 Hello and welcome to this session. Today we're going to discuss about designing a go-to-market strategy specifically from a product management standpoint. So if you just google go-to-market strategy and read about it or have any pick up any textbook around this particular subject, you will have enough information around the definitions and how we go about building this and what are the key insights that we should have before we start on a go-to-market strategy. This presentation, I'm going to focus mostly on my experience and not repeat the textbook stuff and go into a larger definition of this particular strategy. My aim is for you all to understand in the real world scenario, what go-to-market strategy looks like, what are the common pitfalls, and how you have to sometimes pivot from your initial strategy to drive the success. So let's get right into it. So when you start on a go-to-market strategy, the first essential step is to define the value proposition of your product. Needless to say that is probably the first thing you do when you start designing a product, but even in the course of the product design and the documentation, the value proposition evolves and changes into something that is slightly different to what you initially started off. But when you're thinking about a go-to-market strategy, you should be crystal clear on what particular value proposition you're trying to drive. Once you have the value proposition, the next thing is the product market fit. You need to know what specific problem this is going to solve. So you have the value props, you know the real-world problems, you need to ensure that the problem is big enough to solve, and you're basically able to join the groups. As you move forward, you now know what is your specific target market. Which group of your customers are having this acute problem that your product is going to solve. Based on that, you work out the entitlements, like basically the financials of this particular product and in the long-term, what sort of money you're going to make through this, and then what the addressable opportunity is. It's essentially like it can be a very big entitlement, but based on whatever assumptions you want to make on the market share or the adoption, what is the opportunity you want to address, or you will be meaningfully able to address through this product. Then comes the risks and the mitigation plan for whatever strategy that you want to build, and this is where you need to be very honest with yourselves in terms of here are the things that we do not know, here are blind spots, and at least at a theoretical level, have a mitigation plan for all the nodes, and there will be certain amount of unknowns there, but at least we would like to see that you have crossed all the known issues, and you pretty much are familiar with what sort of risk this product has. Then once you go past that particular point, at this point in time, you have a clear value proposition in mind. You know what target audience or target customers you're looking for, and what are the risks to the plan. At that point in time, you start driving an option of this product. You have to start building the plan to drive an option of this particular product. For that, you need to have proper communication plan, and a proper marketing plan for you to reach your customers, ensure they trust you, they value your product, and they're able to adopt a particular product. Let's get into an example. This is coming from my own experience, partly not entirely of launching a 3PL or working with 3PLs in the last few years, and working also in the supply chain domain for a very long time. Let's take this example and see what sort of motor market strategy we would need, at a very high level of course. For a 3PL and folks who are not familiar with what 3PL is, 3PL is a third party logistics. It's a company that provides you certain supply chain capabilities, like for example, a storage space to store your products, some transportation mechanisms to move your product from the stored location into different marketplaces, sometimes even fulfillment to your customers, and various other value-added services, like quality assurance and so on. In this particular example, we are assuming that as a product manager, you are building a 3PL service, where you're going to store products for your customers and also give them certain value-added services, so that they can have a hands-off-the-wheel experience on their supply chain. In this example, if you think about it, why would a customer adopt your product or sign up for your 3PL? I mean, the biggest point always is the cost. Are you able to provide a cost-effective solution that other major players are not able to prove? What specific value-added services you're able to provide because there are so many competitors in this particular market, everybody has this additional touch they have in their offerings that probably makes it extremely difficult for you to create an niche for yourself. So you should have or you probably must have a value-added service that you are going to provide, probably a spectrum of value-added services that different customer segments can actually have. Now that you have a product, you've defined the value proposition, you think about what particular market segment are you going to capture? It's because you want to capture the businesses that are mainly into e-commerce. They don't have their own physical locations. They're sourcing from some other country and probably they're looking for the hands-off-the-wheel experience where they want to just store it somewhere and then send it through to the e-commerce companies for fulfillment. It can be businesses who have multi-marketplace