Go-To-Market Basics - Introducing a New Feature to the World
As a product manager, what do I need to think about when releasing a new feature/product, so I can make sure its maximally successfully.
2 weeks ago, I learned my biggest Q1 deliverable was queued up to be deployed to production.
The problem - it was 2 quarters later than we initially forecasted. 😮💨
The reason - this was a major effort that passed through multiple technical teams. It required some brand-new engineering infrastructure to deliver. It also featured a major data science wrangling and modeling.
The entire value proposition of the deliverable hinged on delivering specific data points, calculated in real-time, to enable performance measurement of our core business.
It was huge deliverable focused on measurement. As such, it required a full Go-To-Market effort around contextualizing the problem to anyone relevant to what exactly we delivered, and why it mattered to them.
Go-to-Market activities are an interesting beast. Get to a large enough organization, and you’ll encounter dedicated product marketing teams who carry the burden and (hopefully) organize everyone you need to deliver on your behalf and own preparation on all marketing materials.
At a startup, if you ain’t driving the Go-To-Market, you’re not getting to market. 😝
My company, a startup, has reached the point where we’re hiring our first dedicated product marketing resource. Until that happens, unfortunately, all the assistance I have at my disposal lacks the technical grounding to meaningfully help with a data-heavy deliverable.
This was too big to fail release1. I, therefore, took the burden upon myself to prepare the Go-To-Market to assure success.
Thank god I did!
As I went through my go-to-market checklist, I found a major gap in our impact analysis, one that could lose the entire issue confidence of our sales team.
To compound the stakes, our CEO has the most oversight over sales - and just OK’d the budget for me to triple the size of my team. Any sales team roll-out would have to involve them.
Solving my issues required the full attention of me and a data scientist - so I wrote up the tickets and we got to work.
In doing so, we found a new narrative in the data that justified why I need more resources - turning a harry situation into an even bigger win.
Here’s how
Go-To-Market in a Nutshell
I define Go-To-Market as everything that happens between successfully deploying something to production and getting the new feature or product into the hands of users who will find it valuable.
This encompasses educational documentation, webinars, email blasts to existing clients, marketing campaigns to new clients, industry interviews with prominent publications, In-App messaging highlighting what is new, internal team education, beta cohort development and deployment, paid advertising, and beyond!
There is no shortage of what can be defined as “Go-To-Market”(GTM).
To make things simple, every GTM generally addresses one of the following 3 buckets.
How will this affect our internal teams
How will this affect our clients
How will this affect our position in the marketplace (Your company and its competitors)
Figuring out the impact on each bucket is what will dictate the specific GTM strategy of the new feature/product at hand. Once defined, going to market starts with the education and onboarding of each cohort.
PROGRAMMING BREAK
The rest of this article is for paid subscribers only, where I use a real example from my day-to-day of onboarding my internal teams to this quarter’s flagship new data science offering.
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