort of informs a lot of how those companies work. They're working around their big user conference.
Eric Doty: And is it normally designed that way, like to incentivize coming to the conference to find out the big features or like why structure it that way?
Alex Kracov: I think it's partly that. I think it's partly like, let's make this conference awesome and every customer is going to be there. And there's definitely like pressure for Benioff to get on stage and like announce his new Agentforce and all the different things there. It's like, you have this captive audience, you need to make it worth their time. And if you just got on stage and didn't announce anything, they're like, that's weird.
But I think it's actually even more useful for the internal team. It is like putting a serious pressure, right? It's like, if you don't launch this feature, Benioff's going to be on stage and not have anything to talk about. So you better work this weekend to get that product done. Like it is super motivating for the internal team to not embarrass the company. And I also think that is like some of the probably the biggest benefit of these giant user conferences is to like push the team to do a lot of work in a compressed time, because there's a real physical event that you're sort of working towards.
Eric Doty: That makes sense. Okay, marketing question. Do you think the big splash launch with Product Hunt and a flashy video, do you think that converts to pipeline right away? Does it have an immediate sales impact or is it more of a brand presence? I think what I'm getting at is like when you're doing these like big splash launches, like what is the outcome you're actually looking for?
Alex Kracov: Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of it is more on the like brand indirect pipeline gen side of things. But I think where it really works, it works. And that's very silly to say, but if like you do that big splashy launch and you find extreme product market fit, the market is just like, whoa, that's cool. And you did some marketing thing that caught people's eye, then it's like, really worth it and going to drive a ton of pipeline.
And it also sort of depends on like the definition of that splashy launch. Like, are you doing a brand video that's going into actual commercials and YouTube retargeting or whatever it is? Are you going to put billboards around the city? Are you doing Dreamforce? There are sort of different flavors and each one of those marketing channels kind of will drive pipeline in different ways, but usually it's like sort of on the indirect side of things.
Alex Kracov: But it does bring up this interesting question of like, how do you even track the success of a launch in general? And that's honestly something that we kind of struggled to do at Lattice. Do you goal PMM, product marketing, on the launch? Do you try to goal product managers? It's a very complicated thing because there's a lot going on.
And there are ways to do it. Initial signups on the day of the launch or the week of the launch, right? Is it driving net new signups to the website? But then there's obviously clearly product usage. Do people start using the new thing right away?
It depends. Like some products we've launched at Dock, we've like noticed an uptick right away and other things, it takes a little while because customers are like not paying attention to you all the time. They might be busy. They might be on vacation. They might be at their SKO. They're not like paying attention to everything that you're launching. And so other products sort of take a little bit of time to kind of get adoption. But obviously the best ones just kind of go up and to the right right away. And that's when you really know you got something that's working.
Eric Doty: Yeah, makes sense. In terms of sales, the sales team being able to talk about product launches before they happen, what's your philosophy on how much the roadmap can be shared with prospects by the sales team? Because obviously we have a rough roadmap calendar, we have a rough marketing launch calendar, we know what's kinda coming, how much is it helpful for sales to talk about versus not?
Alex Kracov: Yeah, it's a delicate balance. I used to be in favor of like marketing should always make the roadmap or work with product to make a roadmap deck and share it and let's have the super public roadmap. I'm now completely on the other side of it. I actually don't like sharing roadmaps with potential customers or even customers because it puts the product team in sort of a box. It allows less flexibility to build the actual right thing, as opposed to you feel like you have this commitment out in the world.
And so I just kind of hate the public roadmap now because I want that flexibility as a product person. I'm still down to get on a customer call and talk about what we're building and things, but I really hate committing to specific timelines. I will say whenever we do, with LMS, I did like create a little deck that previewed it. And then I usually will just sandbag the timeline by a couple months. If we're committing and talking about it with customers, I want to over deliver, not under deliver.
But I really try and say, hey, sales team, sell what we have today. Don't sell future stuff. Now that contradicts what I was saying earlier, where it was like people want to join a startup because they want to know where you're going. So there's an interesting balance, but you want to talk about where you're going at a high level. We're going in this general direction, as opposed to like on March 13th, we're going to deliver X, Y, and Z. You don't want to deal with that.
Eric Doty: Yeah. And tell me if I'm wrong, but I think like my sense of how it normally happens with our sales team is it's like, okay, here's sales rooms, here's content management, here's our AI stuff. And the customer goes, great, I love all this, but I absolutely can't buy you unless you have LMS. Then like that's kind of the only time when they're like, okay, yeah, actually LMS is coming up in two months. And we wouldn't say that if the feature was a year away, but you know, when it's like, it's kind of solidly on the roadmap — whereas we're not like proactively selling the roadmap.
Alex Kracov: Exactly. It usually comes down like that. And it's usually like at the later stages, they really want to do Dock with everything else. But then like, we're missing LMS, let's say. And then even then, I'm like, if they need it right now, they shouldn't buy Dock. Like, if they need it right now, and that's what they actually want, and they need to launch in the next month, like go with somebody else, because we don't have that. And it might be coming, but it's also going to be a V1 product, and we got to evolve it, and it's going to get better.
Like, I don't want — I want people to buy Dock for what it is today and know that it's going to keep getting better and better in the future. And we can give some sense of how that's going to evolve. But it's sort of from an engineering perspective, these things take longer than you think or shorter than you think and you need that flexibility. And that's how you build good product. And you don't want to be sort of locked in by some like fake roadmap deck that you had to put together for the sales team.
Eric Doty: What role should sales play after a launch? Like other than being sort of the recipient of training and like knowing how to do a new demo, is there anything the sales team should like actively be doing with their prospect base, for example?
Alex Kracov: I mean, product feedback. Like funneling back what they're hearing from customers, potential customers back to the product team. You know, like what I was saying before is like every product's not going to be perfect, right? It's going to be missing features and things. And so the sales team needs to be really communicating back to the product team of like, what's missing? What do we have to build? What do we have to do to close that customer?
