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

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, if possible, observe or embed myself with customers for a period of time (say, a day or two) to study how they actually "hire" for their job to be done today (consider this an ethnographic approach to customer development). Finally, if I'm a B2B PMM, I would recognize that I am not marketing to a single customer but, in all likelihood, a group of potential buyers. So I would conduct my JTBD interviews/observations across multiple members of the group; for example, the likely functional user of my product, the person who can champion my product internally, the person who controls the budget, etc. If I had additional time and budget, I'd supplement my qualitative interviews with a survey-based approach to quantify my JTBD customer learnings and create more rigorous needs-based segmentation. For background on JTBD... As I understand it, the JTBD framework was invented by consulting leader Tony Ulwick and further developed and popularized by late Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, author of the book "The Innovator's Dilemma". What sets JTBD apart from traditional product-development research approaches is it begins by focusing on problems to solve rather than features to build. In that regard, it is solutions-agnostic and customer-centric. In fact, JTBD analyses don't necessary involve "validating" any specific product or feature idea! The idea is to let customer needs guide your product development, rather than allow your biases about what you think you should build preempt your deeper understanding of the market/customer. Here is a resource that offers an overview of how to do JTBD analyses: https://athenno.com/insights/jtbd-analysis-what-is-it-and-how-to-do-it

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... 1. 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. 2. We agree on a prioritization framework for everything we want to Validate (new-product ideas we need to vet before funding or building), Test (limited pilots of new products PMM will run w/ a smaller group of customers), Launch (what new products will PMM bring to market this half?) and Scale (what existing products will we prioritize for customer adoption and growth? 3. We reflect the priorities of all initiatives described above with a 3-Tier system applied across Validate, Test, Launch and Grow. Tier 1 (or T1) initiatives get the most PMM time, resourcing and bespoke treatment. T2 use more templated, light-touch, or "bundled" treatments with some (but not much) custom PMM work. T3 are mostly hands-off when it comes to PMM involvement and use entirely templated approaches. For T3, we even ask the PM team to self-serve sometimes, like submitting their own blurbs about a new T3 feature into our internal biweekly sales newsletter. In general, we limit ourselves to ~5 T1 product launches per year. (Again, we have over 20 PMMs on our squad.) Why Tier your GTMs? * Your resources our limited. You need to allocate your PMM time, budget, and focus towards the launches that matter most. You must prioritize! * You need to focus your messaging to the market and your sales org, lest you lose their attention and create too much noise. If you try to launch, like, 10 T1 products with a ton of fanfare, your messages will start cannibalizing one another. Each customer segment/persona can probably only focus on a couple messages from your company each quarter. In a separate question in this AMA, I describe a bit about the differences in the level of PMM support each GTM launch tier receives.

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 patterns and insights that can shape our product recommendations to the R&D org. What should we build next? What problems are customers telling us they have, and which should we problems should we try to address or at least investigate further?

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 hit its success criteria, or exit criteria to go from beta to full launch (sometimes called “general availability” or GA). In our business, our head of marketing decides if a product is truly market- (or launch-) ready. How do you know if it is? It’s all about whether you’ve hit your success criteria that PMM, Product, Product Ops, and maybe even Sales have previously aligned on. These criteria can include a handful of customer- and business-relevant targets. Ideally you use a mix of survey-based or quantitative approaches like a scorecard to track progress against these criteria, alongside qualitative customer and rep feedback you gather from interviews with pilot testers. Some success or exit criteria examples: * Customer readiness … Are your customers finding measurable (ideally quantifiable) value in the new product during testing? For example, in LinkedIn Ads, we typically track some metric tied to advertiser/customer ROI or advertiser productivity as our true north. Or, what’s the CSAT or NPS for the new product (as measured during beta) compared to your goal? * Product readiness … have we taken care of all critical bugs? Have we built must-have or critical features that pilot customers confirmed they need to use the product successfully in GA? * Marketing readiness … Do you have 2-3 customers who will go on record to provide testimonials? Do you have your required number of case studies? Does your Comms team have a couple of press placements lined up? * Sales readiness: has Sales completed the trainings and indicated (ie: via a test or quiz) that they understand how to pitch to and support customers? Has Sales’s most important product feature feedback been acted on or at least scheduled for future evaluation or assessment? I’m not saying the criteria above are always the right ones. They’re just examples. LAUNCH “RUN OF SHOW” Ok, so assuming your product is a Go for launch, another main component to GTM readiness is your “run of show”, which is essentially your launch day checklist of all the content that needs to go live, the emails that need to go out to the market, the press embargo that gets lifted, the webpage that needs to light up, the product that needs to officially ramp to all users or customers, etc, etc — at specific times with specific individual owners responsible for each step of the launch. One final twist: Sometimes you can release a product to customers and schedule the big marketing launch moment for a later date. Why would you do this? If your company schedules one predictable marketing moment each quarter where you announce all your big launches all at once — a strategy that has the advantage of capturing more mindshare in market — then you might ramp the product a few weeks or so before your big launch day. Marketing launch and product release don’t have to be simultaneous, and my view is you don’t want marketing’s GTM calendar to hold back a great product from customer use (assuming the product is clearly delivering customer value in your beta and is truly ready for general availability).

