Go-to-Market Collaboration is Product Management

Derek Osgood is the CEO and founder of Ignition. 

Derek Osgood loves both product and product marketing, and he’s a big believer that the two departments should have a collaborative relationship — especially when it comes to go-to-market strategies. Derek is such a big believer that he founded a company whose platform manages go-to-market processes and helps product and product marketing teams collaborate better.

“Go-to-market, conceptually, is fairly ill-defined,” he says. “If you go ask ten people, you’re going to get ten different answers on what go-to-market actually is. … When we think about go-to-market, it’s not just net new products. That’s also new features, it’s new policies, it’s any update that requires communication to a customer and identifying who that customer is, why they should care about it, how you’re going to introduce it to them, and how you’re going to roll it out, so it’s very cross-functional, very collaborative.”

At the heart of the go-to-market process are roadmaps — note the plural. “One of the big challenges that many teams have when they try and communicate roadmaps is they try and create a one-size-fits-all roadmap,” Derek says. “The biggest piece of advice I have is just don't try and solve all of the different stakeholder information needs in one roadmap.” To improve the got-to-market methods, he suggests having three different roadmaps —one for engineering, one for product, and one for product marketing — that have clear, contextual handoffs among departments. 

Learn more from Derek, including how to break down silos, the importance of collecting continuous feedback, why adoption is a terrible metric — plus tips for avoiding the “flaming-bag pass” — on this episode of This Is Product Management.

Download the transcript:

Here are some highlights: 

• The “Flaming Bag Pass”
• Shifting from a project mindset to a product mindset
• What’s on a roadmap? 
• Collecting continuous feedback
• Most important metrics for tracking success