Eric Doty: And another example that comes to mind, actually, we just launched the Dock Chrome extension recently and Christian on our sales team used it as an opportunity to like loop back around with customers who were like, okay, my biggest — the biggest reason I want to buy something like Dock is because I want my content to be more discoverable or there was something like that. And then, so that gave him like a touch point to go back to a deal that was like kind of dead-ish, and then go, hey, actually now we have this new Chrome extension, it should make it way easier for sales to find their content. And then that actually like revived the deal.
I think like there's also that — I mean, I don't know how scalable that is and like what a scalable system looks like there in terms of like a closed-loss reason on the deal maybe — but you know, sales can also use it as like a free touch point too.
Alex Kracov: The other thing that comes to mind too is sales should inform the product roadmap. We started doing these competitor intelligence meetings at Dock where sales is like, we're losing deals to this competitor because of these three features. And then it's like, okay, thank you for the feedback and then product goes and works on it. And then we'll ship those three features to get to feature parity against that competitor.
And then what I want to hear after we ship that is — well, I want to hear that it's getting better in those conversations against that competitor, but I also want to see it in the numbers. I want to see our close rates go up against Seismic or Highspot because we shipped those features to get to feature parity. That's another way you can evaluate the success of the launch, especially when you have features that are built with something really specific in mind, like a competitor.
Eric Doty: That feels like a great place to stop. Alex, thanks so much for chatting about product launches. Thank you everyone for listening today. As per usual, go to growintelshow.com if you wanna sign up for the newsletter version of the show. Find us on YouTube, find us on all the social platforms, Spotify, Apple, et cetera. Make sure to subscribe. And I hope that I'm dancing around with a gold medal around my neck next time that you're listening to this.
Alex Kracov: Go USA.
Alex Kracov is the founder and CEO of Dock. He was the third employee and VP of Marketing at Lattice, where he spent five years helping grow the company from zero to over $50 million in ARR—ultimately building it into a $3 billion business. Before Lattice, Alex worked at Blue State Digital (the political adtech firm that helped elect President Obama) where he led projects for Google, and he started his career as a sales rep at Yelp.
Eric Doty is the Head of Marketing at Dock. He joined Dock over three years ago as the company's first and only marketing hire and has been building the content engine ever since. Eric has been the first marketing hire at three different startups. He's also Head of Community at Superpath, a community for content marketers.
Most companies either ship quietly and hope people notice, or over-engineer a launch and miss the window of opportunity. At Dock, product launches are a deliberate, repeatable system that has driven a lot of our growth. In this episode, we pull back the curtain on exactly how it works.
We walk through Dock's complete product launch playbook, from the first roadmap conversation to the post-launch sales follow-up, including:
Enjoy the show!
Tools mentioned:
Eric Doty: Hey everyone, welcome back to Grow and Tell. I'm Eric Doty here with the world famous Alex Kracov. How you doing today, Alex?
Alex Kracov: Doing good, doing good. Happy Friday.
Eric Doty: Yeah, happy Friday. I just watched Canada win the semi-final of the Olympics. I think this episode will be after the Olympics are over, but I'm hoping that flash forward a couple weeks to me celebrating, like running around in my Team Canada jersey after they win the Olympic gold medal. And if not, then I'll look really stupid.
Alex Kracov: And I just watched the US women beat Canada yesterday. So I'm feeling pretty good about the US-Canada thing. Yeah.
Eric Doty: That didn't happen. My TV stopped working during that, so sorry. Okay, so today we're going to talk about product launches. So we're going to walk through the full anatomy of a product launch at Dock, everything from product development to how we develop messaging, sales training all the way through to marketing. And then I'll try to get some spicy hot takes from Alex on things like who should own a launch, whether like big product launches are overrated, how we think about priority tiering and what role sales should play in a launch. So let's get right into it, Alex. Let's just like walk through all the stages of a launch at Dock, so that kind of orient our listeners here. So maybe that's actually to start with, like, what is our typical actual product launch schedule in terms of how often we're shipping features, like major features versus minor features, and what does that look like?
Alex Kracov: So at Dock, it's sort of, I mean, it's evolved over time and we're shipping stuff all of the time. So it's kind of hard to say like what exactly our schedule is. But what the rhythm it's kind of come down to is like one really big thing every quarter, I would say. The pace that we build product, I would say like our big sort of new offerings or things, those builds usually take like three to six months and just the size of our engineering team, we're able to kind of get a bigger like tier one launch out every quarter-ish, I would say. And then we're constantly shipping stuff on the product side of things. That's one of the beauties of the SaaS model is we probably do deploys to production twice a week, I would say, that's fixing little bugs, then a lot of little features and things. And then we're sneaking out different product announcements in there too, bigger things.
Eric Doty: Yeah, for sure. And I think one of the benefits in our situation is that just to call out is that you are our product manager, you are the CEO, you are deeply entrenched with me in marketing. So I think a lot of the launch stuff actually gets easier. And it's like maybe a little more casual than at some companies because like we just have such a tight working relationship and you have the whole product roadmap in your head. You have the marketing roadmap in your head. So in some ways things are a little easier there.
Alex Kracov: It's very fluid and I guess I've developed, I've always had the marketing empathy because that's where I came from where it's like, okay, let's separate the launches and give you time to work on making the marketing collateral. But now I really also have the product empathy of how long these things take and why, you know, EPD teams always miss their deadlines and stuff like that. So I try and pad our launch schedule appropriately on both sides to give the engineering team that extra time to kind of get the QA done and finish those final bugs we got before we get things into production, but then also to hopefully give you some time where I'm not just like, we got to launch it tomorrow. Go, you know, it's like, it takes time to like write the blog post and make the video or whatever we're doing.
