AMA: Cortex Head of Product Marketing, Lauren Craigie on Go-To-Market Strategy

My first advice here is to not accept an interview if you’re being asked to create a full GTM plan for a product they actually plan to ship :) But aside from that, I think the best way to start is by asking a few key questions you should already be asking in the normal interview process. In my opinion it’s the questions alone that PMMs ask that helps me decide whether they’d be the right fit. Some examples of what you could ask prior to getting started on the assignment: Describe your ICP for th ...Read More

A few things come to mind— You get the audience wrong. You’ve built something you think will be useful, but your marketing and messaging isn’t tailored to the right audience, so adoption wanes. You get the pricing wrong. I think every pricing change will feel like you’ve gotten it “wrong” because you’ll hear the loudest feedback from what may be a minority of your buyers. But if you haven’t tested your pricing in smaller groups or done adequate interviews to get the packaging, model, price point ...Read More

I think it’s less important to worry about consensus seeking on every step (there should be dozens for every launch regardless of size), and most important to align on 1) what constitutes a really big launch, a medium launch, and a small launch 2) align on roles that you hope/expect your peers in product, sales, marketing, and engineering to assume 3) align on the understanding that launch planning is significantly more than just the launch blog—that it includes PMMs involvement in research befo ...Read More

If there’s alignment on the ICP you’ve helped codify — alignment both where you win today and where you want to win tomorrow — it’s significantly easier to influence product roadmap. But there’s two ways to think about this: 1) advocate for the problem to be solved 2) advocate for the solution to a known problem If you have an established product management function #1 tends to be the fastest route to action. PMs always need help collecting data about the market and users, and PMM should be doin ...Read More

Good question—there’s always some grey area on lines of responsibility so I’ll add which other teams might own/participate in each phase: Research: can be owned by or with the UX and PM teams but should include user research, jobs to be done, alternatives for your solution, and language used PRD (product requirements doc): owned by the PM but the PMM can help contribute problem and solution framing. This is what I treat as gospel for exactly what the engineering team will commit to building, by ...Read More

Everything comes back to the launch tiering for me. T1-T3. In a nutshell: T1 is revenue-generating or new market opening — you should have a landing page on the website, pricing and packaging, and a long-tail content strategy T2 is usage/adoption or competitive win rate increasing — you may not need pricing/packaging or a landing page but should have a plan to talk about this feature again in all of your go-forward content T3 is user experience improvement or churn reduction — you need customer ...Read More

What a cool question! And project for you to undertake! I think the good news is that if your market research, audience focus, and messaging framework were as robust as you’d hope, you don’t need to think too hard about refactoring core positioning. So I would refocus your effort into three (sizeable) categories, ordered by time needed to execute: 1) Pricing/packaging: If you’re moving one of your products to self-service there’s significant infrastructure that will likely need to be considered ...Read More

I want to answer this one because I think it’s important to take note of the framing :) The marketing team shouldn’t have to be “convinced” after you’ve already created a plan. They should be aware of/excited about your launches well ahead of that. Sit down with the team and do quarterly or monthly campaign planning centered on expansive stories where your launch can be a key pillar holding up a lot of their own efforts. If the launch isn’t big enough to influence their plans, that’s okay! It mi ...Read More