A changelog that writes itself

Founder Jake Brereton and Tyler Davis were co-workers in Atlassian when they realized one thing that had become painfully clear: the tools and technologies powering engineering teams have been far outpacing those available to the rest of the product organization. When finally the duo launched LaunchNotes in 2020, and for the past almost 3 years they have been leading product and marketing teams to make a successful transition into a world of continuously communicating with customers and closing the loop between the builders, the customers, and the rest of the business.

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Modernizing product development is a major priority for LaunchNotes, and after having explored the difficulties of it first-hand, the duo is doing their best to deliver a Product Success Platform that connects the substance parts of the expansion cycle — such as comms, feedback, and planning — into a unified customer experience.

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Being the first-ever product success platform, LaunchNotes provides everything product teams need to succeed and excel in the modern world. Product success and PM sustainability has a major role to play in aligning not just internal organization teams but also users who can get a transparent view of where the product is headed and what the roadmap looks like.

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Launch Awesome

The amazing folks at LaunchNotes realized that being a category leader isn’t easy. It means having to educate people, making them realize the importance of product success, and eventually getting them to discover value through the product. What better way to do this than to nurture a community of Product Managers and Product Marketers who are leading the charge on product delivery and adoption?

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Launch Awesome is an invite-only Slack community of Product Managers and Marketers where you can exchange ideas, and discuss strategies, tactics, and protips that they can use to successfully build and launch great products.

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“Hey LaunchNotes, meet Threado!”

Automated workflows have become indispensable for Steve Klein, the community manager at LaunchNotes. There are some things he’s able to do now that he would’ve never been able to do if it wasn’t for Threado. “I was not being able to manage everything, stay on top of the community, answer questions regularly, share resources, or reach out to the right folks at the right time,” said Steve. “Threado’s automations have allowed me to do things I never I’d be able to do on my own.”

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The Launch Awesome community has put in place what might just be the more intricate workflow ever made with Threado. Onboarding is the most vital touchpoint when managing a community. “Doing a better job at onboarding people leads to better engagement. What we do in our onboarding is ask a lot of questions using surveys. We let people self-select what their preferences are and which bucket they most identify with. So we’re able to send even more personalized messages, resources, and recommendations. And then we tag them so we can reach out to them again using bulk message or even outreach,” said Steve in talking about the importance of onboarding.

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How Launch Awesome onboard their members using Threado?

The onboarding has been setup with an elaborate survey that helps identify new members and in turn, personalize how Steve and the community team interact with them.

• As soon as a new member joins, they’re enrolled in an onboarding flow that starts with welcoming them to the community.
• Next, the workflow sends a survey to the member asking if they look more toward the Product Management or Product Marketing side of things.
• Depending on what the member selects, they’re then added to a tag (either Product management or Product Manager).
• Both Product Managers and Marketers are then engaged with relevant resources like which channels should they join, which AMAs should they checkout, and what other resources might be helpful for them.
• The workflow further extends to asking if they’d be interested in any job postings and be open to offering any Product Manager or Marketing roles in their company.
• If a member responds saying yes, they’re tagged with a relevant tag which can be used to identify them later.
• Lastly, the workflow nudges the users to introduce themselves in the relevant channel and get the conversation going.

Launch Awesome has 4 more active workflows -

• Send a warm and welcoming message to people who become level 3 engaged members according to Threado’s leaderboard.
• A similar workflow for those who become Level 2 engaged members.
• Send 1-on-1 networking insights to members based on a tag.
• A 10-day introduction reminder to folks who’ve not yet introduced themselves in the community.

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Steve logs in to Threado 10-15 times a week, mostly to keep an eye on automation reports. He liked to see how many new members enrolled in the workflows, which part of the workflow did they go through, where they are, and how have they engaged as a result of it. “I’m always curious to check out the reports and analytics. I always check out the automation report and see which members have taken which part of the workflow.  And since our workflow is quite intricate, it’s always cool to see where the members are and how are they interacting with the workflow,” said Steve.

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The community team also extensively uses tags for sending personalized messages at scale and sending email outreach to members. One of the use cases that Steve walked us through was using tags to talk to members about Topic Tuesdays - a discussion thread that revolves around a different topic every week.

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“We do something called Topic Tuesday thing, and for the people who are tagged in the Product Marketing cohort, I can just select how many new joined in the last week and send them a personalized message saying “hey, we just dropped this Topic Tuesday question, why don’t you check it out”, and that’s like an easy yet effective way to get involved in the community,” explained Steve.

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Steve uses email outreach to send monthly community recaps to the community because he understands that members are not always active in the Slack community. Also, a lot of people are a part of multiple communities so it’s difficult to turn more heads. Outreach gives better chances of engaging with members outside of the community.

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Including automated workflows and outreach emails, over 90% of all community members have been engaged with more than 300 automated DMs and 900 outreach emails.

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What’s next for LaunchNotes?

“I don’t know how would I do any of that if it wasn’t for Threado,” said Steve. “And even if I had to, it’d be such a lift having to manually select all those people and send individual messages to them. And the best part is those personalized nudges that make people want to engage in the community and keep the conversations going.”

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Steve’s ambitions with the Launch Awesome community have evolved as the community has discovered more value in Threado. Being able to do things that he couldn't have otherwise is a testament to how strategies can evolve when you have a platform that supports your goals and aspirations. As the community initiatives scale, Threado will be a critical part of LaunchNotes in its journey to lead the charge on product success.

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