AMA: Adobe Head of Lightroom Product Marketing, Mary (Shirley) Sheehan on Go-To-Market Strategy

First of all, successful launches set a goal for a launch during the initial phases of the launc, not just slapped on at the end. If you don't know why you're launching something, and what goals you are trying to acheive, you should pause and sort this out before moving forward. Once the launch happens I like to assess the impact of the launch by channel at first weekly to spot any anomalies and make sure your launch is on track, and then at least monthly to keep up momentum and iterate if necessary. 

Ultimately I think that every launch should have one "north-star" goal and cascading KPIs, and you might see that varies by launch. For example, your north-star could be increasing Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), increasing customer Monthly Active Use (MAU), or increasing net new customers. Once you've landed on that, you should be ruthless about developing a GTM strategy that helps you hit those goals, and choosing metrics that help you understand if you are on track for those goals or not. That being said, the KPIs that I've found most common to track are: * Total web or app traffic and conversion rate * Email sends / opens / conversion rates * Product usage & MAU * Attributed ARR * Digital marketing metrics like impressions and conversion rates * Contribution of the launch to Marketing Qualified Leads MQLs (for B2B)

The best way to start with a GTM strategy is to assess your strategic readiness before building out the plan. For example, do you know the audience you are targeting, the positioning, the packaging and pricing? Have you assembled your core internal GTM team? Have you established the key goals and metrics for your launch? Once you have these key items answered, it makes it much easier to build out the plan.

Ideally, before a launch, you have worked hand-in-hand with the product team to understand who the product is for, and what product it solves. But if you are coming into a situation where this is not defined, here are some ways to approach it: * Ask the "dumb" questions to your product and eng team (other people WILL want to know them too): Who is this for? What pain points does this solve? Why did we build this? * Develop a hypothesis on who the customer is and test it, stat. This could be in the alpha or beta process, or in separate user testing. As far as operationalizing the ideal customer as part of your GTM strategy, once you are fairly confident about the ideal customer, I'd recommend: * Reviewing your GTM checklist and making sure the channels align to where these customers are spending time. * Using results of the above-mentioned testing to make sure the messages align to what the customers care about. * Watch the results like a hawk. Are the customers you thought would buy actually buying? Why or why not?

For each "Tier 1" launch, I typically create: * A GTM checklist (which is your Bible, includes metrics, links, as well as key drivers of the project) * A launch brief to share with creative in-house teams or agencies * A product communication doc with specs of the feature and any talking points (co-developed with product) * A messaging document that gives the core messages behind what we're launching