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Who is Paul, and what happened to him? We are so glad you asked.
In this limited series, we unravel the mystery behind the disappearance of Paul, the trusted playbook that guided product launches for over a decade..
Follow Jarod and the Vivin team as they face their biggest challenge yet: pulling off a high-stakes product launch without the playbook they’ve relied on for years. As the product evolves faster than anyone imagined, the team must navigate the chaos of strategy, planning, creation, communication, and launch in real time.
Can they succeed without Paul by their side, or will the launch fall apart?
Join us as we explore the death of the traditional product launch playbook and what it means for the future of go-to-market strategies.
Jarod Greene (00:00):
Guys, has anyone seen Paul?
Narrator (00:05):
Well, someone's got to set the stage, so it might as well be me. This is Jarod, but clearly Jarod isn't the only character in this story. And what story is that? You've probably guessed, but it's a mystery, a murder mystery actually. But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, Paul isn't a person. No, Paul is a playbook. The trusted dog-eared guide that's been at the heart of every product launch, every marketing push, every success for over 10 years. And during that time, Paul and Jarod were inseparable. Two sides of the same coin, but every story has a turning point. He disappeared and everything changed.
Jarod Greene (00:52):
Paul was my guy. I mean, when I was starting out, I needed a roadmap, a reliable way to get through product launches that felt impossible. And Paul was that. He was like a friend who always had my back, told me exactly what to do, step by painstaking step. We tackled every product launch together, the good, the bad, the in between. And that's why I was so excited to have Paul by my side for Vivun's most important launch.
Narrator (01:24):
But like all old friends, Paul wasn't perfect.
Jarod Greene (01:30):
Yeah, Paul could be a little stubborn, little controlling even, but I always knew I could count on him no matter what.
Narrator (01:41):
Then one morning Paul was gone.
Jarod Greene (01:46):
I just need y'all to understand we had already established the strategy for the launch. We were right in the midst of planning and ready to go into the create phase when I got the news. I felt lost. Like, what do I do without Paul? Here I am about to go through the biggest launch of my career and everything changed and I'm talking from product capabilities to position, to messaging. Everything needed to be redone and I know things will never go according to plan, but I never imagined this. Where the heck is Paul, man?
Narrator (02:31):
But to tell you the end of that story, we must first start at the beginning. Meet Russell, one of the core people who led the charge in setting the course for what's next, the strategy.
Jarod Greene (02:45):
So Russell, let's set the stage for everybody. What's the product launch we were planning for?
Russell Witham (02:52):
Back at the end of last year, as with a lot of organizations, we were still working through core pieces of our agent developed strategy. And so back at that point in time, it was all about how we landed our version of memory within our agent, how we could bring in integrations into that, capabilities like email, Slack, how we can get that content and make it available to Ava and then have her use it effectively.
Narrator (03:19):
And for those of you who don't know, Ava is an AI sales agent and this whole product launch was being built around launching her into the world successfully.
Russell Witham (03:30):
So that was everything we were focused on back at that point in time. And yeah, it feels like a lifetime ago because it changes so fast, Jarod.
Jarod Greene (03:39):
Tell me what went into the planning process. I know you and I were in the room together, but tell the audience what kind of goes into planning a launch months ahead of the actual deployment and availability of the agent.
Russell Witham (03:54):
Well for sure, Jarod, it starts with a sound strategy. And so our strategy at Vivun since we really saw the potential of this technology was one that we really believed that it was essential for you to have a system of knowledge. A brain is the analogy we often use for our agent. That's differentiated from how you get knowledge from a large language model. The large language models are incredible facilitators, but those are crucially not actually the brain of our systems. That was always a core piece of our strategy and that informed a lot of the work we were doing. But then along with that, we always had this north star from a strategic perspective. We wanted Ava to be proactive. We wanted her to be able to not just respond to users when they ask something but also be able to anticipate what they wanted to do and be able to prepare for that before they even thought to ask. And so that strategy then that led into, of course, then the planning that we were doing, Jarod, how we were thinking about that launch, all flowed downstream from these strategic things that we've always had a line of sight on as we thought about how our agent needed to be different from others.
Narrator (05:10)
What Russell is talking about here is really building a brain. A way that Ava could truly think versus just respond to being prompted. Remember that as we keep unfolding the story.
Jarod Greene (05:22):
When you think of strategy general as a product leader in a rapidly emergent space, what are all the factors you consider when developing strategy? I know we write it down, I know we feel good about it, but with so much information flying at you at once with the competitive landscape being what it is, how do you manage strategy in the age of AI?