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 idea has product-market fit, assess willingness to pay, and begin to do some customer discovery where you narrow down who your target customer(s) might be (if your product is B2B, note that your target customer is likely a buyer group of several people within a company, not a single person. If B2B, validation is also useful to learn the buying process or journey to make sure you know how you will need to do business with your customers for this specific product.) * Test: Run a limited pilot of your new product with a group of your prospective target customers, ensuring diversity across traits like geography if you're planning to go to market globally. For testing, your goal is to ensure the product is market ready by hitting certain "exit criteria" to move from test to launch. These criteria should be oriented around customer value as well as demand/commercial upside. Try to limit yourself to three. Testing can also be a chance to presell to secure/forecast initial demand, validate your core messaging and positioning, generate proof points you can cite in your launch materials as "reasons to buy" or "reasons to believe", and line up a few reference customers or case studies for big release. * Launch: As a B2B PMM, I tend to think of launch in terms of internal, external, and partners. First, though, the most important step you can take as a PMM is to create a single source of truth for your product positioning and messaging, and the overarching narrative you want to tell about this product. The various marketing, sales, support and partner teams who will support your launch and create content for it will use this SoT to guide all of the assets they create, ensuring consistent messaging points, voice/tone, etc. * Internal mostly focuses on enabling and equipping your sales org and customer support teams on the product (how to pitch, best practices, objection handling, competitive selling, product use cases, etc.). * External should focus on driving awareness, consideration, and demand. Channels and tactics can range from PR, blog, web, content and organic social at the top of the funnel; to events, case studies, paid demand gen, eBooks, webinars, and email marketing toward the middle/bottom. (And more; this list is just a sample). Each channel and tactic should serve a purpose and have a quantifiable target or goal. This means you don't necessarily have to include every one of these items in your GTM. Be strategic, and include/exclude certain tactics based on level of expected impact and feasibility. * Partners are often essential to reach your customer and can help you co-market and co-sell, so I always think of them as their own GTM channel. * The big launch day: While your launch plan articulates your GTM strategy, for the big launch day itself, it's helpful to have a "run of show" checklist that line by line says what each cross-functional member of your launch team is supposed to do at specific times. For example, "Person A schedules our launch blog post to go live at 6am EDT", "Person B schedules customer launch email for 7:00am EDT", etc. As your launch tiger team completes each task, check it off your list. * Scale: Launching is only part of the battle. How will you grow adoption of your product in the months post-launch? What sales targets and customer-value goals are you trying to deliver on? Are you on track to hit them? (If not, how can you improve your marketing plan or the product itself to hit your goals?). Often, scaling a product means REPEATING THE GTM CYCLE AGAIN, starting with validation. For example, if adoption is starting to plateau, you may need to do more customer discovery to figure out why demand is decelerating, if there are unmet customer needs you should account for in future product enhancements, if your sales org needs some additional proof points or cases studies to fill the opportunity pipeline, etc.

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 customer impact, respectively. There might be about 3-5 T2 launches per quarter. Our team reserves the bulk of our GTM resourcing and bandwidth for T1s. These launches have the most custom or bespoke GTM treatments and often mobilize the vastest cross-functional marketing resources (i.e.: web, customer marketing, growth/demand gen, events, content & social, PR). By contrast, Tier 2 GTMs are bundled together in a single quarterly moment and might share the spotlight together in a joint launch blog post, combined customer launch email, etc. They might be featured in an event but wouldn't be the "hero" product per se. They might not get their own pitch deck but would get a callout in an existing solutions-oriented sales deck, for example. Tier 3 launches generally receive little marketing support save for an update to our Help Center and maybe a mention in an internal product FAQ used by our sales org. This is not only due to their lower level of individual impact; it's also because the best way to drive awareness and adoption of smaller point-solution features is, in my experience, via in-product notifs, alerts and nudges, rather than traditional marketing channels and tactics.

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 verbatims. PMM often collects these insights, but we also partner with Product Ops (who tracks customer-submitted support tickets) and Market Research (which conducts twice-yearly at-scale C-SAT surveys across our entire business line). * Rep feedback: How many asks from the Field have we gotten for this product idea? Tally it up, try to map these asks back to incremental budget we could unlock by introducing this feature. Keep in mind, reps’ estimates of how much additional spend they could win if the had Product X are often rough guesses. * Competitive or market intel: What are our competitors doing in this space? Are we lagging them? If we built Feature XYZ, how could we not only achieve parity, but how could we leapfrog them or further differentiate ourselves? That said: Your job as a PMM does not have to be to tell PM what to build. As a PMM, one of the best things you can do is to help your Product partners understand what PROBLEMS your customers are facing. If you frame your insights in terms of customer problems to address, and prioritize those based on need or size of opportunity, THEN you can more successfully guide your PM partners toward the right product solutions. In other words, lead with the top customer problems of Jobs To Be Done that you think your PM should be addressing, ranked by size of opportunity or customer need/pain. Then focus on the WHAT to build. One final thought, something we are thinking of doing more of on my team: Get a select group of test customers in strategic segments to pre-commit $X in incremental spend to test a new product you want to build. Pre-commitments can demonstrate pent-up demand to PM and shape their roadmap decision-making and funding choices. Obviously you should align with PM before making this offer to customers so you don't make a promise to clients that you can't fulfill.

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 Marketing team (external and internal) that we work with on a GTM so they can leverage it to start creating content that reflects our core messaging. PMM might not write every piece of copy that ends up in a customer email, webpage, or ebook, but we will typically review these assets that other teams make to ensure each one reflects our positioning consistently. Sometimes this exercise requires us to "train" our x-functional marketing partners on our new product so they can truly internalize our core positioning and how our product operates/delivers on that positioning. To facilitate, PMM will sometimes create a "getting started guide" for a big new product that contains our positioning, dives into how the product works, expands on its benefits and use cases, etc. This guide is a great internal education resources for Marketing and Sales. (It can even serve as the foundation for future collateral.)