How to Announce New Products in 2026

The pace of software development is accelerating at an unprecedented rate, driven by AI tools like Cursor and Claude Code that allow companies to launch features faster than ever before. For startup marketers, this speed creates a new dilemma: how do you manage a product PR program when feature fatigue makes traditional announcements less effective?  If your brand is simply shoving a grab bag of features out the door, you are likely getting minimal traction and missed editorial coverage. On this episode of FiredUp!, we dive into the evolution of product news in 2026. This week, episode 132 of the FiredUp! podcast is about how to announce new products in 2026! 

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In this episode of the FiredUp! podcast, the Firebrand team shares the importance of AI in promoting product visibility and actionable steps you can take right now to get your product covered by journalists. 

Morgan and Chris discuss:

• Narrative Over Grab Bags: Grouping features into a meaningful theme is critical; a grab bag of unrelated updates often results in low-value, automated coverage, whereas a themed announcement builds a much stronger corporate narrative.
• The One-Week Pitch Rule: Speed is great, but effectiveness requires lead time. For any important announcement, ensure your PR team has at least one week to pitch busy reporters to maximize editorial coverage.
• Optimize for AI Visibility: Modern product PR isn't just for humans. Structuring your announcements to be indexed correctly is essential for appearing in AI recommendations and competitive listicles where prospects do their research.
• Define the "So What?": Before going to market, define the core message of your announcement by figuring out what is most meaningful for the reporters you are targeting. If the announcement lacks a newsworthy hook, it won't move the needle beyond a basic press release reprint.

Is your product news driving your corporate narrative, or just adding to the digital noise?  In a world of accelerated development, the brands that win are those that can turn fast features into compelling stories.

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Transcript

Morgan McLintic: 0:00

Software Development has accelerated through the use of tools like cursor and Claude code, meaning companies are launching more features than ever. But what's that mean for your product, PR program? That's the topic that we're going to talk about today. Hello everyone. Welcome to fired up the podcast for marketers working in early and late stage startups. Hello there. Everyone. Welcome to fired up. My name is Morgan mcclintic, and I am joined today by my co host, Chris Albrecht. Hey, Chris, how you doing?

Chris Ulbrich: 0:32

Hey, doing great. Great to be here.

Morgan McLintic: 0:34

Good. So today we are going to talk about product PR, and you know, the pace of software development is faster than ever. Companies are launching more features. It's got more competitive than it has ever been before. And obviously, when you're trying to communicate, that has a big impact. So if you think about it compared to just a couple of years ago. I guess that's still in the AI era. How would you say product PR has changed?

Chris Ulbrich: 1:07

I think in terms of classic PR, it's probably pretty similar to a couple of years ago in that product PR, for anyone who's been in this space for a while, they'll know that the opportunities for product coverage, especially of B to B technology, have been on the decline for a long time, and they were in pretty tragic shape a couple of years ago. You're down to a handful, a very small handful, of publications in the B to B tech industry that broadly cover B to B Tech, and then you have, of course, niche trades which cover technology to different extents, depending on the industry and the relevance of technology to that industry. But I think, and I know we'll be talking about this in greater detail, I think the really big shift is that clients, rightly, are thinking at least as much about Geo and how you show up in LLM results that and how you show up in queries with AI, as they are about having readers see their content on a web page, which is read the article itself, they're actually at least as concerned with how that content is going to be extracted by An AI and show up in an AI context. So it's important to note that the editorial coverage still feeds into that. It's just that the editorial coverage is not the end goal, it's more how it promotes your AI visibility program, yeah. I mean, there are still

Morgan McLintic: 2:35

publications that cover BBB, product, news, infra, world, etc, you can get coverage. But if you think about product news, where does it fit into your overall PR program?

