Go-to-Market is Product Management
Karthik Suresh is the CTO and co-founder of Ignition.
Karthik Suresh has extensive experience building and launching products across consumer, enterprise, and data domains. He’s led product teams at both early-stage startups and tech giants — perhaps the names Facebook and Craft ring a bell.
Karthik believes companies should have product marketing managers (PMMs), in addition to product managers. And he believes PMMs need their own tool to take products to market. It’s why he co-founded Ignition, “the first system of record for go-to-market — a collaborative hub to plan, execute, and measure launches.”
He also has his own thoughts on what constitutes a go-to-market strategy: “Who’s your target audience, how are you positioning the product, and how are you messaging the product so it’s very clear to your target audience what the value prop is? Then what are the channels you’re using to get to those people? All of these put together is what defines a go-to-market strategy.”
There are many elements to take a product to market successfully. “Sending an email to a customer is not a launch,” Karthik says. “You need a multi-channel approach for introducing products to people. You need to think about how you best position it with respect to competitors. What messaging really appeals to your users? And you shouldn’t be spending all your time on just micro launches. You need to actually have a plan for a macro launch.”
Get more of Karthik’s take on PMs, PMMs, and go-to-market strategies — plus why “user research is probably one of the most important parts of … product management or product development in general” — on this episode of This Is Product Management.
Here are the highlights:
- Employing a tiering structure
- Time and resource allocation
- The relevance of user research
- Career advice for PMs and PMMs
- The importance of empathy
Subscribe now!
Get our new reports, case studies, podcasts, articles and events
