What I'm working on at LaunchNotes

This post has been a long time coming as I’ve been involved with the LaunchNotes team in some capacity for over a year and a half. I invested in our seed round back on 2020, worked a few projects just for fun, joined part time in a slightly more official capacity for some equity, started working full time last summer for more equity, and now I’m a full on W2 employee!

I've worked on just about every part of the product so far - I started out working on our marketing site, then the onboarding flow, then I was our primary project manager for a few months, but I’m really excited to tell you about what I’m working on next.

I recently started Launch Awesome - it’s a community for PMs, PMMs, and product ops people to discuss the strategy, tactics, and pro tips they use to have successful new product and feature launches (quite the mouthful, I know). If you think you could benefit from sharing notes w/ other Product Managers and Marketers, join us in Slack.

Why would I want to work on this? With the rise of CI/CD, software development and deployment has changed considerably over the past decade. Back in 2010 when I got into the startup world, we deployed a new version of the product every Thursday. Today, most companies are deploying updates several times per day. Features are released slowly with feature flags and early access programs. The entire workflow has improved dramatically.

But communicating those changes to customers is still stuck in the stone ages. Changes are announce to customers via The Big Launch - usually with no sneak peaks (or advanced warning) along the way. Announcements like this are usually sent to every prospect that has ever signed up, every blog subscriber, every webinar attendee - whether or not they want to hear about it.

The situation is often just as bad, if not worse, INSIDE the company. Customer support teams are finding about new features from customers and no one knows if the features that are shipping are hitting their success metrics (if they even have any - but that's another story). Everything is a mess.

The way product teams communicate about their work needs an overhaul. These are the problems we're solving at LaunchNotes. And the community I'm starting, Launch Awesome, is a place for us to all share how we on the Product Management and Product Marketing side of things improving how we do things to accommodate this new software development/deployment environment.

I’ve experience this problem personally while working as a PM in my previous role and now I’ve heard so many of our customers reaffirm how much the status quo isn't working for them. That's what makes me so excited to work on this.

Oh and I'd be remiss to leave out that I've worked with about half of the company at a previous job and CEO here is one of my best friends - but that's just the icing on the cake.