AMA: GitLab Vice President of Product Marketing, Dave Steer on Go-to-Market Strategy

Product Marketers should, as they say, measure what matters...and what matters is heavily dependent on the stage of the business and product. If you are earlier stage, focus on assessing whether the problem your product is solving is real and important. Good metrics for this stage: Funnel conversion, win rate, marketing tactical effectiveness (traffic, leads). For later stage, your GTM strategy should be measured by more sophisticated indicators, such as pipeline coverage, deal velocity, net exp ...Read More

Operationalizing a go-to-market strategy is not for the faint of heart. There’s a lot that happens between writing the doc (see narrative above) or slides and executing the strategy in the market. Here’s my list of the riskiest elements and how I solve for them. First, team alignment. In my experience, aligning the team is the trickiest element because the amount of stakeholder voices expands seemingly exponentially the closer you are to launching your GTM activities. This is just as true for th ...Read More

Part of what makes Product Marketing such an exciting (and sometimes complicated) function is that it can have a wide array of capabilities. The exact capabilities will vary by team and company size, as well as the stage of the company and the business, product, and GTM strategy.  Still, I’ve found it helpful to have a foundational set of capabilities that I build product marketing teams towards. On my team, we talk about the fact that we don’t expect everyone to be expert in all of these capabi ...Read More

This is such an important question since, especially for product marketers, we can find ourselves adopting a tactical cookie-cutter approach, making our marketing bland. Blech. Yes, checklists aligned with tiered products are important in creating a consistent, repeatable workflow (imagine the chaos without them). Still, while checklists provide order, they can also drain the creativity out of marketing and hamper our ability to tell compelling stories. With all of that aside, I do think there a ...Read More

Great question - you'll see the answer is some of the my other answers. I'll add a few other steps here: First, be intentional about the core working group. Go-to-market can be vast, so it's important that you have key functions (sales, customer success, marketing, revenue operations, and more) represented.  Second, align the team on the stage of the business. Sangram Varje and Bryan Brown recently published MOVE: The 4 Question Go-To-Market Framework which offers a maturity assessment of where ...Read More

I believe that market insights are the #1 core product marketing capability. Literally everything – from positioning and messaging to the products and capabilities you deliver to the market – flows from insights that you generate via smart, well-run market research. I’ve worked on dozens of products at every stage of maturity and, while most of these can be applied horizontally across several industries, it has been helpful to leverage market research to identify which verticals to target and ho ...Read More

There are, of course, several elements so I’m just going to touch on the foundational pieces that product marketers must have in place. But before I do, I have one pro-tip: develop your GTM framework as a narrative. I've found that the activity of writing it out in narrative form helps to create clarity of thought and to socialize it with stakeholders so that everyone can contribute. This narrative should include: Market adoption stage – Your goal is to understand where you are in the classic te ...Read More

Ah, the elusive product-market fit…what Mark Andreesen once called ‘the only thing that matters’. Broadly, there are two components that I look at: a defined and interesting market with a clear problem to be solved; and a capability (or product) that meets the need in the market. With this in mind, the first metrics I look at are associated with the market. These metrics include Total Addressable Market – TAM, for short – and the competitive landscape. I find these two areas are good proxies tha ...Read More

A colleague once told me that Product Marketing is a team sport. I couldn't agree more, and gaining alignment and getting buy-in with stakeholders is a critical success factor in the role. The questioner asks about senior stakeholders, but I think it’s important for product marketers to think about all stakeholders, regardless of the level or title. The first -- and most important -- part of buy-in is listening. Great product marketing leaders listen very well. If I’m starting in a new role or b ...Read More

Let me start by saying this: I’m hiring! Check out the GitLab careers page or HMU directly. When I’m hiring a product marketer, I’m looking for a set of experiences that will add to the capabilities of the team – see my answer on capabilities – so the specifics are highly dependent on the context of the team and the company. For some roles, I look for domain experience since the team is trying to accelerate its understanding and entry into a specific category. For others, I’m looking for more ge ...Read More