Now product managers and marketers can find the community they’ve been looking for. Where? In a new Slack community called Launch Awesome.
Launch Awesome’s creator Steve Klein was no stranger to the startup world (or GrepBeat) when he decided to launch the new Slack workplace community. Klein, who is also co-organizing the Raleigh Durham Startup Week in April, is currently in charge of product and growth at the venture-backed product development platform LaunchNotes, which counts Durham’s Bull City Venture Partners as one of its lead investors. Klein is also an investor, in fact; he put money into LaunchNotes as an angel before later joining the team himself.
Klein is best known as the Co-Founder of Statuspage.io, a platform that helped tech companies keep their customers up to date on service outages that was acquired by Atlassian in 2016. He was a guest on our Exit Stories podcast to talk about that experience. He was even the winning bidder of our “Pete” NFT last April, with the proceeds going to the North Carolina Museum of Art.
This current project, Launch Awesome, operates with the mission of sparking conversation between product marketers and product managers on strategy tactics for a successful product or feature launch. [You can join the Slack community here.]
Klein noticed that while there were a few Slack groups for product managers and product marketers individually, there were none that combined the two groups to discuss product launches.
“I think it’s interesting that there’s not really a place specifically for both parties that gives them a way to talk more about or think more about or hear more about their counterparts’ perspective,” Klein said.
Klein said he wants to provide a forum for managers and marketers to learn how to have a more successful product launch and create a larger impact for their companies.
“If you’re a product manager, I want this to be a place where you can learn how to better think about your product strategy, think about your roadmaps, think about how you’re aligning your internal teams and getting the whole organization rowing in the same direction,” Klein said.
Product marketers, on the other hand, will learn how to craft better narratives around their launches, Klein said. The Slack workspace will provide AMA-style interviews and host book-club-style events every few weeks for the national product marketer and manager audience.
Klein hopes to grow the community to hundreds of active participants this year.
“The way I think about this thing actually being successful is, I first and foremost want this to be a place that actually helps product marketers and product managers to have product and feature launches that go more smoothly within their company, and that have a bigger impact for them,” Klein said.
Klein added, “It’s such a huge opportunity for companies when they’re launching something big and new for them to really engage with their customer base. The better they can do at this, the more likely they are to find success for the company as a whole.”
