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Launch Plan (Marketing): Notebooks & PostHog 3000 #139

Closed joethreepwood closed 3 months ago

joethreepwood commented 8 months ago

What's launching, and when?

We're planning to launch a reduced-scope version of PostHog 3000, called 'Base 3000', which will launch alongside notebooks. This follows a period of internal testing.

The plan is to enable this feature as beta for 50% of teams, and run this as an experiment for a two week sprint. If nothing breaks? Full launch and announcement. All users who join the beta will get a new, in-app announcement.

The dates may drift as the situation develops, but the plan is to enable the beta the week of 4 December, and initiate full release on the week of 18 Dec.

Launch plans

The launch plan is divided into three stages.

Pre-launch, before the beta

Launch week to all users

Follow-on activity

Updating the site

These are critical assets, which we should aim to update the week of the full release. Screenshots should be updated, or removed if not strictly needed.

andyvan-ph commented 8 months ago

I know I suggest this every time, but I think this feature (more than most) would benefit from some kind of video demo / animation.

joethreepwood commented 8 months ago

I know I suggest this every time, but I think this feature (more than most) would benefit from some kind of video demo / animation.

What sort of thing would you suggest, and how would we use it?

benjackwhite commented 8 months ago

Yeah I think so too. Question really ends up being "will the video stay up-to-date" but if we are purposeful about keeping it simple and easy to re-record then I'd be up for this.

charlescook-ph commented 8 months ago

I will only say this kind of thing once, but given 'changes in UI' seems to be our biggest blocker for videos generally, is there not some AI solution we can use for this?

(Sorry to suggest AI, won't happen again)

neilkakkar commented 8 months ago

wellll, I will only say this kind of thing twice, but we do already have recordings for cypress tests, so technically, if you write a cypress test (or get chatGPT to write it xP), you could automatically generate a video out of it, and say update it every week/month with a click of a button. Not sure how useful this will be though, compared to a person making sure to highlight the important stuff.

joethreepwood commented 8 months ago

My question is still really about what we want to do.

If we're thinking some sort of demo of some notebooks functionality to add in a blog post and embed in social announcements, etc, we can absolutely do that. And it won't matter too much if it ages because who's going back to those pages.

The part I'm less keen on is doing some sort of polished explainer video which we can feature in more prominent positions on the site and re-use. That will date and need to be kept up to date, and I'm not personally convinced of how valuable it would be compared to the effort required. I've worked on these projects before and rarely seen them end up worth it.

So, yeah. Before we turn to AI to solve the problem, I want to hear a bit more about what the goal is and how we'd use a video so that we can actually create something that delivers on the objective, and we aren't doing video for the sake of it.

andyvan-ph commented 8 months ago

I think a 3 to 5 min demo video from Ben, maybe with some light editing, would be fine. It's just a feature you really need to see in action. That plus a decent collection of short video clips would work nicely.`

Key thing is to show:

joethreepwood commented 8 months ago

I've updated the plan above, adjusting the date and adding the usual responsible people. Still open to feedback, and changes.

corywatilo commented 8 months ago

where notebooks should feature in the docs and product hierarchy

Within Product OS for both

joethreepwood commented 8 months ago

After the standup last week I've updated the suggested launch plan to reflect the launch of Base 3000 and Notebooks together. Please take a look, share feedback, and add anything that I may be missing.

If this looks good and no objections are raised in the marketing sprint, the next step will be putting owners next to items and starting to prep some of the messaging.

We'll definitely want to have a video which walks through all of the 3000 changes, and demos notebooks. I'll create an issue to spec that out once we have a bit more clarity on what's Base 3000 will look like (I believe there'll be a demo on all-hands).

corywatilo commented 7 months ago

Let's just make this mostly a Notebooks launch with a little bit of UI cleanup included – and avoid calling it "Base 3000" or anything 3000-related.

andyvan-ph commented 7 months ago

Some additional thoughts:

  1. I think it would be fun to do some teaser screenshots / gifs in the week or two up to release... e.g. a gif showing switching to dark mode, a limited preview of notebooks. I'm happy to pick this up.

  2. Do we need some documentation explaining the difference between dashboards and notebooks? I suspect this will confuse people at first.

  3. Can we get a bit more targeted than "update every screenshot on the website" for launch? – i.e. what are the 100% high-priority parts that need to be up-to-date for launch, and which are "this can wait". Maybe I'm overestimating the size of the job, but updating every single tutorial (to use just one example) doesn't seem super productive when much of the UI isn't changing.

  4. To Cory's point, I think the headline items here are Dark Mode + Notebooks, so we should lead with those externally.

andyvan-ph commented 7 months ago

Things that need updating

joethreepwood commented 7 months ago

Let's just make this mostly a Notebooks launch with a little bit of UI cleanup included – and avoid calling it "Base 3000" or anything 3000-related.

