AMA: Etsy Director of Product Marketing, Seller Services, Madison Kiani on Go-To-Market Strategy

Check out my GTM strategy framework here and linked within this AMA page - it has a bunch of questions and steps I use with my team to prep a GTM. Generally though, here a few questions I believe are important to answer or have confidence in: What problem or pain point is your customer feeling today? What can you offer to solve this problem and how does solving it further support your business strategy? What user research or competitive insights do you have that support your solution? What are t ...Read More

Check out my GTM strategy framework here and linked within this AMA page - it has a bunch of questions and steps I use with my team to prep a GTM. Generally though, here a few questions I believe are important to answer or have confidence in: What problem or pain point is your customer feeling today? What can you offer to solve this problem and how does solving it further support your business strategy? What user research or competitive insights do you have that support your solution? What are t ...Read More

Good questions! First, I like to think about tiering GTMs based on size of impact, complexity, and target audience. Based on that, I typically group GTMs into three categories: Tier 1: Large, critical updates: These are tools or policy changes that are fundamental to using Etsy, impact all sellers, or address legal/compliance requirements. For these types of launches, we leverage pretty much every communication channel that we have: Seller Handbook, Help Center, email campaigns, in-product messa ...Read More

My team is the bridge connecting product, marketing, support, and many other functions. This means cross-functional collaboration is so important, though it definitely comes with its own unique challenges. Here are a few I’ve felt in the past and how I've worked with my team to address them: There have been times when my team was brought in too late in the product development process. This resulted in our messages not quite landing right with sellers, and missing the chance to help shape the pro ...Read More

This is always a tough one to balance, but it's super important for the customer experience. Since Etsy is a global marketplace, we're always thinking about how to design tools and experiences that truly meet the needs of both our sellers and buyers globally. When you're planning a GTM strategy with a global audience in mind, consider: Does your product have unique benefits or limitations for customers by location or region? It's really important to lay these out upfront for internal alignment a ...Read More

My team’s mission is to empower sellers to succeed by building their trust in Etsy, encouraging them to use our resources, and ultimately helping their shops grow. So, when we measure our impact, it all comes back to how well we're enabling that. We look at: Adoption of seller tools/features: Are sellers actually using the tools and features we're launching? And are they sticking with them? Etsy revenue: This includes revenue from services Etsy provides to sellers, as well as the growth in their ...Read More

This is something my team thinks about all the time! We can't always perfectly time our product launches (due to internal readiness and/or other external factors that come up) but we really try our best to group launches when it makes sense. This also lets us tell a bigger story to our customers about how Etsy is investing in the selling experience and the marketplace as a whole, which is much harder to do when we're just communicating one-off launches. When thinking about how to combine differe ...Read More

Great question! A lot of times, Product Marketers are trying to figure out how to bundle or talk about multiple products and features together to tell a bigger story. But there are definitely times when it's more impactful to focus on just one product or feature. Here are a few ways to do that: If a specific product or feature really resonates with a particular subgroup of your customers, think about segmenting messaging for them that highlights the specific feature as the main value prop. If th ...Read More