Harish Peri

1. How does your company think of its 'market'? This is essentially a segmentation exercise but sometimes the hardest part. This requires alignment between sales, product, and marketing and is a great starting point for PMM to make an impact. Decide on the GTM 'vector' early - ie. verticals, company size, revenue band, geo, use case, needs based. Decide on the definitions of each and write them down 2. For a given release or launch, what are the priority segments?. Not everything is going to be equally important to every segment and the core of GTM is to make those prioritization decisions. E.g. a launch that's aimed at Financial Services companies vs. Health providers or a major release that's targeting Enterprise customers vs. SMB. For this exercise, you also need to understand product intent. Are we trying to capture new share, fix bugs and rescue CSAT, open up a new market, etc. This will help to determine the opportunity value that a given segment can provide for a given release or launch 3. For those priority segments, what is the segment-by-segment positioning? This is the 'art' of PMM where you write down the basic value prop for each target segment. Remember, what matters to an Enterprise buyer is very different from a vertical-specific buyer. Trying to be all things to all people is a recipe for failure 4. How does the positioning translate into execution? Sales enablement, campaigns, website updates, social/blog/content plan 5. Stakeholders - the above points address what, how and why. But you also need to loop in the 'who'. Product, sales, support, documentation, sales engineering and the entire village required to make your GTM successful. Ultimately you need to start with the launch or release date, and create a 'work back plan' that addresses all of the above questions.

1. Making assumptions about pricing and not vetting them with sales VERY early in the process 2. Assuming that its a 'handoff' to sales enablement vs in reality its an ongoing partnership where PMM needs to lean in quite a bit to help 3. Not factoring in global requirements VERY early on and discovering late in the game that its not just a 'localization' issue that will handled by the 'local' teams 4. Not factoring in migration or EOL requirements and just focusing on the new, shiny products. Customers have more heartburn about migrations than marketers account for. Be ready for that, and factor that heavily into operationalization

Success is only as good as the definition of success. So in the early days of the launch you need to have a aligned defintion of what the launch goal is. Market share, awareness, competitive takeouts, upsell/cross-sell. Define it very clearly and define what the metric is for success. Also define the expected timeline for success, and ensure you have the actual instrumentation to measure it. Then the launch leader should commit to regular updates to the launch stakeholders on success metrics, and should call quarterly or monthly reviews in case the launch goals are not being met (in order to course correct)

This was a product I helped launch more than a year ago. It was a product that had high market demand and was long overdue for the target buyers. If you reference the question I answered on 'GTM blueprint', this launch had everything in reverse. 1. Unclear Target Segment - we didnt have alignment on who the exact segment was based on launch-day product capabilities, use cases, company size, etc. The broad feeling was the target was 'everyone', which is always a recipe for failure. 2. Misalignment on strategic intent - there were mixed messages around the strategic goal of the launch. Some thought it was capturing broad market share, some thought it was playing catch up on competitive features. This also led to conflicts around pricing, which led to pricing too high and competitive 3. Mismatch of positioning and buyer - we ended up going after the wrong buyer/decision maker in an attempt to 'look cool'. Our target persona was actually more of an influencer/user that the buyer would have looked to with trust during the sales process. By not targeting them, we ended up in competitive bakeoffs that didn't let us shine to our fullest 4. Stakeholder alignment - we ended up in a place where product and commercial stakeholders were misaligned quite a bit leading to delays and conflict All in all, launches are hard. Launches make you question your strategy, your values, your approach to marketing - everything. So best to spend more time upfront aligning than rushing to launch.

