From Vision to Reality: Lessons learned from launching 17 products worldwide

TLDR: In this article I share behind the scenes stories and learnings after launching 17 products globally in VTEX Vision Spring '24 bundle of releases. I also mention some of the frameworks and hacks we used along the way.

What you'll find?in this article

In this article, I'll share behind the scenes stories and challenges we faced in some of the fronts when making VTEX Vision, along with what we learned along the way. Every section includes a ??Tips segment, for you to scale up your Product Marketing work from our experience.

On Tuesday, April 23rd, I woke up with a pounding heart, checking slack channels, while brewing some coffee. That was the D-day of our VTEX Vision global campaign deployment, and this date was carved on my mind for the past three months.??

Fast-forward to the morning of April 25th. I wake up with a lighter heart. D-day is past us. My doorbell rings, and the most beautiful flower bouquet, along with some chocolate and champagne, arrive with a note that reads:

Achievements should be celebrated, whether they are big or small - and this one is HUGE. Allow yourself.???- Nati Costa

Although this is a 1st person POV tale, it's not just my story to tell. Let's rewind a bit, and see how everything started.??

The project

Product showcases, where companies bundle a bunch of product updates and launches in a quarterly or bi-annual campaign is becoming a popular way of letting users take the most out of your product, instead of making granular launches throughout the year. Tamara Grominsky talks about this trend in her recent PMM Camp Newsletter, if you want to check out other examples and insights.

VTEX Vision is our company's product showcase, created in this scale for the first time. This is how I describe it:

VTEX Vision is a semiannual global campaign, where we share with the world all of our product launches and platform updates from the past months. Our goal is to reinforce how VTEX is creating the future of commerce, and impact sales opportunities, spreading the message to an audience composed of our community (customers, partners, market analysts, investors and potential clients) in over 20 countries.?

This would be our first edition, blooming fresh like its title: VTEX Vision Spring '24.

Let’s set the scene with some numbers. VTEX Vision included:

• 17 different product launches crafted by (literally) hundreds of VTEXers over the past months.
• 15+ teams at VTEX involved, including designers, product managers, product strategy, tech leaders, developers, procurement and finance, security, regional marketing, sales, investor relations, analyst relations, facilities, Public Relations and Comms strategy along with field marketing for performance and campaign distribution.
• 4 external suppliers, including 1 freelance video editor and motion graphics animator, 1 Video production agency, 1 freelance webdesigner and a web development agency.
• 3 months to make it happen.?
• 1 Product Marketing Manager to coordinate this project ("it's me. Hi. I'm the problem it's me" - Taylor Swift)

The plan was to showcase our new bundle of releases through demo videos going over every product, a short film, featuring our Product Director, to tell the story around our new features, and a landing page to host these assets and collect leads interested in testing our new products. Not to mention a full distribution campaign through Linkedin, email marketing, multi-region press strategy, WhatsApp, and many other channels.?

From deciding the narrative around our product launches, to figuring out how we would translate that visually Into assets that were both elegant, unique, and with the right amount of boldness within the frontiers of our brand, every step sparked a new learning experience for me, so I wanted to share some insights with aspiring PMMs.?

??Tip: Although it takes a village to create a project like this, we had a special multidisciplinary committee, with representatives from both tech and marketing to coordinate tasks and streamline decision-making. The committee was composed roughly of the following areas:

- Product Marketing Manager
- Product Strategists and managers
- Product Designers
- Brand Designers
- Marketing specialists
- Public Relations and Comms        

The demo videos

We wanted our product to speak for itself. That’s why creating product demos for each and every release was so important to us.?

This meant synchronizing the tech teams that created these products in the first place, so we could steer their product knowledge into words in demo scripts. We wanted to create scripts in bulk, to speed up this delivery, so our actions at this beginning consisted of:

1. Creating a demo script template on a shared Google Docs, for standardizing the demo flow and storytelling.
2. Sharing the docs with Product Managers and Product Designers, so they could fill-in the template with info about their own products.
3. Reviewing all 17 scripts, and standardizing structure and language based on our tone and voice guidelines. (We had countless rounds of reviews, with product and marketing folks chiming in to achieve that sweet spot between technically accurate, and enthralling storytelling).?
4. Creating storyboards on Figma based on the scripts, to guide screen shares, art directions, and conceptual diagrams for more complex products, when needed.?

Along the way we understood that words on a Google Docs template don’t necessarily translate well into video format so it took quite some back-and-forth with our team of designers to make sure that the videos were clear and also wonderful to watch, and not just an assortment of animated text and screen recordings.

??Tip: Although the demos were a part of the Spring '24 edition, they were a considerable investment, so we wanted them to have a bigger shelf life, outliving the Spring '24 campaign. Therefore we didn't mention "VTEX Vision" in any of the files themselves, so they could live independently and be applied into other contexts in the future.?        

The short film?

Our story would be told through a short film that encapsulated all of our product launches and showcased the narrative around VTEX Vision, sharing the message in a thorough way for investors, analysts or anyone who wanted the full scoop, but not tiring our audience with overly detailed explanations.?

