This article derives from a presentation at the Product Marketing Summit London in 2021. Watch this presentation, and others, via our OnDemand service.
Hey, everybody. I’m Spark. My parents aren’t crazy – they didn’t name me Spark, but it’s a little bit cooler than Susan Park, so that’s what I like to go by. I work at Meta, in the VR Work Experiences division.
What I’m here to do for you today is something that I wish someone had done for me. Are you the first product marketer at your company? If so, I’m here for you. I know it’s tough. Are you the first product marketer your cross-functional partners have met? If the answer is yes, this is also for you.
What I want to do in this article on go-to-market (GTM) strategy is to give you a jargon-free framework to explain what we do across the launch process. I hope to give you the language tools to explain what we do very simply, and a concrete framework that, hopefully, will get you 90% of the way in a go-to-market launch.
I’ll specifically be covering:
- The launch process
- The first A: Audience
- The second A: Angle
- The third A: Accomplishments
- The fourth A: Activation
The launch
Let’s start with the launch process. This can differ between products and companies, but the idea is that you go from an idea to research, and then you build, test, and launch. I love to kick off GTM planning in a different place than most people expect.
Most people think it should kick off in the testing phase; I think it should start with the research function. You should be thinking about your customer during the research phase and using that to shape the product.
