On building Go to Market Driven Product Roadmaps

I have worked with multiple companies of different sizes through my career. My most recent role being leading product for Amazon on the…

I have worked with multiple companies of different sizes through my career. My most recent role being leading product for Amazon on the Alexa team and I cant help but compare and contrast the virtues of building go-to-market driven product roadmaps. Admittedly, this article is probably more useful for the B2B or B2B2C company. Amazon, is famous for its six pager documents which in lieu of more information is essentially a go-to-market plan. I have worked for other large monopoly businesses where we build the tech and then choose to win the customer compared to the fierce, competitive world where we work with multiple co-players requires a well thought out go-to-market plan before we even start building the product.

I want to outline a few things that you should think about, and I hope this helps in building better products with fewer $$ being wasted.

Customer — Who are your customers? Specifically, who are the users of your product and who are the decision makers. In the enterprise world, these are two different decision makers — your users may not be your decision makers who sign the check and approve of the product being adopted. What is the wow factor and what is your north star? What specific pain point are they facing that if you solved, they would be willing to pay for it? This in essence helps define your minimum viable product. Extracting the answers for some of these questions requires some methodologies — At Marketron, we started an advisory board of the top 10 media groups to help answer some of these questions. While the CIOs of the organizations were members of the advisory board, the station manager, the sales manager etc were additional users that used the product on a daily basis. At Amazon, we had the advantage of an already established product for customers to react to, and offer their early inputs and we used it well. I had four different types of customers to tackle, choosing which ones to go after and which markets required both an understanding of their limitations in adoption, the implementation risk and cycles and lets not forget generating quick and early feedback that we could respond to for changing our implementation models. Some of the early failures allowed us to build new technological solutions that helped scale the market quickly.

Market Roll-out — Are you selling directly to customers? Or are you selling through the channel? Are you selling through a bundled partnership with a white label product.This helps determine your achievable goals for the year. If you are hoping to capture 0.5% of a $20B market, which customers should you go after first for the rest of the market to follow? Do you want your top customers to be your first customers? There are multiple ways to tackle this and pros and cons for each approach. At Intel, we distinctly used the plan of getting the top customers to be our first customers. Top customers tended to be more advanced in their research, always looking for that competitive edge and happy to be early adopters. Once we were able to prove out technologies with these top partners, the rest of that market followed.

Go Big or Go Deep that is the question— Would you rather build one featureset really really well and capture most of the market and spread all your money on sales scaling? Or would you rather build a rich product for one top partner and continue to keep them happy. This is an often faced dilemma in the b2b product building world. A good answer would be a little bit of both. Build moat both through your product footprint and sales if you can afford it.

Pricing — How much are customers willing to pay for this product? Is it a licensing model, or is it a per seat pricing model. Is it freemium, or is it rev share? You need not have exact numbers. But a semblance of what is achievable, even a back of the envelope calculation will help determine if you are on the right track and if you should indeed be solving this problem or choosing to build this product.

Product Messaging — Internal and External communication around the product feature-set is important. This is where the idea of “benefit-value” statements either issued by the product manager helps. What are you building, who are you building it for, and how much are they willing to pay for it are all important factors. How do you determine pricing is an art in itself. Determining this early may not be an important factor. You may get away with a nominal amount as long as you capture your market footprint against the competition — “Go big, or go deep” is a constant battle in product decision making. If you are able to determine this early, then you are much ahead of the curve in terms of product planning and can mitigate some of the more costly decisions.

Answering some of these questions could be a 2–3 month process, but in my opinion well worth the exercise. I have worked for companies where the go-to-market plan comes after the product has launched and I have worked for companies where the go-to-market plan is the first thing ever written. I am in the latter school of thought. As always, please write to me if you have questions. I am at yrdeepika@gmail.com.