businesses like across the globe or even in the same geography, they might have different businesses that they cater to. And for them, having a centrally located storage just helps them to move that inventory down to the right marketplace very quickly. So as a product owner, you need to be very clear like what exactly you're trying to target and what's the product market fit for your product. And this is an example. Let us say you're starting off with the smaller businesses who have a very difficult time negotiating contracts with the bigger supply chain products or bigger supply chain players or bigger 3BLs. So you might want to just give them a very kind of a niche experience, maybe have a lot of hand-holding experience for them to grow their business and give them those capabilities which the other players may not be able to do. So this is just an example. Let us say you're targeting the smaller businesses who do not have enough volumes to necessarily get good contracts from the bigger players. Now, what are the inherent risks of this particular product? The high investments, because you're talking about real estate here and probably a few million cubic foot because you need to have some amount of storage space for you to kind of offer that to your clients. Then it's a highly competitive market as we have been speaking about. A lot of players, a lot of big players with deep pockets. So unless and until you have a very clear value prop it's going to be very difficult for you to manage these risks. Once you have these risks identified, of course, you'll have to figure out based on your strategy, what are the mitigation plans and ensure that you've thought through what are the fallback options are. Then once you get to a point where you have checked off these four areas, then you think about a proper adoption strategy. How will you market this product to the smaller businesses? How would you ensure they come and adopt this particular product? And that probably becomes the key to your go-to-market strategy, right? Like, okay, I know my product has these great qualities and these great value props. I know it's a good fit. I know the risk and I have a mitigation plan and I know what is my target segment, but how do I reach out to those folks and tell them that, hey, look, this is a good product and you should have one? And that requires a lot of adoption strategy and adoption strategy is not necessarily the part of this conversation, but that's a very important part of your overall go-to-market strategy. Now, once you've built this whole strategy out, one thing you need to understand, this is not a new lateral exercise. This is something that you need to get, product, business, engineering, finance, sales and marketing, legal and every department who are associated with the product launch, all of them to come together and help you build this strategy. The product manager here might be facilitating a lot of these conversations, might be building the initial strategy, but this needs to be thoroughly vetted by all these departments. For example, when you're thinking about the risks and if it's a very high investment risk, then that is where you need to understand from finance, like what is their risk appetite, if there is a fallback option, sometimes they come up with their own fallback options and understand what the ramifications are of this strategy not working. Similarly, if it's a new market that you're trying to enter a new country or new geography you're trying to enter, legal is a very critical department that you need to consult and there are so many nuances to a particular country, so many marketplace specific requirements that you have to abide by that legal becomes a very important stakeholder there. And of course, needless to say, product, business and engineering who are responsible for implementing the product, they all need to come together and ensure that they meet the timelines, they offer the features that you have aligned on with them and they are able to manage the cost of the product as well in the right way. Lastly, sales and marketing are extremely important to your adoption strategy, they are the folks that basically reach out to the customers, promote the product and ensure that you have the right kind of mechanisms to go to the market with the right kind of ammunitions. So all said and done, ultimately, as you can see, the whole strategy prevails around how you get the customer onboarded to use your particular product to prove it. So your strategy needs to be customized. Everything you think about, there's a few bullet points that we have talked about from value proposition to the product market fit to the target segmentation, everything should revolve around what ultimately we are trying to achieve with from our customer's lens, right? And it has to be fully customer-driven. And if driving adoption with customers at your goal, I mean, there can be different type of products, some products can be marketed to a very niche segment so that it's not like adoption may not be their goal of it might be high profitability kind of a product. But let's say if driving adoption is your goal, you should know who are your early adopters, who are the most likely customer segments that will come and adopt your product. What are the critical features for that? Like why would they use this particular product? Are there, is there a gap in the market that is today driving them not to use a bunch of the products, right? And even if there is no gap, like even if they had to adopt your product because of some reason, maybe financial reasons, what are the critical features that they need to even start? What is the willingness to bring, right? Be very humble