Product Management: Foundations to Practice · Go-to-Market Strategy
What a GTM Plan Includes
A great product with a mediocre go-to-market plan often loses to a mediocre product with a great one. This chapter breaks down what a genuine GTM plan actually needs to cover.
A go-to-market plan describes how a product or major feature will actually reach and be adopted by its intended customers, typically covering the target audience and positioning, the messaging that will communicate the value proposition, the channels through which customers will be reached, and how success will be measured after launch. Each component depends on the others: messaging without a clearly defined target audience tends to be generically appealing to everyone and compelling to no one in particular.
- A GTM plan covers target audience, positioning, messaging, channels, and post-launch success metrics, each dependent on the others.
- Sales and marketing input is non-negotiable, since they hold current, direct knowledge of what resonates and which channels work.
- Success metrics must be defined before launch, or the effort's outcome cannot be evaluated or learned from afterward.
- A GTM plan should specify what happens after launch day, since unplanned follow-up squanders a launch's initial momentum.