Chris Ulbrich: 2:49

So there was a time when I would say that it ran a real close second, when I got into corporate news, when I got into the business about 20 years ago, your goals with a PR program for most B to B tech companies were pretty simple, advertise your vitality and momentum on the corporate front when you had the opportunity and drive customer leads through product promotion during the other times. And I would say that the goals of driving leads and advertising your momentum are still pretty much the same as always, but as I indicated earlier, I think that increasingly product coverage is seen as a means to an end, not an End itself. It is driving visibility in AI, as much as anyone expects it to be a sort of standalone article that people read end to end. You know, our clients are increasingly at least as worried about how they show up when someone types give me the top five product solutions in this area as they are in the fine details about how their product is described over 800 words in an article, they definitely want that article, but the urgency, I would say, is at least as high, if not higher, on the AI side of it, that's what's really on their minds right now. And I think that there's reason for that, because AI evidently drives attention, drives leads. For years in PR, we've been advising clients on how to grapple with this decline in traffic, to to the editorial sites that we traditionally pitch, and how to make the most of it, and how to get visibility in an environment where there are fewer and fewer places to do it? Well, AI offers a sort of a radical new answer to that question. And what's eye opening about the AI is that in areas where there's not a lot of content, like, for instance, niche areas of technology, it's not really picky about the. Sources of information that it uses to come up with its opinions in quotation marks, right? If it's ranking products, it's happy to use a site which might objectively be considered pretty low tier, sometimes almost spammy, like a marketing side page or something like that. So that means, though, that like on the upside for B to B is that even the relatively small number of sites that are publishing product news, sometimes like, there are still sites that hold to a high standard of quality, but there are others that are kind of just republishing news with minor tweaks, and those posts have new value now you can justify the effort needed to get them maybe more today than you could two years ago. So that's sort of a way to circle back to the original question, how are things different today than they were two years ago? In some ways you could argue that product PR is even more relevant, just not for the reasons that you traditionally valued it for.

Morgan McLintic: 6:06

Yeah, it just as a sidebar on that sort of geo point. One of the go to tactics is actually for brands to publish these sort of competitive listicles the top 10 vector databases, and you put yourself at the top, and you are giving pros and cons about your competitors, and at the moment, those are getting disproportionately cited, and lots of companies are then putting out these battle pages. They've been around for a long time for paid media. We drive traffic to these sort of Harvey Ball these pages with these Harvey balls, and we do this, and they don't do that, but now those are really big for geo. I have a feeling that at some point they'll get nerfed down again, because it's just, there are some companies that are producing hundreds of these, and it's not exactly great for SEO, because it's not, it's not giving a great experience, and these don't have a lot of authority, but for AI search, at the moment, they're really working. We just put out a blog post about that, actually. Now on the topic of product news, though, I think it's good to announce as much as possible for this geo reason. But how do you determine if this product release really is newsworthy?

Chris Ulbrich: 7:21

So if you are pursuing quality, detailed media coverage, then you have to approach it the way that you would have approached a serious announcement, like media announcement at any time, but in a way more so, because the few remaining enterprise B to B reporters, and so that's my specialty. So that's the area that I'm going to refer to by default. But in enterprise B to B, you can literally count on one hand the number of reporters in this space who regularly cover, say, networking technology or data technology, maybe two hands. But yeah, that's it. It's not right. So if you're looking to get coverage from a reporter who's doing real work, conducting interviews, albeit maybe email interviews, but putting some effort in and trying to do justice to your story, your task is harder than ever. So you know, as always, this is a matter of asking yourself, if you want to know what makes it newsworthy, you have to look at it from the reporter's perspective. What makes it relevant to them, and am I offering it to them at a time in a way that makes it viable for them to take the story so in the classic sense of newsworthiness, it has to rise to a certain level of significance. It has to have a certain level of timeliness and interest, relevance to the audience. And I think increasingly, this has been true for a while, but in the spirit of as always, but more so you need to identify a theme for your announcement, because especially this has been true since the dawn of the SAS era, where updates tend to be a grab bag of features, because it was so easy to launch new features with SAS, you used to have spring and summer launches now, they just come throughout the year. You have all these dot zero, 1.01, 11, dot 22, releases that are fairly minor. And they are. They're important collections of minor updates and budgets. So they're important, but they're not necessarily significant. They don't help the reporter, if they're doing one or two of these, or, I don't know, three of these a week, right? These really significant stories a week, they don't really help them move the needle for their readers as to what is happening in the industry when you're investing that much time in a story. Worry. You want it to be emblematic of something, and a grab bag of features is not emblematic of anything. I've been recommending this for years, but I think with the accelerated, especially now that we've moved into this era of AI generation of code, where the production of features is even faster than ever, it's all the more important to impose some discipline on your release process and ask yourself, is there a story that I can tell here about the development of my product, how it relates to everything else going on in the industry? What it signals for the development of the kind of product you're offering? Can you say anything other than now our users have access to XYZ feature, because those are release notes that you can put on a blog. You don't need one of the few remaining reporters getting 300 pitches a day to write well, I mean, you might feel like you need it, but they're not going to do it, but they're not going