Eric Doty: Yeah, exactly. Okay. So let's just like walk through the process here. So you already have like the product roadmap and then normally you send some sort of like warning shot over to me, like, as head of marketing saying, okay, we roughly want to launch this product. Right now we're working on LMS, which will be launching very soon. And so for that, that was like a bigger launch. So that was more like, okay, it's December now, Eric, I think we're going to have this done by the end of March. Let's just like get the engine moving. So there's normally that kind of like warning shot sent over.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, and the way I think about our product roadmap, I basically have an Airtable, a huge list of all of the features that everyone's ever requested of Dock, and then there's things that we want to build too. And then I've tried to get ahead, as far ahead as possible. I have a rough sense of what we want to build overall a year ahead, 12 months ahead, but our roadmapping is really three months, quarterly at a time, because things are just changing so fast, and what we're hearing in the market, then everything that's going on in AI, we're constantly kind of, it's a big jigsaw puzzle, right? And then like certain projects like take longer than we think they're going to take. Some things are faster than we think. And so I'm like trying to kind of give you a rough sense of things like a quarter ahead of time, but inevitably it's all going to change and the exact timing switches up.
Alex Kracov: And so that's like how I sort of think about the roadmapping process and the way things actually get onto the roadmap is sort of two big inputs, I would say. The first is like our customer feedback, people start using Dock and then they're like, wait, I need, usually it's little things. Like I need this button to be blue instead of green, right? Silly example, but you get the idea. They need like little tweaks to make the product work for them. And those things are usually smaller launches. But then there's things that like the market is demanding from us and that could be something that we see maybe our competitors or an adjacent competitor is doing, something that's happening with AI, something that our sales prospects are asking for. These are usually like new product things that we need to build. And so that's where I sort of have to use my taste and judgment to decide, okay, here's what we're doing and here's what we're building. And I sort of map that against our overall company strategy and our ICP and the category we're building for, which is revenue enablement, to make sure it sort of all fits in that paradigm.
And then the nice thing is like, I'm the final decision maker, I sort of suck in all of the information from everybody, right? The internal team, the external folks in the market. And then I can kind of just make the call and negotiate with myself. And I'm often wrong on those things in the order, but I, you know, generally have been directionally correct.
And one thing I do come at it from is a marketing and commercial brain, I sort of envision the launches in my head. I envision the category and the product that we're making. We're not quite as formal. Amazon does this thing of they write a press release before they do the product, which I think is really interesting, of what do we want the marketing and the messaging to do? I sort of do that in my head, I think, where it's like the reason why we want to be a revenue-enablement platform. To do that credibly, we need to build learning management. That is one of the three big components of it. And so we didn't write a formal press release, but I'm thinking it really from that commercial perspective in mind when we think about our roadmap, especially the new big things we're launching.
Eric Doty: Yeah, for sure. That's a good segue into the next step, which is basically like you and I normally sit down and look at the marketing calendar and say, where would the roadmap kind of conveniently slot in in terms of our next few months of planning? So like I said, at Christmas time, we said, okay, end of March, let's launch LMS. We have all these smaller features that we've recently launched kind of quietly. So let's like slot those in on the calendar, kind of one a week or one every two weeks to sort of — those ones aren't as timely versus, then we have those big kind of like tent pole launches that we're like, okay, let's plan the whole quarter around getting to this.
And I think like when that happens, that's normally where like I'll take like LMS is a good example where I say, okay, like let's start building the website page. And that's almost like the Amazon thing too, if they're working backwards of, okay, what do I need to build the new landing page on our website? That's like, I need to understand the messaging first. And normally like you and I have either like async or we get on a call together and you say, okay, here's like the messaging I'm envisioning, like LMS, it's whatever, you know, train your sales team with minimal effort, like whatever the messaging is. And then I take that and like digest it, go look at all the competitor websites, look at the market, think about like, how are we positioned against all these other tools? And there's kind of like this multi-layer brainstorming that happens.
One of the other things I do when I do that too, is I watch all your demos of the features and I go through actual design files and how you were talking to our designers about like, okay, I want the flow to feel like this. I want, you know, when I click this, this happens. And that gives me like a really nice feel of, yeah, like even if the feature isn't live yet, like how it will actually feel to the end user. And then I start doing like, okay, here's like the interesting features, big list. And then for each of those features, here's the so what for the audience, right? It's not just that like we're adding courses to Dock, it's we're adding courses so you can train your sales team in the same tool that you do content management or whatever the value prop is. So there's this kind of like mapping exercise that happens.
Alex Kracov: And I give you credit too, because you definitely build the plane as we're still flying it, whatever that saying is. You'll look at these half completed products and design files that don't have everything, and then you're trying to piece together my Slack messages about what it's about, or our quick conversations in our one-on-ones. It's a messy process, but it works. I think it works because we're working together so tightly on it.
Eric Doty: Yeah, I think my advice for marketers in this position is to get in the tools that your team is working in. So rather than you just throwing something over the fence to me, I'm going into Linear and looking at the design files, looking at our staging where the developers are working right now and actually clicking around. And I learn a lot from seeing the whole development process that went in.
Alex Kracov: And seeing the marketing message come together too, like forces me to make sure the product is actually living up to expectations. I think marketing like sets the expectations of what even is this thing? What's Dock? What's courses? What's the new product? And so I want to make sure that like, you know, whatever Eric is saying on the marketing website or in the blog matches the reality of the product. And there's, there's, you know, probably times I don't have enough example off the cuff where I've slightly evolved the product to sort of match the marketing or said, hey, we got to like delete that copy from the marketing website. Not true yet in the product, something we want to do, but it's not quite there yet.
And then we'll move things up and down the roadmap — one thing, I think in the marketing message, it was very clear with the LMS launch, which is about certifications, that sort of word is a really big part of the final step of a course. And so it's like, we actually weren't gonna — it's not in the V1 of the course launch, but it's in the V1.1. We moved it up the roadmap because to make sure that we're telling this full marketing story. So there's a lot of marketing and product collaboration. And I think more companies need to operate in that way. Product marketing is so important, especially for software companies.
