Abstract
This chapter describes in detail the Go-to-Market/Product Marketing PYPR dimension that represents “The Outbound Part of the Software Product Manager Role.” The outbound part of the product manager role focuses on awareness creation, translating the value of your product into leads, incremental sales opportunities, and product success in the current installed base and net new customers and users. Depending on your product, success might be measured by adoption, product profitability, or any other north star that we discussed in Chap. 4. Independent of the organizational setup, as a product manager you are indispensable in this dimension as you are heavily involved and driving this PYPR dimension or you are significantly contributing to its outcomes. As a product manager, your attention on this PYPR dimension is vital, because the Go-to-Market/Product Marketing dimension has the potential to determine product success and could easily become a limiting factor to the product’s yield potential. To safeguard product success, your attention and focus is required on the following topics:
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Sales and marketing teams are provided with useful assets to do their job
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Professional services and partner ecosystem are fully equipped for success
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Competitive landscape is monitored; insights are derived, leveraged and shared
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The market and your customers are informed about your latest capabilities and understand the positioning and value of your product
The product launch plan is the central piece of work that puts a conclusive frame around all important aspects of the Go-to-Market /Product Marketing dimension. If you consider these basics, then your chances to deliver the right messages, to the right people, at the right time significantly increases.
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- 1.
The descriptions are short repetitions from Sect. 2.2. Perhaps you missed one or more aspects of product marketing or marketing overall, but in my interpretation, this PYPR dimension is not about covering the complete 4P in marketing. I focus on the product manager role and the core tasks, responsibilities, considerations. For example, I acknowledge that pricing is an important topic, and I agree that it is worth reviewing pricing with each new launch. Nevertheless, I do not include pricing as a topic in this chapter because pricing is part of the business model overall (see Sect. 4.1) and according to the recent McKinsey PM Index, only 1% of the PM spend time on this.
- 2.
At times we prioritize tasks to de-risk development activities and gain more knowledge, but only to assure that we can build the topics providing the highest customer value.
- 3.
Which can be a competitive product or doing nothing.
- 4.
One of the books that are frequently mentioned in this domain is Geoffrey Moore’s book Crossing the Chasm (Moore, 1995).
- 5.
If you wonder where the details about Product Marketing are hidden, then I would like to direct you to Sect. 2.2.3. Product Marketing is the department frequently associated with Go-to-Market planning and execution.
- 6.
See Fig. 4.10.
- 7.
We faced the situation that some customers could not differentiate one product offering targeting sales and marketing users from another SAP® product offering targeting supply chain users. Both had components of a planning application and both leveraged machine-learning for more accurate forecasting. Our peer Software Product Managers and our team tended to ignore this perception; however it turned out that we both had to shape our product positioning for the market and for our internal sales colleagues. As a result, we saved a lot of time and we could all focus on real competitors.
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Wagenblatt, T. (2019). Go-to-Market/Product Marketing. In: Software Product Management. Management for Professionals. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19871-8_6
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