21/30: Understanding Marketing & GTM Strategy
The product equivalent of a smooth landing is a great go-to-market strategy. Let’s unwrap this gift that keeps on giving.
Product management and marketing are the best of friends.
We’re both obsessed with our customers and target audience, we try to understand our market and competitive segments, and a large part of our work is crafting the narrative that brings our solution closer to those whose needs it addresses.
This is strategic work accompanied by a lot of tactics that translate our work to our customers — also known as go-to-market strategy.
This can mean launching a new product, expanding the scope of an existing product, or launching the product in new geographies.
And as any strategy, it’s a series of calculated bets that are driven by a centralizing idea about how to make the product succeed.
Developing the bets and tactics of a GTM strategy is not only the responsibility of marketing and the commercial side of the org, but also product — at least in healthy environments where departments move in the same direction.
As a product manager (and especially as product leader), you’ll find yourself working on:
How to price the product and/or features
How to position the product in your market
How to package, distribute, and sell the product
What channels to offer the product on
How to determine return-on-investment for all of the above activities
So start getting comfortable with these concepts. Because boy oh boy are you gonna need ‘em!