Why Go-To-Market Strategy

I’ve shipped dozens of features that I thought were brilliant. Some succeeded. Most quietly failed. Well, most of them failed. The difference wasn’t the quality of the product - it was whether we’d thought seriously about go-to-market.

Here’s the uncomfortable realisation I came to: building a great product is table stakes. The hard part is getting it into users’ hands in a way that drives adoption, usage, and value. That’s what separates product managers who ship features from those who drive outcomes.

Why Most PMs Get GTM Wrong

The Build It and They Will Come Fallacy

Early in my career, I genuinely believed that good products sell themselves. We’d spend months perfecting a feature, launch it, and then wonder why adoption was disappointing. The feature worked beautifully. We’d validated the problem. So why wasn’t anyone using it?

Because we’d ignored everything that comes after “ship.” We hadn’t thought about how users would discover the feature, understand its value, or integrate it into their workflow. We’d built something great and hoped the market would figure it out.

Slack didn’t become Slack because their product was technically superior. Plenty of chat tools existed. They succeeded because they understood go-to-market. They started with a clear ICP, had a bottoms-up adoption strategy, and invested heavily in making it trivially easy to try and adopt. The product was great, but the GTM strategy was what created the compounding growth.

Treating Launch as the Finish Line

I’ve watched teams exhale with relief when they ship, as if the hard work is over. In reality, shipping is when the actual work begins. Launch is a moment; go-to-market is a process that extends before, during, and well after that moment.

HubSpot’s product launches are exemplary here. They don’t just ship features - they orchestrate launches. Education content goes out weeks in advance. Customer success is trained and ready. Sales has the materials they need. Marketing has built awareness. By the time the feature is generally available, the market is primed and the internal teams are aligned.

Compare that to the typical product launch: a blog post, maybe an email, and hope for the best. Then three months later, you’re puzzled why uptake is low and conclude the feature wasn’t valuable. Maybe it wasn’t. Or maybe you just never gave it a proper chance to succeed.

The Elements of Effective GTM Strategy

Know Your Audience (Actually Know Them)

This sounds obvious until you see how many teams get it wrong. They have vague personas - “marketing managers” or “enterprise customers” - but no real understanding of how these people work, what motivates them, or how they make decisions.

When Notion launched their API, they didn’t target “developers” broadly. They focused on power users who were already building hacks and workarounds. These people were motivated, understood the value proposition immediately, and became advocates. The GTM strategy acknowledged that early adopters would be different from mainstream users, and that was fine—they needed to start somewhere specific.

The exercise I go through now: describe your ideal first user in enough detail that you could pick them out of a room. What’s their day like? What frustrates them? Where do they look for solutions? If you can’t answer these specifically, you’re not ready to launch.

Align the Entire Company

GTM isn’t marketing’s job. It’s everyone’s job. Sales needs to know how to position it. Customer success needs to understand the value proposition. Support needs to handle common questions. Product needs to prioritise adoption barriers. When these teams aren’t aligned, users experience friction that kills adoption.

Make Onboarding Frictionless

The gap between signup and value realisation is where most users are lost. If people don’t experience value quickly, they churn. This sounds obvious, but most products make it unnecessarily hard to get started.

Figma’s GTM brilliance was partly in how stupid-simple they made it to try the product. No credit card. No installation. No configuration. Just start designing. Within minutes, you’d experienced enough value to want to continue. That low-friction onboarding was a strategic choice that required significant product investment.

Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

Launching Everything to Everyone at Once

The temptation is to make a big splash. Full product availability, comprehensive marketing, sales pushing it to every customer. It feels like you’re maximising opportunity, but you’re actually creating chaos.

When Superhuman launched, they did the opposite. Invite-only, highly selective, deeply engaged with every early user. This created scarcity and desire, yes, but more importantly, it let them learn and iterate before scaling. By the time they opened up more broadly, they’d fixed the critical issues and refined their positioning.

I’ve learned to think in stages: private beta (friendly users who’ll give detailed feedback), public beta (broader group, focus on catching edge cases), general availability (confidence that the major issues are resolved). Each stage has different goals and success criteria. Skipping stages means you’re learning expensive lessons in public with your entire potential market watching.

Ignoring the Activation Metric

Most teams obsess over adoption numbers—how many people signed up, installed the feature, clicked the button. These matter, but they’re vanity metrics if people aren’t reaching the “aha moment” where they experience real value.

Dropbox famously discovered that users who uploaded at least one file and accessed it from a second device were dramatically more likely to become long-term users. That insight shaped their entire onboarding and GTM strategy—everything was designed to get users to that moment as quickly as possible.

For every feature we launch now, I force the team to define the activation metric before we ship. What specific action indicates the user has experienced core value? How do we measure it? What’s our current rate? This single question focuses GTM efforts in a way that vague “increase adoption” goals never do.

Underinvesting in Enablement

You’ve built something great, but if your sales team can’t articulate the value or your customer success team doesn’t know how to drive adoption, your GTM will fail regardless of product quality.

Atlassian is exemplary at enablement. When they launch something significant, they have comprehensive internal training, updated sales materials, documented customer success playbooks, and self-service resources ready. The product is only one part of the equation.

I’ve made the mistake of treating enablement as an afterthought. We’d ship something, then scramble to create materials when sales complained they didn’t know how to position it. Now, enablement is baked into the launch plan from the start. If the materials and training aren’t ready, we’re not ready to launch.

A Framework That Works

Here’s the approach I use now for GTM planning:

Before Launch:

• Define ICP and activation metric
• Create positioning and messaging (test with real users)
• Align internal teams on goals and their role
• Build enablement materials and train teams
• Identify distribution channels and prepare content
• Set up measurement and feedback loops

During Launch:

• Start with limited availability to learn fast
• Monitor activation rates and gather qualitative feedback
• Iterate quickly on onboarding friction points
• Amplify what’s working, fix what’s not

After Launch:

• Track leading indicators (activation, engagement, retention)
• Analyse where users drop off and why
• Continuous improvement of messaging, onboarding, and product
• Share learnings across the company

This isn’t revolutionary. It’s just systematic about the things that actually matter for getting products into users’ hands successfully.

Key Takeaways

• Launch is a process, not a moment: Great GTM starts weeks before shipping and continues months after. If you’re thinking about GTM on launch day, you’re already behind.
• Know your first user specifically: Vague personas lead to vague positioning. Get specific about who you’re targeting and why they’ll care.
• Align the entire company: GTM isn’t marketing’s job alone. Sales, success, support, and product all play critical roles. Misalignment creates friction that kills adoption.
• Make value realisation fast: The longer it takes users to experience value, the more you’ll lose to churn. Ruthlessly eliminate onboarding friction.
• Learn before you scale: Start with limited availability, gather feedback, iterate, then scale. Don’t launch everything to everyone on day one.

Final Thoughts

I’ve learned to think of product development and go-to-market as equally important. You can’t succeed at one without the other. The best product managers I know are as thoughtful about how they’ll bring something to market as they are about what they’re building.

This requires a mindset shift. It’s not enough to ship great features. You need to drive adoption, usage, and value. That means thinking like a marketer, understanding sales, empathising with customer success, and orchestrating efforts across the entire company.

It’s more work. It requires skills that many PMs haven’t developed. But it’s the difference between shipping features that quietly fail and launching products that genuinely succeed.

Have questions or thoughts? Get in touch - I’d love to hear from you!