Russell Witham (05:43):
I think that the need for adaptability and being able to rapidly evolve to new information has never been higher. And in particular, we often will use the analogy when we're talking in our Vivun R&D org about sort of the fog of generative AI and it creates this, you sort of imagine the disorientation you get when you see fog, right? Because it's like I have some notion that there's things out there, but you can't really fully visualize it. And so that's how we think about the R&D process because yes, we have hypotheses, we have viewpoints on our end of where we expect things to go. And that again ties back to our strategy. But there's also all of this immense uncertainty because the field is just evolving so rapidly. And so in particular, the part that I always like to think about there is how the release of ChatGPT, the release of the APIs that OpenAI really pressed forward with initially, that's barely over two years old. So when you're talking even three months within that sort of context, it's an enormous amount of time. And the pace of innovation we've seen has been credible. And that's both the innovation from the AI labs themselves as well as the innovation from folks who were building, like we are seeing how rapidly that shifts and how rapid our pace of learning is a hallmark of the current age that we're in right now.
Narrator (07:03):
I want to pause here on what Russell just said. You can see why Paul wasn't cutting it anymore. Teams have a lot on their plates and with everything changing so quickly, people in SaaS have to adjust and pivot their go-to-market strategies at a moment's notice.
Jarod Greene (07:21):
What are some non-negotiables about building into the fog? How do you bring people along for the journey that might feel scary or might be disorienting? What are the non-negotiables and kind of core philosophies you guys carry in product to make sure we don't hurt ourselves?
Russell Witham (07:39):
Well, I'd say there's a couple different ways to think about that. Certainly we were talking about our strategy a moment ago, so partially there's an internal consistency element around being true to our particular viewpoint on generative AI. That's how we have truly proactive capabilities anticipating users' needs, being able to really do the work on their behalf. There's a certain aspect of that, so we want to be able to really honor that work as it were. But then also there's this period of course, where many orgs are thinking about how this technology is going to change the way that they're working. And so from a Vim perspective, our bedrock is the customers that we're serving, the sales organizations who are trying to harness this technology and figure out how it's going to evolve their organization in the future. And so for us, I think it's very also non-negotiable if we have our strategic vision that's somewhat technologically oriented, but then also we're really helping organizations figure out this landscape and being a true partner and we want to sort of bring them into that fog to a certain extent and be a pioneer that's going to allow them to understand what's possible and then also how they can themselves transform where they're expecting to go as an organization based on the rapidly evolving technological landscape.
Jarod Greene (09:00):
Russell, you've been through a few product launches with me. The cadence of strategy and drives a plan drives the creation of materials. Why do you think that cadence has been important?
Russell Witham (09:12):
I serve a EQU to a drumbeat. I almost think about us marching as a team, right? When we have that plan in place and we know what we're moving toward, it helps everyone stay in sync, right? We have a plan on the marketing side that gives sales an opportunity to understand how they click in, how they can contribute. Of course, on the R&D end, it outlines key things of what do we need to make sure we're enabling? Where are the key things we need to de-risk on our side? And so obviously just that exercise of putting that thinking in place, having that drumbeat that we can all follow to that's so valuable as we're trying to launch big things, points out how when we're building software like this, how it's truly a multi-team, multi-discipline effort. And it's not just the technology you build, it's not just your ability to sell it. It's not just your ability to market it. It's really all of those teams coming together and being able to ultimately deliver something that meets the needs of customers and meets what the market is really demanding right now. And it takes contributions from everywhere.
Narrator (10:15):
Product launch playbooks have worked for decades because of this, the same steps, the same cadence, the same people involved to make everything work together as it should.
Jarod Greene (10:06):
So we're also, walk me through the moment you found out that our strategy was going to impact the launch in a significant way. What was going through your head?
Russell Witham (10:37):
Jarod, we talked earlier about how we've had this strategy that's been very consistent through time on how we intend our agent, our AI sales agent, to be proactive. Our focus around a particular way to think about what should the knowledge of an agent would be, bed rocked on. But I mentioned also the fog, and we see things that change faster often than we're anticipating or in different ways. And what we saw as we were going through the launch process, the things that we expected is we saw our ability to deliver proactive work that was really changing in a way that was much faster than we anticipated. And we actually could really take the turn from our agent being more reactive in a lot of cases, to being truly proactive in delivering the work that sales teams needed most. It feels like it was six months, nine months of hard toil to sort of get to that point. But then you start to see things unfold quickly, and once we saw that opportunity was there to be able to have our agent deliver more proactive work, I think it became really clear, right draw as we were talking about that, that then was this incredibly important capability that we need to be able to talk about and communicate back out to the market.
Narrator (11:51):
So, to quickly recap, Ava vin's AI sales agent is primed and ready to go to market. The team has a strategy. Now it's all about planning the execution. Ava, however, is about ready to get an upgrade.
But what happens when that drumbeat is interrupted, when the plan doesn't necessarily go according to plan? More on that in the next episode what happened to Paul, the death of the traditional product launch playbook.
Dominique Darrow (12:32):
‘Cause I think at that point, having just a document sent out wasn't gonna do this shift justice. And that's really when we had to jump on a call and that was a hard call.
It was one where we really had to put all concerns, you know, good and bad on the table, in terms of what we're gonna do as a team. And I think at that point it was a really big shift in our mindset. We have to be flexible.