Case Study: Planning Go To Market (GTM) Strategy

Background:

How do you manage multiple marketing teams, a product team undergoing a re-org, and a product launch with no clear requirements or goals?

Patience. And coffee. Lots of coffee.

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The organization is on a path to meet parity in its market, and that includes an app for its members.

Goal:

The product marketing team (me!) orchestrated the go-to-market (GTM)  efforts of the organization’s first app launch to drive awareness and downloads.

Plan:

Go to market plans can be formulaic–and that is a good thing when entering an ambiguous launch. Below, in chronological order, are highlights the steps followed to meet our GTM kickoff date:

  • Weekly discovery calls with the product team. These weekly sessions helped us discover the functionality, features, dependencies, and goals of the app–and gaps.

  • Define roles and responsibilities. The lines can blur between product and product marketing. With a beta test and planning for marketing, we drew a line in the sand on ownership.

  • Forced timelines. We claimed our own timelines based on previous releases. This helped bring focus and prioritization into our planning on both sides.

  • Skeleton plan socialized. Sharing our skeleton GTM plan cross functionally allowed us to uncover timing gaps and specific needs across teams.

  • Determine stakeholders and approvers. This is a critical first step to determine and align with all team. Without identified stakeholders, you can find yourself at a crossroad in decisions. 

  • Cross-functional team kickoffs. We set up individual team kickoffs and then held weekly meetings to share, align, and provide visibility into the app strategy.

  • Weekly communications. I sent a summary at the end of each week of what we completed and what would happen next week to keep everyone on track.

  • Kickoff.  Our GTM kick off included over 50 people to align and gain approval. (We did it!)

This took over 5 months.


My Role: Writer, Researcher, Journalist, Project Manager, Negotiator, Team Lead, Presenter. 

A product marketer wears many hats, as we know. Not only functioning as a journalist to pull out what is and isn’t in a release but then presenting a road show across teams to get their feedback and alignment. I managed and tracked multiple teams to ensure questions and tasks were answered. I crafted the strategy and messaging framework into a simple, easy-to-understand copy, led teams on a specific timeline to meet our GTM deadline.

Constraints

Our biggest challenges included:

  • No defined date. (Product marketing set the stakes to begin planning.)

  • Change in product release date. Product asked us to bump up our marketing date. I did an opportunity/risk analysis to determine the earliest date we could go live.

  • No identified KPIs. (Really, we did not have any metrics.)

  • Limited release. Not all members would have access to the app at the same time because of internal platform constraints.This created its own challenge, as anyone can access the app in the app stores at any time.

  • Lack of Resources. Launching an app without a project manager placed a shared workload on product marketing and product lead.

  • Non-existent Analytic infrastructure. This was not in place to set/track measurements.

Results:

We pulled it off!! And the biggest reasons we could included: 

  • Project management. We set deadlines and held teams accountable for each deliverable.

  • Weekly communications. A standing meeting was set with cross-functional teams to share visibility and a weekly email summary distributed to all team members.

  • Weekly meetings with the product team. I set aside an hour each week for the product lead and me to review progress and answer questions. 

  • Review and approval of the GTM plan in phases.  The success of a GTM launch includes approval across smaller teams first. The goal of your GTM kickoff should be that there are no surprises to anyone. 

Lessons:

  • Align early and often. Gaining approval with smaller groups helped us refine our plan quickly before presenting at our kickoff. This was critical to keeping us on deadline.

  • Be more forceful about KPIs. Because of internal constraints, this became a secondary project. If I could go back in time, I would have leadership enforce KPIs within the build as a requirement for the product launch. 

  • Identifying Roles and Expectations. As an outcome of a retrospective, team members voiced they were unsure of their role. I have since created a launch charter to outline roles, expectations, responsibilities, and communication channels.

Linda Franklin