Dave Steer

I love this question because it widens the aperture from product launch to go-to-market plan. The product launch is an important part of the go-to-market plan, but the launch only represents one (really important) point in time. I like to think of the product launch as the rocket booster that you need to get your message to the marketplace. Before I share my blueprint, I have an important PSA for product marketers: product availability is not the same thing as product launch. Product availability is when the product is functional (as defined by the product requirements doc) and can be used by customers; product launch, on the other hand, is when you’ve executed your marketing launch plan to meet your business and marketing objective. Product managers and product markets confuse the two at their own peril as it can lead to extraordinary stress and, more importantly, missed opportunities to tell a big, compelling story to the market. The blueprint I use for go-to-market planning is straightforward: 1- Audience - Identify the target audience(s) and included all of the insights you have about them, 2- Problems & Job to be Done - Articulate the problems that the product solves, 3- Positioning & Messaging - Craft a positioning and messaging strategy that will resonate with the target audience based on the problem statement above, and 4- Creative & Channel - Show the creative concepts and channels you will leverage to break through the noise in the marketplace so that the target audience is inspired and acts on your message. 5- Execution - The last part of the blueprint is vital: as the product marketer, your job is to ensure that all of your customer-facing teams -- from marketing to sales to communications to EVERYONE -- are rowing in the same direction. You are the conductor of this orchestrated set of events, so make sure that you’ve articulated how, operationally, this will be done in the go-to-market plan. It sounds simple, but the details of each of these elements is what separates a meh Go-to-Market plan from a great Go-to-Market plan.

My team and I use a Message House framework that covers the following elements: * Solution/Product Naming * Tagline * Positioning Statement * Short and Long Descriptions For the Positioning Strategy, we use a modified version of April Dunford's Obviously Awesome positioning canvas. The canvas, we have found, invites us to be more critical and thorough in our positioning strategy. It includes: * Competitive Alternatives * Unique Attributes * Value * Who Cares A Lot We inform the messaging framework with the positioning canvas, filling in the following elements: * Target audience (personas, ICP) * Unifying message * Pain Points (up to 3) * Solutions (up to 3) * Key messages (up to 3) * Competitive differentiators * Proof points/Customer references It can be quite comprehensive, but when the thinking is crisp, so is the end result -- differentiated positioning and clear, resonant messaging. As you can see, Competitive Positioning is woven through all of this work and strengthens the overall messaging strategy.

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 your company is in its evolution from defining problem-market fit, product-market fit, and platform-market fit. Third, make sure that your go-to-market strategy is aligned. I recently worked with a coach who helped us develop our market vision (our sense of where the market was headed) and then the company, product, GTM, and operational strategy to respond to the changes that we saw in the market. It was an exercise that helped me sync GTM with the broader company strategy.

I answered a previous question about measuring success of a product post-launch, but it’s worth diving more deeply into KPIs for the launch itself. The most important step here is to tie your KPIs to the marketing objectives and strategies that you are adopting. For example, if you’re launching a ‘tier 3’ product without any investment in press outreach, does it make sense to track media coverage? Nope. Let’s assume that we’re focusing on a Tier 1 product launch. Here are the KPIs I typically track: 1- Press Coverage and Analyst mentions. Important to track quantity and sentiment. 2-Social Media engagement. Also important to track quantity and sentiment, as well as both consumption (e.g. views of Tweet) and more activate engagement (e.g. Retweets). A few product launches I’ve managed led to people actively educating their followers about the product. Pure gold! 3- Visits to website/landing page 4- Engagement with the top, middle, and bottom funnel you’ve created 5- Adoption and usage of collateral from Sales team, as well as their satisfaction with enablement. These are all leading indicators of success. Ultimately what matters most though -- and what should be tracked closely -- is long term product adoption, usage, and referral itself.

