THE BRIEF
Turn every major Shopify launch into a story partners could confidently take to market.
Shopify regularly introduced more than 100 product updates at a time through Shopify Editions. Affiliates and dev shops had trusted audiences, but they needed more than release notes. They needed clear use cases, proof points, content angles, and assets.
I translated new product launches into partner-ready narratives, then carried those stories through enablement, owned channels, events, and conversion experiments.
THE CHALLENGE
Partners needed a story, not a changelog.
Each launch spanned products serving different merchants, business models, and stages of growth. What mattered to an affiliate was different from what mattered to a developer partner.
The challenge was getting upstream early enough to determine which updates mattered to whom, refine the story, and build a distribution plan before launch. At the same time, product education was fragmented, at the time the Growth Center was a single Splash page, and there was no durable system for keeping partners updated.
THE DISTRIBUTION LAYER
Each launch needed somewhere to live after launch day.
I rebuilt the Growth Center from a single Splash page into a self-serve hub on Shopify with a publishing system for 12 languages. I combined Google Analytics, Impact, and email performance in Looker to see which resources partners used and where their referrals converted.
I also built Affiliate Insider into the always-on editorial channel for product updates and content ideas. The newsletter grew subscribers 290% while averaging a 48% open rate and 6.2% CTR.
The Growth Center gave product stories a home. Affiliate Insider kept them moving.
THE PARTNER GTM FLOW
From product roadmap to partner-led demand
I built a repeatable path that brought partner distribution into launch planning early, then carried each story through enablement, activation, experimentation, and measurement.
01 ALIGN
Maintain an always-on working rhythm with Product and Engineering to stay close to the roadmap and shape partner GTM early.
02 FRAME
Build the product narrative: what it does, how it works, the problems it solves, and content angles partners can lean into.
03 PACKAGE
Build the demo, product guide, merchant proof points, and creative brief partners need for launch.
04 DISTRIBUTE
Publish through the Growth Center, Affiliate Insider, localized campaigns, and partner-facing launch communications.
05 ACTIVATE
Bring the story to life through product demos, webinars, conferences, workshops, and the Shopify Affiliate Summit.
06 OPTIMIZE
Use Google Analytics, Impact, email performance, experiments, and partner feedback to improve the next launch.
RESULTS
Product marketing, built for scale
WHAT I LEARNED
A product launch is not finished when it ships. It is finished when the market can repeat the story.
Partners do not need a feature dump. They need a clear customer problem, a credible proof point, a relevant content angle, and a destination that converts. Bringing partners into GTM early made launches more understandable, distributable, and measurable.