Eric Doty: Yeah. And this recent launch was interesting because we actually started earlier than normal with working on the marketing launch because we found, you know, there's always a bottleneck you don't expect, right? Like our web developer is busier than we thought they would be. And so this time I started like quite early in the product development process. It's a double edged sword because yeah, like we got more ahead of the actual launch. Like now that we're a couple of weeks away, I'm already ready and it's sitting there, which is nice. But on the other hand, there was a lot of like, no, that's not going to be in there anymore. That's not going to be in anymore. Or like that'll be in a later launch. So there was a bit of like a give and take there.
Eric Doty: So there's this like internal messaging that's been developed. Now I think normally I hand things kind of back to you for the training content like internally with our sales team. So can you walk through kind of how you typically go about training our team?
Alex Kracov: Yeah, so I feel like there's two different types of training for your sales and customer success team. I can talk about them kind of together. Two different types of training, right? The first, and they kind of come from different departments. Like one is more marketing-led training, right? It is like the why, right? Like why is this product important? Why would anybody care? Why is anybody going to use it? And then it's probably the why and then who, like who is it for? Who's going to use this thing that's built?
There's sort of that side that comes from sort of the more marketing brain. And then there's the more like product side, which is like the what? Like what does this product actually do? Like how do I use it? How will users use it? What do the buttons do? And sort of there's two different styles of training there.
What I've seen successful, we used to do this at Lattice is, you know, set up your classic training meeting and sort of marketing starts the conversation, the best sales teams are going to do value selling. They don't need to know the product as in depth as your customer success team. And so starting with the why and who it's for is almost more important than what the product actually does, which is funny and sort of unintuitive, but that's the reality. So you sort of need that at the beginning of your training sessions and you got to keep it super simple, a couple of slide decks, a leave behind, things like that.
And then usually the product manager, whoever actually built the product, can start to explain the what, right? And like, how does the product actually function? What do the buttons do? And sort of walk through the demo click path, right? That the sales team should take their buyers through as they're talking about the product.
So that's kind of like the two sides of the training. And what I found successful is you need to do a live training just to get everybody in the room. It should happen ideally before the product even launches or maybe in your beta period, but very close because if you don't do it close, then you're just going to start fielding a bunch of annoying questions from the sales team of how do I do this, customers are asking, blah, blah.
And so you should do some sort of live training. Then you definitely need some sort of leave behind. So in Dock, we use our own product, our playbooks to do this, but a pitch deck can work. You need something that people can go back and reference, like the live session recording, some materials where they inevitably forget some things, they have a place to reference or some AI chat that they can go ask questions to.
And then after those initial trainings, you need checkpoints afterwards to make sure that the sales team is actually talking about this new product in the right way. And this mostly matters for really big products, like the LMS launch for us. But you need to — the most formal way to do it would be like a certification process, right? Where the sales team is like, you know, they're going to digest all this information and they're going to be forced to go into a room with the VP of sales or the product managers or whoever and sort of pretend, you know, mock role play and pitch the product. The sort of less formal way to do it is just the managers checking in, right? And making sure and, you know, either listening to Gong calls or whatever it is to make sure that the sales team is sort of appropriately speaking to the product.
And that process is really important for like the net new sort of tier one products. When it's products, you know, like we're building relationship maps into Dock right now, like you don't need to have quite as formal of a training around it. It can be a little bit more lightweight. It can be a little bit more async, different things like that.
Eric Doty: Yeah, I think about the kind of artifacts that you send around to the team, there's normally this initial async video, like here's what the product does, and then we have the in-depth, more of a full training session, and then we end up with the playbook. And I think another thing to add to that too is you're normally setting up a demo environment along with this too, so that they can actually — we have to build the sample courses and give sales something to click around in, something the customer can look at. So I think that's kind of also happening before we do the training.
Alex Kracov: 100%. And that's a lot of work to set up the demo environment to maintain it. And I've seen that that role switches between product and marketing, sometimes it's probably more like the solutions engineer on sales at like a big company will set that up. But at Dock, it's usually I'm the one who's setting up an initial version of it. It's yeah, it's always tricky to kind of come up with a bunch of fake content to put in there. You always want to use real customer examples or even our own, but obviously can't do that.
Alex Kracov: And then one other thing that should be mentioned here is like too many product teams just like ship quietly and never tell anybody. Like especially a company is led by more like engineering-focused product folks, like not go-to-market minded folks, they're shipping a lot of valuable stuff, but it goes into some changelog that nobody's ever reading. And like one of the most simple things I've done at Dock is like when we release something new, whether it's a feature or big tier one product, I do like a Slack message to the whole company. Like in our general channel, I do @channel and I write a little bit like, it's super easy. One or two sentences about the product, a couple screenshots. Sometimes I'll do a few different products together if they're smaller.
And it's a great way just to tell people, like give them a heads up. It also like is good for our company culture, I think too. Like every time I shout out the engineering team, you know, the engineer who built the feature and you know, from talking to Victor, our CTO like that goes a long way because a lot of times these engineers are just sort of building stuff and shipping and never getting thanked for their work. And so this is always like a nice moment for that. But it also creates nice culture internally of like, hey, Dock is like moving and there's high velocity and there's a lot going on here, especially where we're a remote culture. Like you sort of need that touch point of like, hey, we are making progress towards this broader vision of we want to build the next gen revenue enablement platform.
Eric Doty: Yeah. And I think one thing you do nicely in those updates too, is you say like, here's the feature that we just shipped and here's why it's important to our company and our customers. Like there'll always be, and this really big enterprise customer requested it. You know, thanks whatever, Maddy for letting us know. And like, this will be a big deal. Like there's always the why attached to those launches too. And yeah, it's definitely like of everything in the company other than like our live company all hands, I think it's like the most cross team engagement happens because of those announcements. So definitely a nice culture moment.
Alex Kracov: And you touch on something important, there's like closing the loop with customers on like the smaller product launches too. Like most of the times like a customer requests something and three months later the engineering team might ship something and then they never close the loop on like telling that customer that this thing is new now. And we really try and do that. We'll often — in like we use Linear for project management on the EPD side of things and we'll often like highlight what customer this feature was important to and then Maddy and the team can follow up accordingly. And Maddy does a fantastic job of being like, hey, we shipped this thing that you cared about. And I think that, you know, helps our customers like, build trust in us that we actually listen to what they're asking for.