Changing your positioning is a big deal. So much of your Go to Market plan relies on a positioning strategy that is well thought out and embraced by your company. Whenever I need to manage a change to positioning, I start with understanding whether the real need is to change the positioning or whether the need is to tune the messaging strategy. A lot of folks confuse the two. Remember: your positioning defines how you want your target audience to think about your offering. Since shifting perception takes a long time, your positioning should be stable and long-term. Your messaging strategy, on the other hand, is the full narrative and set of statements that reinforce your positioning. It is the story that cements your positioning. Since messaging can shift over time to respond to competitive dynamics or new customer insights, it is quite often that you need to tune your story, but you don’t need to change your position. But, if I do need to reposition, here's how I start: First, I work with my team and stakeholders with a basic positioning statement template: For [your target market] who [target market need], [your brand name] provides [main benefit that differentiates your offering from competition] because [reason why target audience should believe your differentiation claim.]. Repeat after me: I will not rush this process. Your go-to-market strategy is only as strong as the positioning foundation on which it stands. Shoutout to Thomas Dong for providing this. With new positioning statement in hand, I then approach rolling it out as I would a normal Tier 1 product launch (see blueprint above). This means creating a wide array of content and documents so that all of your internal and external stakeholders are aligned. Finally, I tend to think big and creatively when there is a new positioning to be supported. For example, when my team repositioned PayPal years ago, we used the moment as an opportunity to create new messaging, a new website, enable the global sales team, and develop a new brand logo -- which meant sunsetting the giant physical logos on our office buildings (we sold one on eBay for charity!).

Overall, you want to be looking at metrics that give you an understanding of success (e.g. adoption, revenue, word-of-mouth), inform tweaks to your messaging, and future direction of the product. These metrics may differ between B2B and B2C products, especially around Sales Enablement. Post launch, I’m tracking several metrics for my products, including: 1- Adoption and usage of the product 2- Revenue derived from a product 3- Customer support inquiries related to the product (this is a good source for additional product education and messaging) 4- Understanding of product from the Sales team 5- Influence of product for larger broader selling When I worked in Consumer Product Marketing, I would also track mentions of the product in social media channels, NPS related to the product, awareness and understanding of products, and other related metrics.

I’ve had my fair share of challenging product launches in my career. The Tier 2s that you desperately want to become a Tier 1. The launches that you, as a product marketer, learn about 48 hours before the launch. Those are painful. But the most difficult have been in the areas of Trust & Safety, which I believe is one of the most critical and sensitive parts of any business. Get them wrong, and corporate reputation goes down the drain. Get them right, and your product can be a significant boon to your company’s brand. Two product launches stick out the most. The first was early in my career when I was the product and brand marketer for trust at eBay. My job was to build trust and confidence in the eBay brand and between buyers and sellers -- it was a lofty challenge. One of our new products was the introduction of the Resolution Center, a platform that enabled buyers and sellers to manage their disputes. The marketing challenge was that the community, at the time, expected eBay to manage disputes for them (like a traditional retailer would) and, if we sided with either the buyer or the seller, the other party would take their frustration out on eBay. We were the referee and, as one of the PMs told me, no one goes to a sports game to see the referee. The Resolution Center launch was aimed at solving that reputational challenge, but launching it was akin to kicking a hornet’s nest -- drawing the ire of both buyers and sellers. This launch taught me an invaluable marketing lesson: always lean into community engagement. We managed the launch in a way similar to how an aspiring political candidate would engage with communities, spending countless hours answering questions on community chat boards and making ourselves -- the eBay employees responsible for this product -- available to our most loyal customers. In many ways, the Resolution Center launch was painful as we were hearing critique from all sides; but, the way we approached the product introduction demonstrated our passion and commitment to trust on the platform and the long-range success of our community of buyers and sellers. It was marketing that mattered. The second launch was more recent. I was the product marketer at Twitter responsible for the launch of the Mute button, an important feature that enabled people to not have to see Tweets in their timeline. This launch came at a time when Twitter was dealing with an enormous amount of bullying and abuse on the platform. Similar to the eBay experience, Twitter was caught between two countervailing pressures -- the need for freedom of expression and the need for protection from abuse. This launch taught me another invaluable product marketing lesson: always be transparent and listen to your customers. One of the ways we approached this (and many other) launches was to put together a Safety Advisory Board, a group of experts and Twitter customers with whom we shared and gathered feedback on our safety roadmap. This type of feedback made our safety products better and, when it came time to launch, created advocates for us. Product launches are hard - some harder than others. But all product launches represent important opportunities to tell a story and advance a narrative that is important to your company and, more importantly, your customers. Approaching product launches with this truth in mind will help you make the most out of these moments.