Morgan McLintic: 10:54

to cover your release notes. That's right. No, they're

Chris Ulbrich: 10:56

not going to cover your release notes. And actually, now that you say it, that's a pretty good rule of thumb. If you look at the story that you are putting forth, or that you're thinking of putting out there, and you're thinking of pitching and you're asking yourself, Is this newsworthy? Ask yourself, Does this look like release notes? If it does, then it's not newsworthy. You have some

Morgan McLintic: 11:18

work to do. It's a good point, because I think ideally, you would have an overarching, sort of corporate narrative that sort of, here's our company's story and what we're trying to achieve, and the tailwinds behind this and where we fit in, and then this piece of the product that we've launched is a milestone to get that And it ladders up to your narrative as you make it happen. And so that's the story, and this is just a chapter a page in that story. But if you don't often, for poor product managers, I think their roles now must be really hard product marketing, because there are so many features, and your competitors are rolling them out at a fast pace. So the sort of gap What is unique about this product? It's only unique for weeks before your competitors have caught up, and often your competitors may already have it, and you might be unaware. And so you know what is new? You're announcing something that's new, but is it really new? So that's a real challenge when it comes to what are we announcing here? Because you've got to leave some stuff out, and you've got to ladder up to this narrative. It's got to be a theme. And that's the work, by the way, like the work, from a comms perspective, is in building that theme so that you can go here, we've mentioned all these features, and this is what it means, and why it's important and why it's different to competitives. But to that point, though, I'm a big fan of having press releases these days, there was a time when, you know, hey, product news should just be a post on your blog post. We don't need a press release. Press releases are dead. We've killed them off millions of times, or maybe it's just a tweet, and then the media would come but now I feel like we might have gone full circle back to press releases. Do you agree with that? I do.