about it. It's not necessarily that competitors are charging a particular price point, you can actually go ahead and charge somewhat similar, right? If you are starting off and depending on where you are with your brand value, you need to be very data driven around what the willingness to pay for your customers are. And this data sometimes comes from customer outreach, sometimes from surveys, sometimes from economic analysis, and most of the times all these three things working in conjunction. But essentially, you need to be able to clearly say at what price point the product will actually start selling and to what degree. The next and a very important part is how do you build the trust with them? Especially if you're a newcomer to the market, how do they know that there will be the right kind of SLAs that you will be able to do? Right, kind of customer service, right kind of experience, even data privacy or other critical features that are important for them to trust your product and use it for their business or for their own personal reasons, which is very important to them. So building trust with them is very critical. And understanding the whole space a little bit more in depth will help you. Like, here are the major trust busters, here is how I can go ahead and build the trust with this customer service. And lastly, how do you communicate with them? Are you able to communicate with them through a direct mechanism where there's an in-person connect? Is there an electronic connect? Or how do you want to essentially not only communicate to them about the new product, but also understand the feedback from them, understand what they really look for and what they are getting and not getting from your product. So you need to be very clear on what mechanisms you establish for two-way communication, not necessarily a one-way communication where you're just promoting your product. The worst thing a PM can do is to make assumptions around all this, right? Like all these five questions and there can be several more, all these questions should be extremely data-driven and extremely real, but you need to be very clear that you're able to connect with your customer, understand exactly what features they want or what exactly they're willing to pay or how you can build their trust, how you can reach out to them and have a two-way communication with them. If you are making assumptions around, okay, this is how it will work, it will probably not be the right thing for you to do. You may very well get into roadblocks that you could have very well circumvented if you had reached out to your customers and got this data in a more meaningful way. Now, once you have a particular strategy in place where you have looked at the customer, you've engaged with them, you've understood what the problems are, you built the strategy around that, the next most important thing is to how to measure success, right? And measuring success starts with defining clear metrics. And metrics are extremely important for you to set a goal or a success criteria around what do you want to achieve? And if it is something that you can quantify and numerically define, that just makes your life much more easier as a product manager. Without a clear metric, if you just want to launch a product and see how it goes, it generally never works, right? And the metrics can be very different for the same product, depending on what your strategy is, right? And therefore, it's important for you to align with your sponsor, with your key stakeholders on, here is the metric that we will be tracking. And this is the goal that we want to achieve for this particular metric. If you do not do that, that can just create a lot of fiction around, is this product serving the purpose? Your go-to-market strategy may completely change based on what metric you are driving, right? So for the same product, right? Even for that example on around the three peers, it can be an adoption goal that I would like to have at least a thousand customers by the end of the year. It can be a top-line goal that you want to drive this much revenue by the end of the year, or a bottom-line goal and a profitability goal where you're saying, hey, this is my per unit or per square foot, per cubic foot profitability that I want to achieve in this whole year. And your strategy might be very different. Like for example, if you're thinking of an option, you can onboard smaller sellers, but if you're looking at the top-line growth, then you might want to look at bigger businesses who are able to provide that kind of revenue for you to make a lot of money out of them, right? Like consistently managing to be close to 100% of utilization, ensuring that they are subscribing to most of the value-added services that you are offering and so on. So essentially your strategy completely changes, your target segment completely changes. So be very clear on how you define your success criteria and the metrics. Ultimately misalignment on the success criteria or even in the metric that you're tracking is the single biggest root cause of a go-to-market failure. I mean, it is, I cannot emphasize this enough, right? You do one thing, your stakeholders don't agree with that. You end up being misaligned and then you say, okay, I've done this and the stakeholders say, well, this is not what we expected. And that becomes a big fiction to drive the product strategy forward. However, if you have driven, you have defined the success criteria clearly, even then there will be certain challenges. There are so much unknowns to consider when it comes to a go-to-market strategy that even a clear definition of the success criteria will, and thinking through all these things may not actually