We toiled over finding exactly the right words that would convey all of the great thought and attention that these products had received to come to life in the first place. How can you properly state all the data intelligence you can unlock through VTEX Data Pipeline, or how can you portray exactly the kind of breaking edge technology that FastStore delivers for developers but also being clear enough for a business audience to understand you? How do you begin to tell the story and how do you close it? After countless rounds of review, we believe we found the right words to tell the story.

After we recorded our Senior Director of Product going over the entire text, we identified in the script how we would illustrate the story: pointing out cues for when to use excerpts of demos, conceptual diagrams or animations both on the Google Docs script, and on the Figma storyboard we shared with the video production agency we hired.?

??Tip:?The short film's script was our basic starting point for all other written content in the campaign. By defining the story we wanted to tell around these products, the script unlocked our copywriting for landing page content, social media captions, Press Releases, email marketing, and many other activations. It was our campaign's content compass, whenever we were unsure about how to talk about certain features.         

The visuals

Although we hoped every user who stumbled upon our content would watch the meticulous demo videos that we created with so much love, we are realistic marketers and we know that’s not the case. So it was vital to us that the visual experience of the landing page would really reflect the innovative tone and elegant wow-factor that we knew our products would enable customers to feel once they tested them.?

A challenge here was to create unity within our diverse range of new solutions. Each one of the 17 releases was super unique and involved completely different components of an ecommerce operation. From a high-conversion checkout, to digital security solutions, we wanted each release to have its own unique spark, but have that look and feel of being part of a cohesive design system.?

To make this happen, our tireless team of brand designers created product compositions that showcased the products themselves, but had a fine level of abstraction, so we wouldn’t just paste screenshots of our platform all over the landing page.?

Some actions that helped here:

• We had product deep dive meetings with our Brand Designers, so they could visually translate them into compositions and animations that were beautiful and easy to understand,?
• Product Designers and I selected the screens that were most representative of each product, to be featured in thumbnails, or gifs.
• We had daily check-ins with the freelance web designer we hired to create the landing page, to quickly provide feedback on his visual explorations.

??Tip:?Even if you're hiring external suppliers to create assets, make sure you have an internal designer spearheading the art direction of all assets if you have one in your team, so your campaign has visual consistency with your brand's look and feel.         

The distribution

It didn’t make sense for us to invest all of these resources to create wonderful assets if they didn’t see the light of day and were experienced by our audience. This meant teaming up with our performance marketing squad to make sure that we had a distribution campaign that was thorough, efficient and reached our target audiences where they were.?

That's why coming up with a multi-pronged diversified strategy of channels and media was what pushed us to spread this message: from social media posts, to YouTube playlists, to WhatsApp copies that CSM could share with customers along with scripts of how to deliver VTEX Vision during a meeting and email marketing and messaging.?

We centralized parts of the campaign's distribution efforts in our marketing team but other activations required the ownership and perspective of cross-functional departments.?

??Tip: For the internal enablement, some of our efforts included:
- An internal notion page consolidating all assets and providing instructions 
- An FAQ of how you could be involved with VTEX Vision, regardless of what team you were on 
- Deep dives on our company's general meeting every Friday so everyone was up to speed with what the project was about 
- Trainings with multiple teams on how to use VTEX Vision materials        

The Learnings

Besides the tips shared in each section, if our experience can help you, product marketing manager reading this, these are the top 3 things I would have done differently:

• Processes: Define an approval workflow to reduce rework in reviewing and approving assets (who gets the final say to minimize back and forth).?

• Teams: Involve the company's Brand & Design department early on, despite having hired freelancers and agencies to craft the visuals.
• Infrastructure: Test the landing page's hosting and infrastructure for instabilities a week before deploy date (including test Google Tag Manager tags, cookie collection tools and implement a CDN for the landing page, with more room to breathe before the launch date).

Other hacks along the way?

Avoiding human re-work with AI narration:?

• Using an AI voice generator to iterate script's narrations, and get quick renderings of how the script would sound like after each review round. Our initial preference was to get real humans as narrators, like we've done in the past with our demos, but due to the time constraints and constant tweaks to the script, having a software streamline this effort came in handy.?

Single source of truth for information:

• Having a consolidated spreadsheet with basic information about all products shortlisted for the release, shared with everyone on the team and our freelancers.?
• Having demo and video scripts shared with suppliers, and providing feedback for each timestamp on the same docs to facilitate communication.

Thinking globally from the get-go:

• We envisioned our assets to work well in three languages (English, Portuguese and Spanish), and to be applied in different channels. This meant creating visual pieces with minimal copy to be later translated, and with recognizable screens across regions.

What I shared here is not the whole picture, of course, stories and learnings about this project are endless. This is just a sneak peak of some of the pillars that brought VTEX Vision to life.

DM me through Linkedin, if you'd like a template of our docs used! And of course, take a look at our VTEX Vision materials, and share your thoughts!?