Chris Ulbrich: 13:09

I've been pretty down on press releases for many years, and I think that the argument for issuing a press release is stronger than it has been in a long time and again, AI has a lot to do with that. It also has to do with a shift that Google and other search engines have made, but especially Google, over recent years. So Google used to suppress press releases just across the board, so users had to go looking for them to find those results. And Google has eased up a bit, and it is starting to sprinkle in press releases to more general queries about startups and their products. So there's some SEO value in issuing those releases, which there wasn't for a long time. But on top of that, because llms depend on search results to assemble their opinions. Again, I in quotations of industries and leading technologies and so forth. The press releases can feed into a geo as well. Increasingly, I think there is an argument that goes beyond the signaling argument that I've made in the past, where I've said that it's hard if what you're trying to do is communicate about your product and increase the visibility your product. Look reporters don't rely on press releases unless they're sent to them directly, like no one's watching the wire. And so for a long time, I would say it's mainly about signaling to your competitors and anyone else, maybe reporters who have like alerts set up on your name. It's an efficient way of letting them know that you've put something out that's new, and it also just signals your momentum and vitality as a company to be putting out formal announcements through a channel which requires. Requires some investment. It just looks grown up. And so it helps to signal to prospects that you're not just a flash in the pan company. You have a proper wire and yeah, so there's all so that is all as true as ever, but now I think we're getting back to the communication value of a press release as a way to get information about your product circulating with AI, and that's just aside from the visibility that you now are getting back from search engines themselves. But we know that search engine traffic is falling off a cliff and that the future of information search is is AI, so that's really the most relevant. Most relevant benefit here. I would also just note that, on the subject of signaling to your competitors, it's really easy to feel like, like you're the only company that is on the back foot, and that's reacting like, you know, what makes your organization anxious? You know all the competitive pressure you're under, but it's easy to forget that your competitors are also under competitive pressure from you, if you choose to exert it. So think to yourself, how did it feel when your top competitor put out a product announcement that you felt was probably overselling what they did, and they were making claims they couldn't back up. But how did your executives feel about it? How did the board feel about it? Were they chill when they saw this? Or did they say, Where's our announcement? I think it's think that tactically, it makes sense to consider whether you want to have your competition feeling that way, or whether you want to be the only one dealing with that, because you know how that saps those exercises. When your competitor comes out with an announcement and everybody's up in arms about it, it throws to use another metaphor. It's sand in the gears, right? And your organization for at least a day or two starts does not operate as effectively as it used to. You don't want to be the only one suffering that you want to throw sand in the gears of your own competitors.

Morgan McLintic: 17:10

Yeah, it's a great point. And then to the geo thing. Muckrack, which is a media database, has put out a report that said that press releases get cited. Six months ago, they said it was 2% of the time, and then they moved it up to 5% of the time that searches have a citation that's a press release. Now that hasn't been my experience when I've been clicking on them. I think 5% feels like a lot, but there's another it's still a significant source of sight of citations, even if it's 2% I like the sand and the gears thing, so definitely important. So we found out what's newsworthy. We've got our press release. We're going to put it over the wire. We pitched it to the handful of reporters. We've given ourselves plenty of time. It's we've got a story. It's linked up to our narrative, and we've got all the other assets, of course, like I'm we're talking about the comms piece, we're not talking about the blog post. We're not talking about the graphic assets or any other videos, or the email to the customers or any other parts of the communications. You're going to be doing here, we've pitched it. And when should we expect the news coverage? Does it come out on the day when the release cost us a while we pitched it under embargo. Does everything light up at that point? Or what's realistic?

Chris Ulbrich: 18:25

You've laid out a scenario where every where we've done everything right, where the company has done everything right, and it's gotten pitched with plenty of time. Let's assume it has reporters under embargo, meaning that they have taken the news ahead of time with plenty of time to write, then I think it is reasonable to expect coverage the same day, potentially even at the moment of the embargo. Typically, you'll have some idea whether that's going to happen. You don't always, and I would say PRs have had less and less insight into that as the number of reporters who do a serious treatment of a product announcement declines. So if you're working with one of the few reporters out there who is still writing 800,000 word pieces on product news, if they're going to cover it, they will probably have sent you follow up questions. If they have sent you follow up questions, that's a pretty strong indicator they're going to cover because they wouldn't invest the time otherwise. That said, I think of Silicon Angles is a good example. They do substantial articles, but they will often write just from the press release and your pitch, and they don't need a follow up. I think partly that's because some of their key reporters are overseas, so it's not really

Morgan McLintic: 19:50

practical, right? And they've got Wikibon as well. They've got their own Wikibon anymore, but they've got their own analyst as well that they can go, Okay, what do you know for an opinion about