Answering this one in the 'product roadmap AMA' because its super relevant in all situations. I prefer 30-60 days, because most SaaS companies, PMMs need to move faster and start demonstrating value a lot faster than 90 days. 30 days - Find out your stakeholders and meet each one of them. Create a stakeholder map (can be a spreadsheet) that answers the questions: what are your expectations of me, what should I expect from you, what's been going well in the last 2-3 months, what needs improvement immediately? - Setup recurring meetings with each of them - frequency is based on how critical they are - Befriend a sales engineer, customer success technologist, or product manager - someone who can show you your product, show you how to demo it, and where the pitfalls are. Get into the product and learn it fast - Align with your manager on whats expected of you 60 days - Figure out one thing you can actually deliver and own it. Dont wait to be asked. E.g. a new pitch deck, a new campaign, a product launch, or something that matters to a key stakeholder (e.g. product messaging, sales play help etc). This last one is important because in some companies, PMM is very much a stakeholder driven function (which is OK). This might seem overly reductive, but the key in the beginning is to show you understand how value is created, and show your ability to get in there and get something done. Now if you're a manager, there is a whole other step of getting to know your team, understanding their motivations, understanding where they stand with respect to their stakeholders and coming up with a plan to grow each of them. Its probably what you would do in the first 30 days as a manager.

This is a common problem no matter what function you're in. Its about stakeholder management in complex, multi-threaded project environments. Really its about project management 101. A few tips: * Before starting the project, get everyone's buy in on their role in the project. Use a RACI if that's the culture, or at least a simple document saying if someone is in the 'working team', 'approval team', informed/consulted team etc. This will ensure expectation management up front. If someone comes up later saying 'why wasnt I involved' you can show them the paper trail to explain no malintent * Drive home this divison of responsibility in your kickoff call (as in HAVE a kickoff call for sure) * Ensure that everyone involved is on the recurring meeting invite, Slack channel, Teams group, whatever you use for comms and accountability * If you have a top down culture, explicitly build in meeting cadences for review, approval, stakeholder feedback and call it what it is. Dont assume that people will know things, or pay attention 'offline' * Over communicate -- pre-meeting, agendas, status boards, recapss. Call out what's stakeholder relevant, whats not No easy way to do this, but its a lot of cat herding that if done well can drive massive organizational alignment.

Its always good practice to have a stakeholder map. The goal of this document (which I prefer to keep at at individual level) is to remind yourself of who should be included in decisions such as launches, campaigns, sales motions, pricing, web changes etc. Information you need in this could be: * Name, title, relationship * What should they expect from you * What should you expect from them * RACI for their involvement in key processes. E.g. R for pricing, or I for launches, etc Create one of these within your first 30 days of starting a job or taking on a new role, and update every 6 months. It will take some time in the beginning, but its completely worth it.

* Demonstrate the basics: messaging, positioning, ability to make an impactful/relevant/meaningful presentation that conveys the value prop + differentiators of your product or portfolio. Cant be influential if your house is on fire. * Learn the business REALLY well. How is money made, who do we sell to, how is the sales team structured, what are their main sales motions, is it self-serve/direct/partner driven? Learn it ALL. Then figure out where are opporutnities to add unique value: better targeting, better messaging, more customer interaction, roadmap changes. Dont try to change things you don't understand * Do what you say, fast. Dont make excuses, just get it done. Then your credibility will go up. * Have a POV. Why are things the way they are? Test out your POV with sales, product, CSM, other stakeholders and refine it. But have a POV, and when the time is right, you will get your shot to make that POV into reality

1. I always come back to the fact that each segment in your GTM plan needs its own launch approach. This is why there's no one-size fits all 2. E.g. if you have a target segment of self-serve customers, the best launch tactics would involve in-product marketing, guided help, short videos, blog posts, social engagement, really using tools like Intercom to push information contextually to where your users are 3. E.g. if your target is large enterprises, the launch tactic would be more of enabling the account teams, creating FAQs to help customers with migration, pricing questions, technical enablement etc. Its more about alleviating risks than trumpeting what's super new 4. For highly regulated customers, the best launch tactic would be to showcase other customers who have adopted successfully with no additional risk It all depends.

It comes down again to segmentation, target and positioning. How critical is the new release/features to your target segment? Alternatively, it might seem like a small feature but can unlock a new market. Depending on the answer to these, you need to decide how big a deal you want to make of it. The right amount of information for your GTM teams is based on their sales process. If they need a datasheet, a demo, a first+ second call deck, and supporting landing pages to match their opportunity stages, then thats what you create. But never create content for content sake - that is the source of content bloat.