AMA: LinkedIn Director of Product Marketing, Andrew Kaplan on Go-To-Market Strategy

It sounds like by “GTM readiness” the questioner might mean “marketing launch readiness”, so I’ll answer within that framing. I touch on this in another answer, but briefly, there are two aspects of GTM or marketing launch readiness: deciding whether your product should be a Go for launch at all, and then ensuring your day-of launch “run of show” is all set. WHETHER TO LAUNCH… The first aspect is all about whether you should launch at this time. To know that, you need to know if your product has ...Read More

If I had minimal resources and needed to focus on basically one thing as a startup PMM, it would be to conduct a needs-based analysis of my prospective customers' "jobs to be done". I would conduct this analysis this by speaking with as many potential customers as possible to understand their problems, pain points, hopes/aspirations -- as well as what competing products they're currently using to address all of those. I would design this exercise as a series of guided/structured interviews and, ...Read More

Persuading PM to fund a specific product idea requires triangulating across a few types of data: Customer feedback: How many customers have requested this feature or capability? Aggregate these customers by name, size of prize/budget, sales tier or segment, etc. Including qualitative feedback -- like customer quotes from surveys, interviews or focus groups -- goes a long way too. A great Voice of Customer approach blends quantitative (i.e.: survey- and dollar-based analyses) with powerful verbat ...Read More

Regarding GTM tiering... We have three tiers for our GTMs. Tier 1 is generally reserved for the products that have the most commercial/revenue upside and/or the greatest customer impact or change quotient. Generally speaking, our business launches 3-5 Tier 1s per year. In any given quarter, we might be working on one Tier 1 launch, one Tier 1 new-product pilot or test, and a couple Tier 1 new-product market validations. Tiers 2 and 3 are medium- and small-size in terms of commercial upside and c ...Read More

It's always difficult to manage and prioritize your time as a PMM with the R&D org wanting to launch so many things! In the LinkedIn Ads business, we have a PMM team of 20+. But our PM and Eng orgs are so massive that we still find it challenging to allocate our limited resources effectively across GTM! Here's what we tend to do... We do planning cycles twice a year, or once each half. We sit down with PM and identify all the things they want to build and launch in that half. We agree on a p ...Read More

This is an excellent question! Tbh, we are still experimenting with using AI as a tool to streamline and power our GTMs, and we probably don't have all the answers. So far, we are most interested in feeding all our various customer learnings, market research, competitive intel, and industry research into an LLM that we can query to pull up customer and market insights/trends/analyses on the fly using natural language prompts. The biggest advantage of such a tool would probably be to help us spot ...Read More

PMM normally owns the overarching messaging and positioning. We crystallize the core positioning for each product in a single doc that... Frames our overarching value prop or promise, Adds on our supporting benefit statements mapped to specific product capabilities, Provides data-driven proof-points or reasons to believe, Lists ~3 common customer use cases for the product, Cites 2-3 customer success stories, Clarifies our target customer segment(s) for this product We provide this doc to every M ...Read More

If by "building blocks" we mean the main stages or elements of a successful GTM, here are some of the most important I like to think about. (I should note that I am a B2B PMM so my answers are framed as such.) Identify: What is the customer problem you're trying to solve? How large is the market opportunity? What share of that market can you realistically capture? Validation: Leveraging "voice of customer" interviews, surveys, competitive intel, UX design walk-throughs, etc., validate that your ...Read More