Chris Ulbrich: 19:58

that's true, they will. Will often tap an analyst, yeah, and sometimes you'll get followers. But just to say that all is not lost. If you have a reporter under embargo and they don't publish right at embargo time, I'd say that's increasingly common. You do see stories come out days even after the news. It's really rare now for anyone to treat product news as news that loses value dramatically, like within hours. Yeah, that used to be the case where, if someone scooped product news, oh my god, I can't believe this was even true. It just seems like another universe. Yeah, you'd have a green tech company and the green tech beat reporter, where there was such a thing at a tech news site, if they didn't have the news within a half an hour of it coming out, they would say, oh, old news. Not I have scoops to break now, and there's a lot less of an emphasis on breaking product news. I can't really think of anyone who's that wound up about it that said, if you're dealing with a kind of reporter who's working days ahead and needs advance notice, you're not going to get them by pitching them day of so there's a whole group of publications that there's no real point in pre pitching them. They don't take news under embargo, or it doesn't really matter to them, they just dribble out the news like three, four days, sometimes a week after in roundups or in light press release rewrites. It's a volume game for them, and so they're not trying to be first out of the gate for whatever business reasons that makes sense for their publication. It's just not a factor for them. So the lead time for product coverage, I would say, has grown quite a bit. It used to be that most of your hits would come within 24 hours. I don't think that's true anymore. I think it's more like you see coverage come out over a week and then it tails off.

Morgan McLintic: 21:59

Yeah. So the picture is there are fewer reporters covering this in detail. You need to give them more time. We need to be pitching this a week before it comes out. And then once you're pitching, changing the date, particularly if you're going after a multiple is really, you know, not, product news isn't normally an exclusive, but it can be is hard. Sometimes those features are moving right up to the final, the final piece. So you do need to have some discipline around this. And then the news on the day is not necessarily, you know, your emails are going to fire, your blog post goes up all that, because the news isn't necessarily going to drop at that time. And just coordinating that, it's a little bit I

Chris Ulbrich: 22:38

should also note, there is a scenario that we haven't discussed. It's a fairly rare scenario, but it's worth noting that sometimes you've been working with a reporter on a corporate profile. This is the dream, right? And you have a pretty substantial story about the company a reporter going but the reporter just needs some news, and so once in a while, you will see Top Tier Business reporters cover a startup that's of interest to them, and the hook for the story is a product announcement, which you absolutely know they would never have covered. It would never have risen to the level of importance for them to cover on the basis of the announcement itself. It's just an excuse, but it's just worth noting that product news, like almost any conform, can serve as a form of corporate news if you have laid the groundwork properly. So it can be the trigger for a corporate story, but it's fairly rare, but it doesn't you're going

Morgan McLintic: 23:39

to know that you're working with that reporter, and you're looking for a hook on you, and the product news could be the hook. And so, yeah, you do read those, you're like, why is this tiny feature? And often it's quickly covered, and you're into the rest of the profile. Let's talk about product reviews. There was a time where, you know, like, I was working on a firewall company. They're called watch guard. I think still around product, reviews was the mainstay of what we did. We had reviewers guides. We had this was a hardware product at the time. We had to make sure it was delivered. There was a technical call with the SC to make sure it's all set up. We had to make sure. We had to pre vet the lab to make sure did they have the right data set to be able to test this thing correctly because they wanted the testing protocol to be advantageous, or at least not incorrect. It was a whole thing. In fact, it was most of the campaign was making sure you're getting those five star zd, net info, world labs reviews, and if you didn't get five stars, it was this was bad, but now, like, product reviews, are they even a thing? I know they are in consumer, but in B to B Tech, I have a database I have, like, yeah.