Eric Doty: Yeah, for sure. Should we — I think that's everything internal, more or less like up to the point of the actual launch. Maybe we'll just quickly rifle through like how we do a marketing launch at Dock. But before we do that, actually, I think let's talk about something that's interesting that we do, which is that we normally launch the product itself with some period of advanced time before we actually do the marketing launch. Can you talk about why we do that?
Alex Kracov: Yeah. Some of it is just to give you some breathing room, Eric, so you don't have to like do it. And we don't quite always know when the product is going to be live. Our other philosophy is, well, there's a few philosophies going on. One is we don't like products sitting in our staging environment for too long. Like once we get it working and it's QA'd, if we have sort of too much code sitting in staging, it can often lead to like random bugs and things. So it's better to get that going into production faster.
But I would say the real philosophy that we have is like, no product should be perfect at the beginning. If you're building a perfect software product when you launch it, like, that's bad, you've taken too long to build it, which is very unintuitive. But it is the truth, like building software is a super iterative process. There's only so much QA you can do. There's only so many bugs you can find on your local environment, right? There's inevitably going to be things that you have blind spots to, especially as the one building the product or you might not realize that the product doesn't work in this way on someone else's screen. And so you got to build products that are not completely finished. And so, you know, they got to be like working to an extent. I'm not talking about building buggy stuff, but there's inevitably going to be stuff.
And so it's nice to have a period where we sort of soft launch something. It's in the product. We usually will put a beta label on it if it sort of meets a certain caliber of feature. And in that like two to three week period, there's sort of a casualness of people might write in or notice it and start to ask questions. And we'll do a lot of testing ourselves when it's in production too to see like what else is wrong. And it sort of gives us another like two to three weeks of, you know, crisping up, like making that product a little bit better before we like blast it out to the whole world and make it marketing official.
Eric Doty: Yeah, and sometimes we gather a bit of sales feedback or CS feedback and change something in the product before we decide to launch it.
Alex Kracov: Or like we're making the marketing video, like me and you do this, like you're preparing for the blog post or I'm making a marketing video and you're like, whoa, I hit a bug or this doesn't make any sense. And then like that helps the product development too. Because you're sort of looking at it through like a fresh lens once we're out of like hardcore QA mode that we're in staging.
Eric Doty: Yeah, exactly. And it's actually funny enough, it's normally the small features that I end up having a lot of QA, like we reorganize the design panel in Dock. And that's where I'll find all these little clicky bugs or something. And so there's another level of QA that gets to happen because of the marketing launch, which is kind of funny, not on purpose, but it works out.
Eric Doty: Okay. So in terms of like what we actually do for a launch, I'll just like rifle off things pretty quickly and stop me if anything's interesting. So normally for a bigger launch, like you'll record a full demo video of like you talking, clicking through, we use something called Screen Studio that just gives us nice little zooming in clicking animations. For a smaller launch, we might just do like clicking through a screen or just pictures, depending on what it is.
Like I mentioned before, we do a new landing page on the website. If it's a major feature, sometimes it might just be updating a current page — like whatever, we ship a new feature to digital sales rooms. Then we can just add a section about that.
We always do a launch blog post. I think I've seen a lot of marketers ask like, should launch posts go on your blog? Does it just like gum up your blog? And I think to some extent, yes, but I think you also need a place where people can go on your website, pull up the top navigation, see what's new. And so we basically have more or less filtered them out from our content blog. We have something called the Revenue Lab on the Dock website where you have the blog post, but then we have a product updates button in our top nav, and there it's a feed of everything you can see.
I think people wonder, is it worth the effort to make a blog post for every single product launch? I think some companies only do it quarterly, but I think, especially when you're a startup like us, there's like this value in seeing someone just lands on this page and sees there's been a new feature launched like every quarter, like smaller updates every week. And that really gives people more confidence as a prospect in the product that like things are moving and things are developing quickly. Do you have any other feelings about that?
Alex Kracov: Yeah, I mean, it's a really deliberate strategy. Customers buy startup software because they want to be a part of the vision of where it's heading in the future, right? It's not about what the thing does today. It's that they believe in where it's going. And they don't want to use a startup that has stagnant software. And so they want to sort of feel that momentum.
So there's like that side of it from sort of the buyer psychology of it. It's also just really useful content for us, like putting stuff on LinkedIn constantly building in public, feeling that momentum in the marketplace. It's something to talk about that is like, it's a way to sell Dock that is still feeling useful, I hope, where it's like, it's not just like, hey, buy Dock, buy Dock, buy Dock. It's like, hey, we shipped this new thing and it's interesting because of X, Y and Z. And it's a great way to keep our customers in the loop about all these new features. But then it's also a way to tell prospects and catch a prospect's eye on something interesting that we might have shipped. So yeah, it's a very sort of deliberate strategy to build in public the way that we do. And you've done a great job of like making it a very repeatable formula that we can sort of copy from launch to launch.
Eric Doty: Yeah. And people actually like seeing founders click around on the buttons on LinkedIn. I think there's this kind of popular marketing sentiment, like no one cares about your product and, you know, they don't care about your product. What they actually care about is achieving outcomes with your product, et cetera. And that's true. And I think that's really true during the sales process. But I think as just like a marketing artifact, people are kind of drawn to like, ooh, like screen on my LinkedIn feed of like someone clicking around buttons. Like, sure. I'll take a look if it's only one minute. People actually do like that content a lot more than I think marketers give credit for. Like not everything has to be super highly elevated thought leadership. I think people also, especially the type of people like we're selling to, they like the tools.
Alex Kracov: I guess one downside or one thing to be mindful of when you're doing like these rolling product launches all of the time is customers and your internal team too can only like digest so much information. Like they're busy in their days. They're barely paying attention to your software. Probably they're just getting in there and using it for whatever they need to do.
