Your Next Product Launch Could Use a Little Rolling Thunder

Show notes for Season 1 · Episode 19 of Product Marketing for You with April Dunford.

I've been fanboying over April's work for years. Her book "Obviously Awesome" was foundational—it taught me what good positioning actually looks like. I literally read it weekly at one point. Still do, quarterly, to make sure I'm not drifting too far off.

So when I was winding down this season and wanted to go out with something special, there was only one person I wanted in the chair: April Dunford.

Problem: I'd never actually talked to her. And surely someone running a massive positioning consultancy wouldn't have time for a scrappy PMM podcast, right?

I filled out a form on her site anyway. Just threw it out there: "I know you're prob busy—but would love to have you on to talk product launches."

She responded. I think I blacked out for a moment.

Next thing I know, I'm recording with the PMM GOAT and this conversation went 30 minutes because it was too good to cut short.

She casually drops the "rolling thunder" concept—just because your product is released doesn't mean you have to launch it—and a bunch of other absolute gems about how most launches fail, why your positioning thesis is probably wrong, and what big companies do that startups don't.

Here's what we got into

• What exactly is a Rolling Thunder launch? A Rolling Thunder launch decouples your product's release from your marketing launch — instead of one all-or-nothing "big bang" day, you spread your announcement across multiple moments over the course of a year. April picked this up running launches at IBM, where big companies never tie software availability to a single splashy event.

The 4 phases, straight from April

1. Pre-launch: Tease that something's coming to whip up demand with your most likely buyers, and brief analysts lightly — before you're ready to say much. Bonus effect: it puts competitors on notice mid-sales-cycle.
2. Launch: The day marketing actually talks: the event, the PR, the first customer stories. Key detail — this can happen months after the product was quietly made available to real users.
3. Momentum Launch (~3 months later): Go back out and report on traction: usage numbers, logos, metrics. This is where the customers you held back from day one finally get used.
4. Follow-on / Point Release Launch (~3 months after that): Announce the thing customers have been asking for since launch, with more proof points attached. Then the cycle often restarts with a new tease for what's next.

We also get into why locking your positioning to your GA date is a mistake — and how a quiet, limited-availability period lets you validate your positioning thesis with real customers before you spend the budget on the big moment.

Additional Resources

• Get April's Book "Obviously Awesome"
• Work with April

And huge thanks to PMM Camp for partnering with us for S1 - it's THE place to grow as a PMM leader, get connected with like-minded PMM peers, and single handedly contributed to 2/3 of this season's guests.