work in the real world, right? So it's very important that as a product manager, you have the flexibility to strategically pivot into a new strategy, right? So for example, you plan to reach certain level of adoption of your 3DF by the end of the year, it's just an example. So after six months, you work through it and you're only probably 10% of the goal and you know something's definitely not right. And at that point in time, you need to start asking what's going on, right? You've been patient, you've launched the features that you wanted to launch, you've marketed aggressively, you've reached out to a bunch of customers, understood what they're looking for, everything you've taken, still you do not get the right kind of an option. You need to kind of, here are a few examples that you need to kind of consider, right? Is the cost too high? Do we have the right features? Have you built enough trust? In some of those cases, like the right features and the trust, the customer may not even directly tell you that. The customer might subconsciously looking for a feature that you're not providing. The trust is also a very innate thing that the customer is looking for and it's also sometimes very subconscious. So they may not be able to trust you even if you have created all these mechanisms. So this is where a seasoned product manager needs to go deeper, probably talk more to the early adopters, see what's going wrong, do a little bit more survey. But essentially, if that requires you to pivot from your strategy, quickly launch a few features that you've now discovered are important. You quickly build a strategy around building more trust with those key customer base. That's very important for you. You need to be able to pivot quickly and ensure that ultimately, you're able to be true to your adoption goal. Once you have understood the root causes and you've decided how to go forward, please do ensure you have a retrospective in mind. Which basically means that what did we learn from the initial phase where you did not have the right adoption? Did we miss something at the first place or was it something that you had to learn through the experience? It was not something that you would essentially hypothesize at the beginning of the exercise. The reason that I say that you have to have a retrospective is because as a product manager, you're here as well as moving forward in your career because of your willingness to learn continuously. And sometimes just going back and thinking about it just helps you become a better product manager. It helps you immensely try to grow that muscle where this is something that I thought would work but did not work and here's how I can do better next time. So a few key insights that we have from different go-to-market strategies that even I have run in the past or I've been a part of. First of all, as I said, be clear on the objectives. Which should define your success criteria and the metrics. Connect with your potential customers to not make assumptions. And that connection has to be to bring your stakeholders along and drive alignment upfront on the strategy. Joseph assumed that your stakeholders will be in agreement all the time. And if they are not in agreement, sometimes it's actually a good thing because now you have a different perspective and you're able to evolve the strategy when it comes. Be aware of the one-way door investments. So this again ties back to the strategic pivot part of it just to make it very clear. There will be scenarios where you make a bunch of investments on a particular feature or even for a three-part experience maybe on the physical space or something similar to that. But if you make it in a way that's very rigid for you to reverse or it's so high amount of investment that if that does not work out it becomes a big problem for your company then that's not a very good strategy. You need to always think, okay, here are the features that I am building. If I need to pivot, then what are the ramifications? Can they be a two-way door decision, essentially reversible decisions? Great, macroeconomic impacts are here. So be prepared, right? Whether there's a pandemic or there's a global supply chain issue or there's a war that impacts oil prices there are a lot of macroeconomic impacts and every year the same issue does not reoccur but there is some impact or the other. Something is happening in the world that is going to change your strategy. So be prepared that these things will happen and as a product manager there will be certain amount of risk to your strategy, certain amount of failures are succeeded and how you can recover from that and look forward. If you have to pivot for any of these reasons reuse as much as possible. Ensure that you are able to use whatever products you've built or whatever space you've created or whatever be the nature of your product you're able to reuse as much. It's not a very good idea to again start from the scratch because sometimes that becomes too expensive. There can be reasons for that of course. If you have done some amount of groundwork in general you would see that you're using is the best way to go forward. And after you have pivoted and after you have built your own strategy around the pivot like how to move forward please again try alignment with your stakeholders because there might be a bunch of stakeholders who are residing in the past they probably do not even know what you're thinking ahead. So it's important for you to drive that alignment as you move forward. That's it. Thank you very much for tuning in and listening through. I hope this gives you some amount of insights on how go-to market strategies really work in the real world scenario. So thank you very much.