👋 Hi, it’s Kyle and welcome to Growth Unhinged, my weekly newsletter exploring the hidden playbooks behind the fastest-growing startups.

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Now, onto the story.

Product release velocity is, well, dizzying.

I simply can’t keep up with new launches for even my favorite products (although I do make an exception for a good MCP). I don’t think I’m the only one feeling this way.

The rise of AI coding tools compressed shipping timelines. The rest of us – marketing, sales, CS, customers – are trying to catch up.

But companies like Rippling, Notion, and Profound are bucking the trend, turning product releases into one of their most powerful growth levers.

Up today: inside the winning product launch playbooks behind Rippling, Notion, and Profound from the marketing leaders who built them.

Notion previously had maybe 2-3 Tier 1 launches per year and 2-3 Tier 2 launches per quarter. “Everything now feels like a Tier 1 or Tier 2 launch,” marketing leader John Hurley told me.

Rippling plans to launch one or two new products per week for the foreseeable future, said senior director of marketing Ben Pollack. Major launches previously had up to 6 months of lead time. 6-8 week launch cycles are the new normal.

A recent example was Rippling’s AI spend console, which gives CFOs and CTOs a clear view of AI spend. The teams had just 6 weeks of lead time for the launch. During that window they planned website content (theme: Rippling’s own experience with managing AI spend), a hero video (theme: shredding money), video distribution, a Product Hunt launch, internal activation and incentives, and exec social posts.

What stood out to me is how they told Rippling’s own story of managing runaway AI costs. The announcement blog revealed that Rippling’s token spend was growing 80% month-over-month and they were on a path to spend 40% of their annual R&D headcount budget on tokens. 10-15% of employees represented 60% of AI spend with one engineer spending $50,000 per month. The story came across as authentic and personal rather than glossy and corporate.

Rippling built a GTM launch tracker to stay on top of their backlog of product launches. Each launch has a directly responsible individual (DRI) in both product and GTM. The launch plan starts with a positioning and messaging process before any GTM workstreams kick off.

Launches get tiered into small, medium, large, and XL – each comes with different marketing treatment. A small launch might only get a customer email and LinkedIn post. An XL, on the other hand, could come with its own creative team, testimonials with beta users, and lots of technical content (a recent XL launch had 100 distinct marketing assets).

Related read: How to get AI costs in check without killing adoption

The old world would keep product launches hush hush, wait for a big launch day, then make an announcement and release to 100% of users.

This model breaks down given the sheer volume of Tier 1 and Tier 2 releases – it’s just not tenable in most cases.

Building in public has become a release valve for Notion. This prepares people ahead of the launch, creates feedback loops, and shows product velocity. Ultimately, it’s good for the brand.

“Product managers need to become much more comfortable being external facing and creating content,” John emphasized.

Apple keynotes bring out the engineers, Anthropic videos feature researchers, and OpenAI Dev Days put the technical staff front-and-center. Notion’s builders themselves (product managers and product leaders) authentically share what they’re working on well before it’s ‘officially’ released (“we’re not releasing this, so it doesn’t have documentation, but here’s stuff we’re working on”).

Notion’s latest Tier 1 release was its developer platform, which allows teams to build tools for their agents. The product launch was live-streamed in May with a keynote from founder Ivan Zhao – the video is worth watching if you’re looking for launch inspiration.

Months before the launch, Notion’s primary PMs and engineers posted about the product on social media (“hey, this is super alpha, but here are the main features”). Reddit and Twitter had active threads discussing the launch well before it was public. This launch didn’t surprise anyone who was paying attention.

Notion then announced the developer platform as an open beta, not GA (the old world would’ve waited for full GA before saying anything). A page went live a month before the announcement saying “join us to see the developer platform” (again, not exactly a secret). Building and releasing in public kept the spotlight on Notion.

Marketing leader Trevor Pyle mentioned that the way Profound launched its new FactCheck product “would have made 2022 Trevor cry.”

FactCheck, which shows brands whether AI models are describing them accurately, was introduced quietly at Profound’s Zero Click conference in New York. Profound didn’t publicly launch it until months later, waiting for the right market moment to maximize attention (and after making improvements based on customer feedback).

Launch moments were, and still are, big events. They’ve always felt like one-way doors that only happen once. With so much competition for attention, it’s now better to meet the market than to wait for perfection.

Profound launches the same thing multiple times. They’ll ship an alpha, let it bake, then launch it again timed to an event or company milestone. “It’s not about owning one moment in time,” Trevor said. “It’s about sustained rolling thunder. The game is how long you hold attention with your audience.”

The new mission: continually capture mindshare via constant product releases.

If you watched Notion’s developer platform launch video, you’ll see it was pretty pared down. The keynote was pre-recorded in a black box theater with CEO Ivan Zhang sitting on a simple backless chair.

This was intentionally an antidote to the cinematic, Hollywood-style AI videos that flooded Twitter in 2025, which created hype but then either didn’t work or weren’t actually available. John says the market has snapped back hard toward raw, real, behind-the-scenes content that shows the product actually works.

While Notion went raw for their developer platform livestream, they’re extremely polished and intentional about their release notes (aka what’s new emails). Ivan sends these emails every 2-3 weeks and explains what’s rolling out now or what’s coming soon. The emails go out to every Notion customer: tens of millions of people.

The marketing team writes each email entirely in Ivan’s voice, with every screenshot and word receiving exorbitant attention. John even recently built an “Ivan bot skill” that pulls months of Ivan’s actual editorial feedback and runs the first round of edits on every new draft.

Trevor at Profound believes the bar is high at both ends: the launch video has to be either highly polished (genuinely entertaining, visually striking) or completely raw. The FactCheck launch video went as raw as possible.

There was no shoot. Profound pulled real reaction clips, with permission, from product feedback Zoom calls with alpha and beta customers. The video was fast and built for the social media feed.

“It performed well because it was raw,” Trevor explained. “To be pattern breaking it has to be either beautifully crafted or it’s authentically raw. The thing that dies is the middle.”

PMM teams used to grow as product surfaces grew. There would be pods with aligned OKRs. Everyone owned a specific area of the product.

That’s no longer the case. Priorities can change on a dime. Engineering timelines became even harder to predict than before with products often landing faster than expected (side note: that wasn’t always a thing!). Product marketing needs to be ready at a moment’s notice.

Notion’s marketing team has stayed lean, avoiding bloat. They use loose “flying formations” that are subject to change. These formations clarify who’s working on each launch, who’s accountable, and what metrics to track. The formations are more dynamic and free-flowing than a rigid pod-based structure.

Profound dropped the extended launch planning and timing mechanics they used to run. Each Monday there’s a sync with engineering to get a look at what’s coming that week followed by a weekly sprint kick-off. Something is shipping nearly every single week.

PMMs are full stack doing everything from campaign work to demand gen to content. Profound brought almost all creative in-house, operating like their own media agency, so marketing could move at engineering’s pace. And they built systems to help automate Tier 2 and Tier 3 launches that don’t get a heavy treatment, including a Profound agent trained on Profound’s brand guidelines and connected with their CMS.

When I asked what made Rippling’s latest launches work so well, Ben narrowed it down to three things:

As much as product launches have changed, these principles remain pretty timeless. Nail these three things and everything else starts to fall into place. But that’s easier said than done when there’s another new product coming next week.