I managed 3 launches at the same time at Asana, a public company. That was the surprising part. I'd expect this kind of scramble at a startup, not here.
I joined in late April. Asana Service Management (for ITSM buyers), Asana Client Management (for agencies), and Command by Asana (for product engineering teams) were all set to launch the same day in mid-September.
Companies usually space launches out for two reasons: giving the market time to absorb each story, and protecting team capacity. Leadership wanted all three out together, the moment they were ready. Momentum mattered more than sequencing. The first reason didn't apply. Three different audiences meant three different markets, so a shared date wasn't overloading any single buyer. The second reason applied completely, and it wasn't up for discussion.
Between people going on leave, hiring that didn't land, and delayed contractor onboarding, I ended up owning all three products myself. Head of PMM in title, IC across three GTM motions in practice.
That gap is becoming normal. PMM talent is hard to hire for, and leaders are now expected to execute, not just manage people. Organization and time management aren't soft skills here. They decide whether three launches ship on time or one of them slips.
Positioning, plans, then one visual
Positioning and messaging came first for each product, with sign-off from GMs and the C-suite. Then the GTM plans, and they looked nothing alike: SLG, PLG, and a hybrid, running in parallel under one launch date.
Once the plans were set, I presented a "Plan on a Page" at Marketing All Hands: one visual, every activity across all three products, shared campaigns and field events next to what was distinct to each. One view instead of three decks.
From three meetings to one
Kickoff. Each product got its own: positioning readout, a short demo, deliverables, timeline.
Weekly GTM meetings. After kickoff, only the stakeholders each workstream actually needed showed up. No one sat through updates that didn't apply to them.
Running three parallel meeting tracks took a toll I felt physically, not just on my calendar. Same partners, same PMM, everyone already context-switching across three products. Splitting the conversations by product stopped making sense.
Weekly functional meetings. I collapsed everything by function instead: one media meeting, one enablement meeting, covering all three products at once. Before the change: three full kickoffs a week, 50 people each, over three hours of meetings plus side 1:1s. After: 45 minutes total, no 1:1s.
What launched in mid-September
Website, menu, and pricing went live the same day across all three products, with sizzle videos live on the pages and through social. Media was the exception. All three products had been pre-announced, so a launch moment only worked with a real story behind it, a customer result or an ROI stat. We timed each product's media coverage to when that story was ready, not to the shared date.
Where the details made the difference
The collapsed meetings are what surfaced that distinction. One media meeting across all three products made it obvious media needed its own timing per product even while everything else moved together. Lifecycle marketing showed the same thing: Service Management needed a launch email and an admin welcome email, nothing more. Client Management, running PLG, needed a full trial onboarding flow on top of that. Command needed only a launch email. Three products, one meeting, three different builds, decided in the room instead of flattened into one template because that would have been easier to plan.
That's what Head of PMM in title, IC in practice, actually required: organization. Knowing which meeting needed which people, which product needed which build, which story needed to wait for the right moment. That's the mechanism that made both versions of the job possible at once.