And so, you know, one potential downside to having so much like new product, right, is like over saturating your customer's brain around Dock things. But I will take that over saturation over undersaturation like any day of the week. And I think we try and do it tastefully where we, you know, we'll do our little things posts where we roll up a bunch of things. And then also one of the other benefits of just having that product update area on the website is people can always refer back to it. They might not be in the Dock head space now to pay attention to LMS or whatever, but they can always look back and see, okay, what are the new things that Dock has launched recently? So another thing to be mindful of is you want to be shipping product all the time, but you need to be thoughtful about how you communicate and package it to your customers.
Eric Doty: Totally. That brings me to the next sort of step in our launch, which is we always send an email announcement as well, which is basically just the blog post. And people actually don't really click through to the blog post in my experience, but they read the email. So it's nice. Like the blog kind of exists just as a historical artifact on the website versus the email is like the actual material that people are sort of engaging with.
We, to your point about not oversaturating people, like we try at Dock generally to like never send more than one email a week to customers. I think that gets harder as you get bigger. Like now we have a podcast and we have blog posts and we have all this content that we could be sharing. And when you're sort of competing with yourself for what are we going to tell customers about? Normally product launches win and we found that people care about those and we always see interest spikes in Dock when we do product announcements. So that does tend to win over other content. But yeah, we try to limit to one email a week basically.
Alex Kracov: I think you do a good job in those emails of actually making them useful. It's not just marketing crap. It is like, here's how you actually could use it. It sort of blends between marketing and CS a little bit. It's not written like a help center in sort of that most boring way, but you sort of tease how people can actually use the product, which is actually really nice and sort of making it useful.
And then on the flip side, when I do the marketing stuff on LinkedIn where I'm sharing the videos, it's not a true product demo of like, here's every little click thing. Like I try and talk more about the why we built it and sort of flash the product. I try and think of it more as like a little ad for the product or the thing we release rather than I'm gonna like show you exactly how it works in every way.
Eric Doty: Yeah, for sure. I always try to think about, especially like off the hop, like why should someone care? Here's the feature just so it's clear. Then why should someone care? And then here's some examples of how you could use it. And that's kind of like the mental checklist I go through. And then, you know, if you need help, here's where to find us.
Eric Doty: Just quickly, the other things we normally do — like an in-product pop-up for like bigger features, that's like, once you're logged into Dock, you see that little pop-up for bigger launches. We do a webinar, which I think has been really useful for us. It actually doubles as like, it's marketing and like people will come and check it out, but we keep the recordings of those walkthroughs on our website. So it acts as kind of like this longer accessible tutorial you can get.
So for example, like we will launch LMS. We'll do — you'll probably do like a 45 minute webinar and like clicking through all the buttons, all the use cases, some slides, like the full feature set basically. And then that acts as like this secondary education piece for customers, even as they come like months later, we can say, hey, we did this webinar, like go watch it. And so we've found a lot of value in that too.
Alex Kracov: And it's been surprisingly successful. I feel like we've gotten 50 to 150 people showing up to those things every time. And it's always a mix of customers and prospects even. And it's a great way to — on the prospects side, like demo a bunch of people at once and sort of really show them both like sort of, you know, a person behind the company, but also go really in depth around the thing that we're building and show them how we're going to support them. And then on the customer side of things, it's a great way just to teach them about the new thing we launched. And there's always great conversation in the chat of customers building love for Dock there, which is always really nice to see.
Eric Doty: Yeah, for sure. I'll just tie sort of a bow on the steps here. So we do LinkedIn posts, like you mentioned. There's kind of a mix of like product announcements and then we try to do some like related content. Not thought leadership might be too strong, but not just like here's the new feature, here's the new feature, but also like here's how we think sales training should happen. Or here's why traditional LMS is not the right play. And here's why — not always tying it back to Dock, but you know, just sort of product philosophy stuff too around it. Try to do like two or three posts like that for every launch.
Alex Kracov: And then one other thing on the LinkedIn side, just while you're talking about it, is we do run a lot of thought leadership ads on LinkedIn. And the way we think about that is the big tier one launches, like when we launched our AI enablement agent, or we repositioned it as revenue enablement. Those videos, those big launches, we will use in both our prospecting ads, but then also in retargeting. So those we blast out everywhere. It's like, it's a new thing we're doing, this is big, we want everyone to pay attention.
And then the smaller feature announcements we'll usually put in retargeting ads, because at least my hypothesis there is the people who are visiting our website the most are actually our customers. And then it's even nice for our prospects to see that too, of like, wow, this company is shipping a lot, there's a lot of new things. We want to give off that vibe, because it's the truth, it's what we do, we're shipping a lot.
Eric Doty: Totally. Some other things we do, like we have our Dock sales room template. Well, if it's like a bigger feature, we'll go and like add a section for that or a page for that so that sales has that built into what they're sending to customers. Then depending on the size of the feature, of course, there's going to be some like, do we have to update our competitor comparisons? Do we have to update our pitch deck? Do we need more case studies now? Like there's sort of this sales and even like content refresh depending on the impact there. And then for me as marketing, I also sort of have some like downstream content strategy things that might come of it. So yeah, if we launch a new product category, then I'm going to care about like SEO, blog posts and things like that too. But we'll leave that for another day.
Eric Doty: Okay. I'm going to ask you some sort of hot take questions here. So like you've — when you were at Lattice, there's a bigger company, bigger structure there, like how do you avoid product just throwing things over the fence to PMMs and enablement? What did a good collaboration look like in that case?
Alex Kracov: A really hard challenge, especially as the company gets bigger and there's more people involved. Like, you know, all the things that we were talking about at the beginning of this podcast of like how me and you can collaborate are just so not true at a bigger company when there's multiple PMs, multiple product marketing managers, different sales teams and segments. There's just like the sort of classic management collaboration challenge that happens at a bigger company.
I think one strategy I found successful is if you can pair your product managers with a product marketing manager, that is a really nice setup where those two people can sort of be in lockstep, especially around some of the like little or mid tier things. All the tier one features everyone's gonna know about, you're gonna talk about that, but it's often these like smaller mid tier things that can kind of get just tossed over. And so, you know, usually having a product manager, a product marketing manager, maybe somebody from CS involved there too, depending on the PMM's role and the CS team's setup, can be a really good setup.