To Cory's point, I think the headline items here are Dark Mode + Notebooks, so we should lead with those externally.

Absolutely - as mentioned in standups last week, 'Base 3000' won't be a customer facing term, and we're using it here just to coordinate. I'm going to be fleshing the actual messaging out when I start drafting soon.

I think it would be fun to do some teaser screenshots / gifs in the week or two up to release... e.g. a gif showing switching to dark mode, a limited preview of notebooks. I'm happy to pick this up.

👍 But please don't commit us to a specific date until we're a bit closer to launch!

Can we get a bit more targeted than "update every screenshot on the website" for launch? – i.e. what are the 100% high-priority parts that need to be up-to-date for launch, and which are "this can wait". Maybe I'm overestimating the size of the job, but updating every single tutorial (to use just one example) doesn't seem super productive when much of the UI isn't changing.

I was going to ask you this in the standup, actually. Is there a way we can/should prio based on traffic?

Ultimately, if we spread the work I think we can get done pretty quickly with a lot of this. The UI isn't changing hugely, so it should mostly be a case of replacing (or removing) screenshots.

simfish85 commented 7 months ago

Simon's PostHog demo on /book-a-demo

Is this something I can get going on now / need to wait for further updates to be ready? Should I also include notebooks in a demo?

joethreepwood commented 7 months ago

Simon's PostHog demo on /book-a-demo

Is this something I can get going on now / need to wait for further updates to be ready? Should I also include notebooks in a demo?

I'd wait for the internal testing period before aiming to create this, but I think yes to the second part (although it is not a paid feature)

joethreepwood commented 7 months ago

Quick update after catching up with Ben:

The plan is now to do this gradual roll-out, rather than a big all-at-once announcement. We will still need much of the content above (video, tutorial refreshes, etc) so we shouldn't stop planning those - but I'm going to wait for more certainty on the impact before overhauling the plan.

andyvan-ph commented 7 months ago

@joethreepwood Just a reminder, I can sort the social media teasers, so no need to pick that up.

List of features to tease:

andyvan-ph commented 7 months ago

First teaser is live: https://twitter.com/posthog/status/1729192487573488048

Plan to do another tomorrow showing more notebook features. It'll be a reply to this tweet for better visibility.

joethreepwood commented 7 months ago

I’ve updated the top comment to be more specific, and to start putting people’s names next to things in terms of site updates. Please add to the issue if anything is wrong, or unrealistic.

I’ve mostly added names based on what seems sensible (or is in progress already) and areas which individuals normally own, but this is just so we can stay coordinated - I’m nobody’s manager and I’m not trying to forcefully assign things to anyone.

ivanagas commented 5 months ago

@joethreepwood has forced my hand about updating PostHog 3000 tutorial images a bit with a couple PRs like this one (fair enough 😅 ). I don't think it is better experience just to delete the old images without replacing them with new ones. Responding here instead of each of the PRs because others might want to weigh in on this.

It is my responsibility to update them. I started doing it, but they were taking up a significant amount of my time over multiple days so dropped them. It takes a lot of time to recreate the setups I had at each stage of every tutorial and make sure the explanation around the images makes sense. I also hadn't heard a single piece of feedback saying that the tutorials used the old UI.

I also doubt the docs images will get updated by the teams without us forcing the issue, and they will run into the same trouble I had.

Three options:

  1. I spend 1 week updating them as my main priority and get them done.
  2. We hire a freelancer to update them. Basically all of them can be recreated from context and image, although it will take them more time, and we will still have to review them all.
  3. We leave them as is as update them as we update the tutorials or people complain about them

I'd prefer not to do 1 but will do it if needed.

joethreepwood commented 5 months ago

Wasn't meaning to force your hand - just fixing them as I noticed them while I did some other docs work for https://github.com/PostHog/meta/issues/171

I definitely don't think we should wait for 3. People won't actively complain about them as often as they'll go to check the docs, get confused, get irritated, and move on.

I also agree that tech teams won't fix this, even though I've tried to force it.

There is a fourth option: Get a digital asset management (DAM) tool in place to make it easier to update and maintain these images. I don't have a strong opinion here (@corywatilo and @smallbrownbike may though), other than that in my experience these are prohibitively expensive.

I'll add this to the marketing sprint issue so we can discuss, but I'm definitely in favour of getting a freelancer in here.

charlescook-ph commented 5 months ago

+1 to freelancer - this is a very self-contained piece of work that's easy to brief, so makes sense to outsource. Someone in the community would be where I'd look first.