Why I chose LaunchNotes

Hi there! 👋

I'm Adam and I'm the new Director of Product Marketing at LaunchNotes.

My path to LaunchNotes was anything but direct. Over the years, I’ve worked in education (Teach for America), entertainment (Jersey Films), advertising (Hal Riney & Partners, Godfrey Dadich), and technology (HP, Symantec, Norton, Mozilla). And in one form or another most of these experiences were new ventures, started by founders who had a vision of the world of how they could bend the status quo to their will, disrupt the incumbents, and change their chosen industry in a way that it would never be the same. Founders are so inspiring to be around and work with–what they’re willing to put on the line to make their vision a reality; the hopefulness and the work ethic to make every day count with improvements and progress. Tyler and Jake are exceptional founders who have recruited an extraordinary team to bring their vision of both Product Success and LaunchNotes into the world. In short, Tyler, Jake, and the team at LaunchNotes are why I joined. 

Over the course of my career, there have been two values that have remained especially important to me, and that I’ve always kept in the foreground of my mind: the first is the opportunity to constantly be learning, growing, and evolving; and the second value (or good fortune) is being surrounded with wonderful human beings who excel in their chosen craft.

LaunchNotes delivers in every way, every day, on these two things. After only three months, it’s already been an amazing learning journey as we embark on creating a new category (Product Success) and building a durable business that helps companies all over the globe deliver more impactful products and services–products and services that in turn help individuals and organizations communicate, coordinate, learn, and work together more cohesively. Having the privilege to be on that journey with people who are truly impressive in how their acumen in their craft is only surpassed by their empathy, joy, and stoke they create in every team and customer interaction. I’m honored to be part of this team and aboard this rocket ship.

Side note, I’m equally stoked to be part of a company and community that values life outside of work as much as the work itself. Personally, I’ve found that breaks and activities that pull you away from the screen can help reveal insights you can apply on the job and open creative breakthroughs that have been elusive. I enjoy surfing, skiing, hiking, fishing, and camping to recharge and reconnect with family and friends. I’m delighted to have discovered that many at LaunchNotes have their own personal passions, some of which we share, some I look forward to learning more about.

Professional and personal growth opportunity. Check. A fantastic team of builders, shippers, and storytellers. Check. Now, here's what we're building and the market we’re building it in.

The market opportunity for LaunchNotes is humongous

Over time, the target market for LaunchNotes is quite literally every company that ships software. And every company, in some form or fashion, is shipping some sort of software. 

At the heart of every organization is a product. Whether it’s physically manufactured, coded, or offered as an in-person service, the product is the company’s reason for being. For the product to remain relevant within a market and with as many customers and prospects as possible, the product needs to change and evolve to meet the evolving needs of the marketplace. Product change, particularly in software development, evolved with Agile processes and tools that accelerated the change of building and shipping new features, updates, and upgrades. Bi-annual or quarterly releases were replaced with release cycles of 4-6 week sprints. Many engineering and product teams today are releasing features and updates every week (if not every day!). At a macro level, this is a remarkable outcome.

But the rest of the organization has not kept pace with this rate of change. Marketing, sales, and customer experience teams have not had the sufficient processes or tools to bring them up to speed to properly manage and support this accelerated release cycle. To date, they’ve been forced to package all these increments of change in the old and analog frequency of a major release. I’ve experienced this first-hand in my own career. With every major release, the marketing team hopes that we’ve timed our comms such that our customers and the market will see them, hear them, and take some action around them. Meanwhile, the sales team is scrambling to digest forthcoming updates and figure out how to best package and sell them to prospects. And customer experience teams are rushing their preparation for the release before calls and support tickets start rolling in on best practices and/or how to best implement new features. It’s a painfully out-of-sync collection of processes that lead to confusion, frustration, and missed opportunities. And that’s when everything is working as planned, which it rarely is.

Why I’m so excited about what we’re building

What’s amazing and exciting is LaunchNotes solves this problem, enabling the rest of the organization to catch up with weekly and daily release cycles, and actually generate product momentum both internally and with customers. LaunchNotes does this in a number of ways:

• LaunchNotes brings customers closer to the product development process, enabling the product team to have a dialogue with all stakeholders on the most important and impactful features to build.
• The platform helps bring together the cross-functional team needed for sustained product growth: planning, building, launching, and announcing product launches and feature releases.
• The four core pillars of the platform support this cross-functional team across the product lifecycle–customer insights, informed prioritization, shareable roadmaps, and a modern changelog, driving progress and momentum at every step of product development.
• With a dedicated channel for communicating product change and releases, change communicators (PMMs) can now communicate change just as fast as it ships, turning increments of product change into marketable moments, driving brand and business value.

No doubt our future is not assured and will be challenged with unexpected obstacles and interruptions, but I could not be more excited to embark on this journey with a fantastic team of amazing builders and storytellers, into a category and opportunity that is massive, with a service that uniquely solves a problem, which has been waiting years for a solution.

Join us! 🚀

If LaunchNotes sounds like a team you want to be a part of, you are in luck because we're hiring for a number of roles across the team!

Check out our careers page for more info, or reach out to me directly at adam@launchnotes.io

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