And it can be done by, depending on how your PMM and product teams are structured, it can be done by product line, which is the easiest way to think about this. So for Dock, if we had a product manager for deal rooms and content and learning, those are three different product managers. You could have three different PMMs related to that. But it also could be that the PMM is supporting the sales enablement versus CS enablement.
But having a one-to-one relationship is the best way to do this. If that doesn't work because your team's small and you don't just have enough people like that, it's honestly just like a recurring meeting is a good way with a nice spreadsheet that's tracking all the things that are coming or about to launch and so on and so forth. And you just need a recurring meeting with either, you could do it with just a leadership team and then they need to communicate to their subordinates, like head of product, head of product marketing, head of CS and have those people meet and sort of talk.
But I think it's even better if you just get everybody in the room on some cadence and product can present to product marketing on what they're building. And hopefully PMM was actually even informing what was being built in the first place. But if not, just a meeting where everyone's getting together, talking about the roadmap of things, that's sort of step one.
Alex Kracov: And then it becomes how do you enable the field team, right? Sales and customer success. Because they have very little time in their day to pay attention to the new product stuff that you're releasing. And not all of it is important to the field team. A lot of it's probably more important — like the small things are being more important to the CS team because they're trying to make a customer happy and fix something there. You know, the best way to do sales is value selling. And you're really talking about your product at like a higher level. And so they don't care about everything that product is shipping.
And so there needs to be tight collaboration between product, product marketing, and then sales. And in sales, it could be the sales leadership team or sales enablement. And they are working together to figure out what products sales will actually care about and what is most important to teach them. The sort of best strategy, especially as it scales, is there's a recurring training session on the books for the sales team, whether that's monthly or weekly, that sort of depends on how much is going on. And the enablement person will sort of manage that calendar and is sort of the person who can deem whether something is sort of worthy of the sales team's time and then work with the product manager and the product marketing manager to create the content for those trainings, but also to figure out the launch schedule. And as you get bigger, this is a much more delicate dance and you can't just ship stuff at the frequency like Dock does, you have to really give people training ahead of time and after it launches and things like that.
Eric Doty: Sure. Okay, so next question is about launch tiering and priorities. Did you have a rubric or something for like, how did you decide what was like a P1 versus P2 versus P3, or was it just like those people you talked about in a room deciding this is gonna be really impactful in revenue? Like how did you think through the priority of a launch?
Alex Kracov: It's somewhat those people in the room, but it's more of a feeling, I would say. And it's usually like tier one, it's like the CEO needs this feature to get shipped. It's like not a feature, it's a product, right? It is like, if it's tier one, it is a company strategy. It is a big deal. Like the board is talking about it. The exec team is talking about it. Like it's pretty obvious what a tier one feature is. Like there shouldn't be a lot of — there's a lot of debate around that, then you have probably a bigger problem.
When it gets into the middle tiers, depending on how many tiers you got, there's some room for debate. I would say the bigger tiers are the ones that maybe the commercial teams actually care about. And then a lot of just like the lower level tiers are easy because they're just like little features, like tiny little things that mostly just like a couple of customers cared about, but it's not going to matter from the market perspective or the sales team's not quite going to care about it.
Eric Doty: Yeah, totally. Was there ever disagreement over at Lattice over like, this should be bigger priority, like there should get a bigger launch? Or was it like pretty kumbaya?
Alex Kracov: No, it was always so obvious. Yeah, like the big ones were like our engagement launch or when we launched Grow or when we launched compensation. Like it was just always like super, super obvious. The debate maybe in marketing is like, how big do we go? You know, how much budget are we putting behind it? Are we going to make a crazy launch video?
Alex Kracov: And then one other thing that happens and maybe this is slightly off topic to the question, but I do think it's relevant to the overall episode we're talking about is like user conferences. So Dreamforce and Salesforce is a huge example of this, but Lattice turned into this as well is like often that's the pinnacle of the year, right? Dreamforce or Resources for Humans at Lattice, whatever Lattice ended up calling it. That was the place where you would launch those tier one features, right? And so the entire product and commercial calendar was oriented around Dreamforce, let's say. And that's the place where they're going to launch those giant tier one features. And so that sort of informs a lot of how those companies work. They're working around their big user conference.
Eric Doty: And is it normally designed that way, like to incentivize coming to the conference to find out the big features or like why structure it that way?
Alex Kracov: I think it's partly that. I think it's partly like, let's make this conference awesome and every customer is going to be there. And there's definitely like pressure for Benioff to get on stage and like announce his new Agentforce and all the different things there. It's like, you have this captive audience, you need to make it worth their time. And if you just got on stage and didn't announce anything, they're like, that's weird.
But I think it's actually even more useful for the internal team. It is like putting a serious pressure, right? It's like, if you don't launch this feature, Benioff's going to be on stage and not have anything to talk about. So you better work this weekend to get that product done. Like it is super motivating for the internal team to not embarrass the company. And I also think that is like some of the probably the biggest benefit of these giant user conferences is to like push the team to do a lot of work in a compressed time, because there's a real physical event that you're sort of working towards.
Eric Doty: That makes sense. Okay, marketing question. Do you think the big splash launch with Product Hunt and a flashy video, do you think that converts to pipeline right away? Does it have an immediate sales impact or is it more of a brand presence? I think what I'm getting at is like when you're doing these like big splash launches, like what is the outcome you're actually looking for?
Alex Kracov: Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of it is more on the like brand indirect pipeline gen side of things. But I think where it really works, it works. And that's very silly to say, but if like you do that big splashy launch and you find extreme product market fit, the market is just like, whoa, that's cool. And you did some marketing thing that caught people's eye, then it's like, really worth it and going to drive a ton of pipeline.
