Day 21/30: Understanding Marketing and go-to-market (GTM) strategy 🚀
It's not only about what you bring to the table; it's also about how you serve the table 🍽️
I’ll be upfront—go-to-market is probably one of the aspects of product management where I feel like I have the most to learn, so bear with me.
I’ll describe the ideal value of the relationship between the Marketing and Product Management functions by means of an analogy to evaluating an individual’s competency based on two main aspects:
Their actual competency level, and
Their competency level that the external world perceives
Tying this back to the Marketing and Product Management relationship:
Product Management brings the actual capabilities that actually solves customers’ problems, and
Marketing helps the external world better understand how the product can solve a target audience’s problems, which includes how the product is the best solution compared with alternatives (including leaving the problem unaddressed)
Thus, both functions play important roles in go-to-market, which I think of as:
Everything that needs to happen leading up to, while, and after we shout to some targeted subset of the world, “This is what we can provide to you. Here is why you should care—come talk with us!”
Here are some situations that come to mind when critically thinking through go-to-market strategy is particularly crucial:
Launching a new product;
Enabling an existing product to support new use cases to expand the breadth of its existing target audience;
Launching a new product stock-keeping unit (SKU);
Launching the product in a new geographic region;
Launching a new product that your company believes redraws the lines in the wider industry.
As a product manager, you’ll find yourself involved in conversations about these topics—if not contributing to them:
Pricing and packaging of products, services, and features;
Positioning the product to your target audience. This entails:
Who to target and what attributes these subsets of the overall population have
What unique attributes does the product have that alternative solutions don’t, and why prospects should care
Distributing the product;
Selling the product; and
Measuring success for all these activities, so you can continuously iterate.
It takes a team to bring a product to market, so hop on it now with your teammates!