Chris Ulbrich: 24:53

So I think continuing the theme that we started with, I think that product. Reviews in the B to B world have mainly migrated to AI on the one hand and user generated yes content on the other hand. Platforms like YouTube and especially in niche industries, user generated content, sometimes of very dubious quality, can inform the AI assessments of the top players in an industry. But I think something analogous to what's happening, it's been true in consumer for a long time is now true in business. I just recently hired someone to unclog my sink, and think the way I did it was pretty much the way that most people do that now, which is I went to Yelp, I look through the four or five top five star reviews like I figure that I'm not going to go wrong here. No by by picking these top five, I scroll down past the obviously sponsored stuff, right? Like the obviously for pay, and then I get to something that I have some faith has real opinion behind it, even though I do know it can be gamed and I'm busy now, I understand that buying a data platform is a more involved process than hiring a plumber, but that said, I do suspect, based on conversations with clients, that big decisions are being made in not that much more time based on what an AI spits back as the top five players in an industry, and what is the AI relying on? It's relying on sometimes dubious Yelp like lists of user generated content, easily manipulated content that the AI isn't great at sorting out. Fact function there, and I think that the day of the trusted security lab, the trusted expert, I missed that day, not I like I have a professional interest in it, because it meant it was someone you could pitch, but, and I do think you got more value out of that as a reader, as a user, I think that The value of recommendations has gone down, but the reality of the world we live in is that the business of aggregating product reviews just doesn't play anymore, because it can't compete with AI. First user generated content kicked one strut out from that model, and now AI has kicked the other strut out. As you say, in consumer there are still subscription sites like wire cutter that are authoritative. I mean, look, I am not as a New York Times subscriber with a wire cutter subscription. I'm kind of embarrassed to admit how much wire cutter cutter runs my life, because, similar to what I described before, if I need to buy something and I want the best version of it, or, like, a really good version of it, but I don't particularly care that much about the thing itself. I just want to be sure that I'm getting a good version of whatever I buy. I will just buy the top wire cutter thing. I'm not sure it's going to be the best, but it's going to be good enough. It's going to be among the best. I'm pretty confident, because I know how they do, they're like, they have a pretty rigorous review process, and I trust that it's not, it's not fake, it's anyway. I think that we are just sort of living in a moment where there's going to be a in a sort of an elite rear guard holding on in certain industries, and especially in consumer for a niche audience, but in the mass audience, whether it's B to B or B to C, we're living in a world of AI recommendations. Okay, just

Morgan McLintic: 28:27

as we wrap here, Chris, let's just cover mistakes that companies will make when announcing a product.

Chris Ulbrich: 28:34

What do you think? I think we've touched on these over the course of the episode, but the number one mistake is not giving yourself enough time to pitch, and that is surprisingly common. In fact, reporters, I've had reporters say, Look, I know how these things go. Companies of this prestige and size, they don't start pitching announcements three days before they come out. You must not have contacted me as soon as you had the news. I must not have been your first choice, like they imagine,

Morgan McLintic: 29:03

they think they're down on the list, and they're like, right wave of invites to the party, exactly.

Chris Ulbrich: 29:08

And I said you would be shocked, right? Because a lot of companies are just sort of fiddling with their news, and it's especially tempting since the SAS era, because you can fiddle with the end out with that. It's not like you're burning a CD or something. So it's not like you've gone gold and everything is locked down. And so fiddling with the news up to you're messing with the messaging, you're messing with what's in the news, and until that's locked it's difficult. You're the PR team is kind of paralyzed, so just get your stuff in order and give your team at least a week to pitch. And then related is making sure that you have to find a meaningful theme for any announcement that you think is important. Of course, there are different levels of significance and importance, and sometimes you are going to just be shoving a grab bag of features out the door and you can. Expect from that minimal like reprint style press release, reprint style coverage, you might still see value in doing it for like, the tactical reasons that we've discussed before, but for any announcement that's important to you, you need to do the work ahead of time of defining a message, defining a theme for the announcement, figuring out what's important, what's most meaningful for the reporters you want to target, and then coming back to the first one, making sure that the team has enough time to pitch. You want

Morgan McLintic: 30:29

to move fast, but you want to be effective, and so allowing that time for the reporters who are very busy, so that you can actually get to the result that you wanted to get to is really important, because otherwise you're just moving fast, but you're not getting the outcome that you want. All right, Chris, that feels like a great note to end on. Thanks for your time discussing that today, and thank you all for listening. If you like that. We would love it if you would like or subscribe to us. And you can also sign up to our newsletter at firebrand dot marketing, and we will see you all again next time you.