How Alex Eaton runs product launches without losing his mind

Welcome to Evidently—the bi-weekly newsletter where I share my biggest hits (and get honest about my misses) as a first-time VP of Marketing.

Speaking of hits, one of them was hiring Alex Eaton to be UserEvidence’s Director of Product Marketing. I asked him to write a guest post this week about product launches, something he’s way better at than me.

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If you’re a product marketer, you already know what launch week feels like:

• Features that were “locked in” yesterday are suddenly at risk

• Your draft narrative feels thin, but the slide deck is due

• You’re still chasing the perfect customer quote—usually by pinging three separate Slack channels while scrolling a Google Drive of dusty assets

I lived that scramble for years. Then I joined UserEvidence, inherited an always-on customer-evidence library, and discovered prepping for launches doesn’t have to feel like a slog.

These are the five habits that now keep my product launch weeks calm, cohesive, and painless.

1. Grab proof before you draft

The first tab I stare at when whipping up launch messaging isn’t a blank page in Google Docs—it’s our evidence library.

Why? Two reasons:

1. In my launches, the focus isn’t the new features, but how they tie into our overall company story. And since we’re always collecting customer evidence to support said story, I don’t have to totally start from scratch for the sake of every new launch narrative.

2. Peers want to hear from other peers, making customers our best sellers. If I put them at the heart of every launch—showing how our product delivers value—the narrative is made stronger because of it.

2. Lead with the theme, not the features

When I train Sales and CS for product launches, I spend most of my time talking about the problem our launch theme solves. The shiny new features are just tools in the belt, a supplement to the overall solution.

For our most recent launch, I came up with five real-world scenarios, objections, and questions reps already heard on calls. Then I showed how the theme mapped back to each one of them—before detailing how the new features accentuated our previous answers to them.

A sample slide from one of my recent launch training decks.

The goal with training isn’t just to dole out definitions of features, or scatter the team in different directions with completely new messaging.

It’s to help refine our existing story and make it easier to sell with new material.

3. Let your customer evidence library do the heavy lifting

Because of my broader focus on our existing narrative, every product launch feeds the next and the base of customer evidence I have to work with compounds.

During our Collect launch, I pulled a chart from 39 customers proving the core pain in about 15 minutes.

For our Share launch, I exported a persona-perfect testimonial slide in under five.

We’re a small company but we still have over 200 assets to pull from in our library. My process for pulling them looks like: idea → search → export → done.

4. Patch the proof gaps with 30-second micro-surveys

All that said, sometimes you need net-new proof. My rule: keep the ask tiny. One-to-three-question surveys land via CS’s shared Slack channels (best method, IMO) or direct email so customers can knock them out in under a minute.

UserEvidence handles branding, approvals, and “named vs. anonymous” choices out of the box. No more design requests or legal sign-offs for me.

5. Make evidence everyone’s job (and let AI do the grunt work)

The biggest unlock was realizing I don’t have to collect all of the customer evidence I need myself. Our CEO once dropped two Seismic integration testimonials in Slack after I went fishing for proof in our CS channel—face-palm moment, lesson learned.

Democratizing evidence collection with a tool that makes it easy to do means CS, Product, even RevOps adds nuggets to our library as part of their normal flow.

By the time we shipped our G2 integration, I had 20+ assets and a full microsite already waiting for me.

Bonus: I lean on Claude and ChatGPT Projects to riff on feature ideas, whip up wireframes, and crunch HubSpot exports without pinging RevOps. AI isn’t replacing me anytime soon, but it’s the sidekick I’ve finally come around to working with.

What now?

For your next launch:

• Focus on the overall company story and block 30 minutes to catalogue existing love notes from customers

• Spin up a micro-survey template to help fill the gaps

• Show Sales where to grab the goods—and remind them features answer objections, they don’t solve the bigger problem

• Rinse, repeat, and refine

If you want even more detail on my evidence-collection workflow, check out my playbook that went live this week. It’s got more screenshots and examples that help illustrate my process.

Stuff I’m digging this week

• Help shape our next big marketing bet for customer marketers—We’re building something new and we don’t want to do it alone. If you touch customer marketing, take 5 minutes to fill out this 4-question survey. Your answers will directly shape what we build next.

• Burn the playbook: how to win at B2B Marketing—I recorded with the EventShark crew last month in Austin to talk about trust, content, and the hills I’m willing to die on. One of the most fun convos I’ve had this year. Streaming now on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube.

• Fibbler: a better way to see which accounts are paying attention—We’ve been testing this for the last month-ish. And while we’re not hanging our hat on influenced pipeline, Fibbler helps us see which target accounts are seeing and engaging with our ads. A small piece of the always-messy attribution story.

Hold up—what does UserEvidence do again?

Product marketers, marketing leaders, and customer marketers need more than generic testimonials to prove value.

UserEvidence helps create real customer evidence that Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success teams can use to increase buyer confidence.

We make it easy to collect and share case studies, testimonials, competitive intelligence, product stats, and ROI data—proof that helps move deals forward.

Need a stat to prove ROI? A competitive insight to handle objections? A case study that closes the gap between interest and decision?

UserEvidence helps you capture and share the proof buyers need.