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 technology adoption lifecycle. Pinpoint whether your technology speaks to Innovator, Early Adopter, Early Majority, Late Majority, or Laggard. * Positioning strategy – Your goal is differentiated value. Over the years, I’ve seen so many different fill-in-the-blanks positioning frameworks, but I’ve come to love April Dunford’s positioning canvas approach in her seminal book Obviously Awesome. She defines positioning strategy as how a company’s offering is uniquely qualified to be a leader at providing some kind of value that a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about. There’s a lot there – read the book! * Messaging – Your goal is to strengthen your positioning with messages that resonate with the target audience. The biggest growth opportunities that I’ve seen in many organizations are message discipline and how to speak with one voice. * Ideal Customer Profile – Your goal is to define what the ideal customer (at the organization level) looks like. This should include firmographic, geographic, and technographic information. * Buyer and User Personas – Your goal is to define the people (B2B is still marketing to humans). Look at job titles, roles and responsibilities, sequences of participation (in the buying process), and roles in the decision-making unit. Note: Job titles in rapidly changing categories can be elusive – if that’s the case, look more at their roles and responsibilities. At GitLab, we do so in our Handbook here. * A Trusted Customer Journey – Your goal is to define the key steps in the purchase decision process and to surface the messages and actions that will move people through the journey. A key part of this is to build and reinforce trust along the way by understanding their job to be done (what social and functional progress is the customer trying to make and hiring you to do) and empathizing with any anxieties in the purchase that may arise. * Prioritized Use Cases – Your goal is to spell out how the primary buyer & user can use the product for the most significant value and success Again, this is just a start, but if you can gain consensus on this across the entire go-to-market organization, you’ll be in a strong position to execute and repeat the process.

Identifying and prioritizing channels to reach your target audience is key to any product launch. Typically, my channel goal is to surround the audience with a repeated, salient, and consistent message. Depending on the business objective (note to product marketers: clarify the business objective of your product launch first), the goal of a launch can be different from product to product. At times, the business needs to build awareness of your product in order to drive consideration and usage -- this is the most frequent objective. At other times, however, the business wants a product launch to drive a different corporate-level objective, such as positive sentiment or consideration for a broader solution. The first step of any product launch channel strategy is to identify your target audience(s) and, based on a deep understanding of them, identify the best ways to reach them. From this starting point, you can begin stitching together a channel strategy. People’s social and professional networks and media behaviors are complex, so we try our best to develop a comprehensive understanding of our target audience. Beyond their title, who is this person? What keeps them up at night? Where do they learn, get, and share information? What terms do they use when they search for a product similar to yours? How do they engage with channels such as email? Be sure to have a truthful answer for each of these questions -- as a cautionary tale, an IT executive recently told my team that he deletes ALL marketing emails at the beginning and end of his day. Ouch. For product launches, my team typically weaves together a mixture of ‘owned & operated’ (e.g. email, website), earned (e.g. press, analysts), social media, and paid channels with core content that can be integrated into each channel. We prioritize the channels that have the greatest likelihood of reaching our audience and motivating them to make the purchase consideration and decision journey. Laying all of these considerations out is part of the fun of creating a cohesive channel 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 expansion, overall category penetration, and customer time-to-value. The most important part is to understand which metrics drive the business and which levers drive those metrics.