{"id":10334,"date":"2016-09-21T18:17:38","date_gmt":"2016-09-21T17:17:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.intercom.com\/?p=10334"},"modified":"2020-07-30T12:59:17","modified_gmt":"2020-07-30T11:59:17","slug":"prioritizing-product-announcements-saas-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/prioritizing-product-announcements-saas-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Prioritizing product announcements in a SaaS world"},"content":{"rendered":"

When everything you ship presents a marketing opportunity, there\u2019s a tendency to announce everything. Don\u2019t do it.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve all heard the motto, \u201cif you build it, they will come.\u201d While it might be true for some, it\u2019s not true for everyone.<\/p>\n

Announce it, and more will come<\/h2>\n

The reality is great marketing, paired with great product, can equal more than the sum of its parts. I\u2019m a big believer that marketing can amplify everything your product team builds. Why? Well, we\u2019ve seen it first-hand at Intercom with more than 12X growth in new signups since we first invested in marketing in March 2014.<\/p>\n

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While they’re certainly not the only driver, product announcements have been a primary contributor to this new phase of growth for Intercom. It\u2019s one of the reasons we treat everything we ship as a marketing opportunity.<\/p>\n

Continuous shipping = endless opportunities<\/h2>\n

As our VP of Engineering Darragh<\/a> would say, shipping is your company\u2019s heartbeat. It touches all parts of your company, as do its benefits, and the behaviors it enables and encourages, like team morale, motivation, and momentum. It also presents marketing opportunities, every time you ship.<\/p>\n

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The key word here is opportunity<\/em>, because having more opportunities presents a challenge in itself. It\u2019s a new challenge brought upon marketers by SaaS.<\/p>\n

Endless opportunities = new challenges<\/h2>\n

Before the days of SaaS, opportunities to make an announcement were typically limited to your product team\u2019s release cycle. As a result, big investments were made in announcing big \u201cdot releases.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whether you were announcing version 1.0, 1.1, or 2.0, your challenge was to construct a narrative that made sense and told a compelling story about a collection of new features and improvements that more often than not didn\u2019t quite make sense all together. Product managers were pushing, and at times competing, to get their features out in time before the next \u201cship\u201d left. At the same time, marketing was desperate to have something to talk about. It\u2019s hardly surprising that the big release rarely offered a clear and logical story.<\/p>\n

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SaaS changed all of this. Although you no longer have to tell all the stories at once, the challenge instead is being thoughtful about the stories you do want to tell.<\/p>\n

Deciding what to announce<\/h2>\n

Last year alone we shipped more than 100 new features and improvements to Intercom. That presented us with more than 100 marketing opportunities. Here\u2019s just a few.<\/p>\n

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We communicate all these updates and new features via our changes page<\/a>. It\u2019s an easy way for us to keep people aware of all the extra value we\u2019re adding to Intercom, and do so in a pretty non-interruptive way.<\/p>\n

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But we know instinctively that a major new feature like Smart Campaigns<\/a> deserves more attention than something like an integration with a third-party service. If we treated everything equally and tried to shout about each and every thing, people would simply stop listening to us. Just like when your smoke alarm won\u2019t stop beeping, and you take the batteries out to make it stop. It\u2019s a bad idea.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s all about prioritization<\/h2>\n

We\u2019ve created a simple framework to help us to decide what we announce, and how. On one axis you have value \u2013 is the change most valuable to existing customers, or does it have the potential to attract new customers? On the other, you have innovation \u2013 are you playing catch-up to existing products on the market, or is this an entirely new solution to a problem that people have?<\/p>\n

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