How our Support Team Contributes to Product Launches

Launching a new feature is an exciting time at Buffer. It's the culmination of days, weeks and sometimes even months of the work that goes into building something new. There's lots of excitement and a lot to celebrate. It's also a significant time for our Support team. A product launch can generate a lot of conversations with our customers. We want to be ready to handle that ticket volume, quickly answer any questions about any nuance of the new feature, and effectively channel feedback to the product teams that built it.

Launching a new feature can be a step into the unknown — our customers are creative and will use our product in ways we didn't anticipate and ask questions for which we didn't prepare answers. In some edge-case scenarios, they may uncover bugs we didn't know about or have great suggestions for future iterations of the feature that we could add to our product roadmap.

We have refined a process for working on launches, ensuring that the relevant people from the product, support, and marketing teams come together to work on the launch plan. In this post, we'll share a little about what we do in preparation for launches to create the best possible outcome for our customers and our team.

Reviewing new feature functionality

Our Product team frequently shares updates to our product roadmap — the outline and timeline of the features we're planning to build. Transparency is one of our strongest values, and we share this timeline publicly with customers here.

At an early stage, a Product Manager will create a design brief describing the new feature's functionality so that the engineers and designers can start planning their approach to bringing it to life. The Customer Advocacy team will also take a look — as the team that works incredibly closely with customers, we hear from our most vocal users about what features they'd love to see us add or what parts of their current workflow they're looking to improve. We can offer valuable insights and suggestions to help shape the feature.

Working alongside marketing

Once the product manager has put a delivery date in place for a new feature, the Marketing team start putting the wheels in motion for the launch event. We typically want to make a big deal of a launch to ensure that as many existing and potential customers learn about it. The Product Marketing Manager will work with the Product team to choose the launch date, and the Customer Advocacy team will ensure we've got good inbox coverage for the proposed date.

The Product Marketing Manager will start drafting the comms for the launch, including the emails, blog posts and social content. Our Customer Advocacy team also gets to review this, as it helps us to anticipate the customer response. Beyond the new feature's functionality, the marketing communications shares the story of why we've built it and how it benefits customers.