And it also sort of depends on like the definition of that splashy launch. Like, are you doing a brand video that's going into actual commercials and YouTube retargeting or whatever it is? Are you going to put billboards around the city? Are you doing Dreamforce? There are sort of different flavors and each one of those marketing channels kind of will drive pipeline in different ways, but usually it's like sort of on the indirect side of things.
Alex Kracov: But it does bring up this interesting question of like, how do you even track the success of a launch in general? And that's honestly something that we kind of struggled to do at Lattice. Do you goal PMM, product marketing, on the launch? Do you try to goal product managers? It's a very complicated thing because there's a lot going on.
And there are ways to do it. Initial signups on the day of the launch or the week of the launch, right? Is it driving net new signups to the website? But then there's obviously clearly product usage. Do people start using the new thing right away?
It depends. Like some products we've launched at Dock, we've like noticed an uptick right away and other things, it takes a little while because customers are like not paying attention to you all the time. They might be busy. They might be on vacation. They might be at their SKO. They're not like paying attention to everything that you're launching. And so other products sort of take a little bit of time to kind of get adoption. But obviously the best ones just kind of go up and to the right right away. And that's when you really know you got something that's working.
Eric Doty: Yeah, makes sense. In terms of sales, the sales team being able to talk about product launches before they happen, what's your philosophy on how much the roadmap can be shared with prospects by the sales team? Because obviously we have a rough roadmap calendar, we have a rough marketing launch calendar, we know what's kinda coming, how much is it helpful for sales to talk about versus not?
Alex Kracov: Yeah, it's a delicate balance. I used to be in favor of like marketing should always make the roadmap or work with product to make a roadmap deck and share it and let's have the super public roadmap. I'm now completely on the other side of it. I actually don't like sharing roadmaps with potential customers or even customers because it puts the product team in sort of a box. It allows less flexibility to build the actual right thing, as opposed to you feel like you have this commitment out in the world.
And so I just kind of hate the public roadmap now because I want that flexibility as a product person. I'm still down to get on a customer call and talk about what we're building and things, but I really hate committing to specific timelines. I will say whenever we do, with LMS, I did like create a little deck that previewed it. And then I usually will just sandbag the timeline by a couple months. If we're committing and talking about it with customers, I want to over deliver, not under deliver.
But I really try and say, hey, sales team, sell what we have today. Don't sell future stuff. Now that contradicts what I was saying earlier, where it was like people want to join a startup because they want to know where you're going. So there's an interesting balance, but you want to talk about where you're going at a high level. We're going in this general direction, as opposed to like on March 13th, we're going to deliver X, Y, and Z. You don't want to deal with that.
Eric Doty: Yeah. And tell me if I'm wrong, but I think like my sense of how it normally happens with our sales team is it's like, okay, here's sales rooms, here's content management, here's our AI stuff. And the customer goes, great, I love all this, but I absolutely can't buy you unless you have LMS. Then like that's kind of the only time when they're like, okay, yeah, actually LMS is coming up in two months. And we wouldn't say that if the feature was a year away, but you know, when it's like, it's kind of solidly on the roadmap — whereas we're not like proactively selling the roadmap.
Alex Kracov: Exactly. It usually comes down like that. And it's usually like at the later stages, they really want to do Dock with everything else. But then like, we're missing LMS, let's say. And then even then, I'm like, if they need it right now, they shouldn't buy Dock. Like, if they need it right now, and that's what they actually want, and they need to launch in the next month, like go with somebody else, because we don't have that. And it might be coming, but it's also going to be a V1 product, and we got to evolve it, and it's going to get better.
Like, I don't want — I want people to buy Dock for what it is today and know that it's going to keep getting better and better in the future. And we can give some sense of how that's going to evolve. But it's sort of from an engineering perspective, these things take longer than you think or shorter than you think and you need that flexibility. And that's how you build good product. And you don't want to be sort of locked in by some like fake roadmap deck that you had to put together for the sales team.
Eric Doty: What role should sales play after a launch? Like other than being sort of the recipient of training and like knowing how to do a new demo, is there anything the sales team should like actively be doing with their prospect base, for example?
Alex Kracov: I mean, product feedback. Like funneling back what they're hearing from customers, potential customers back to the product team. You know, like what I was saying before is like every product's not going to be perfect, right? It's going to be missing features and things. And so the sales team needs to be really communicating back to the product team of like, what's missing? What do we have to build? What do we have to do to close that customer?
Eric Doty: And another example that comes to mind, actually, we just launched the Dock Chrome extension recently and Christian on our sales team used it as an opportunity to like loop back around with customers who were like, okay, my biggest — the biggest reason I want to buy something like Dock is because I want my content to be more discoverable or there was something like that. And then, so that gave him like a touch point to go back to a deal that was like kind of dead-ish, and then go, hey, actually now we have this new Chrome extension, it should make it way easier for sales to find their content. And then that actually like revived the deal.
I think like there's also that — I mean, I don't know how scalable that is and like what a scalable system looks like there in terms of like a closed-loss reason on the deal maybe — but you know, sales can also use it as like a free touch point too.
Alex Kracov: The other thing that comes to mind too is sales should inform the product roadmap. We started doing these competitor intelligence meetings at Dock where sales is like, we're losing deals to this competitor because of these three features. And then it's like, okay, thank you for the feedback and then product goes and works on it. And then we'll ship those three features to get to feature parity against that competitor.
And then what I want to hear after we ship that is — well, I want to hear that it's getting better in those conversations against that competitor, but I also want to see it in the numbers. I want to see our close rates go up against Seismic or Highspot because we shipped those features to get to feature parity. That's another way you can evaluate the success of the launch, especially when you have features that are built with something really specific in mind, like a competitor.
Eric Doty: That feels like a great place to stop. Alex, thanks so much for chatting about product launches. Thank you everyone for listening today. As per usual, go to growintelshow.com if you wanna sign up for the newsletter version of the show. Find us on YouTube, find us on all the social platforms, Spotify, Apple, et cetera. Make sure to subscribe. And I hope that I'm dancing around with a gold medal around my neck next time that you're listening to this.
Alex Kracov: Go USA.
