Martin Raygoza

The best way to ensure that you are successful in an interview is to demonstrate a clear structure of thought and understanding of the questions being asked. One effective method to achieve this is to outline the steps involved in your thought process. This approach shows your understanding of the task and showcases your ability to navigate it. Here is an example of step by step process when creating a GTM strategy you could use to answer the question: Answer: There is no one-size-fits-all GTM strategy; it will vary significantly depending on the specific product, target audience, market conditions, and other factors unique to each business. However, there are some general considerations I can share to help you structure your strategy. Every strategy should have three main phases: Pre-launch, Launch, and Post-launch. Pre-Launch Phase: * External Analysis: Understand your market (target audience), competitors, industry, government policies (if applicable), threats, and opportunities. * Internal Analysis: The easiest way to ensure you don't miss any critical components of your internal analysis is to cover the five Ps of marketing: Product, Price, Promotion, Place, and People. Ensure you create your strategy with all these elements in mind. The Pre-Launch phase could take the longest, but it will also define 60% of your strategy's success, in my opinion. The other 30% is execution, and 10% is learning and improving. Launch Phase: * Define Clear Goals: This phase is all about execution. But before you can execute a plan, you must have clear objectives and KPIs to measure your success. * Activate Your Sales Channels: Understand how to get your product to the end customer. Map out the best channels to achieve this. Be aware that more channels are not necessarily better in this case. You may want to stick to one profitable channel, especially in the initial stages of your product. * Know Who You Are and What You Offer: At the first stages, awareness must be your primary marketing goal. Whether you're introducing a new product or entering a fiercely competitive industry, if consumers don't know you exist or why you're a better option than everything else on the market, you'll struggle to get them interested in your product. Post-Launch Phase: * Feedback: Ensure you're getting as much feedback as possible from different perspectives: clients, consumers, and distributors. At this point, this feedback becomes your most valuable source of information. It's the actual feeling your product has in the real world, and you need to get the most honest feedback if you truly want to improve and grow.

I can’t recall any specific question but I can share some musts that I look for when asking people to share an experience with a product marketing strategy. The interviewee should be able to explain: * The problem to solve * How their solution attacked the problem * How they managed internal processes and cross functional alignments * External challenges and how they solve them * Main results for the project (align to main business objectives)

Creating a category could be one of the most complicated process for any organization. It is very important that you make sure your company has the resources necessary for this. Here are 3 questions I would ask my business before thinking on expanding to new categories: 1. Will my core business be protected?: The biggest mistake you could make is to unprioritized the part of your business that brings the most value to the company. Unless you can be certain your main revenue stream is safe, I wouldn't suggest start exploring for new categories. Of course there could be situations where you need to create a new category because your core business is dying or competition is catching up, in this case this will be part of your strategy, but you still need to make sure you don't kill the cash cow before time. 2. Do you have enough resources? : Think of a new category almost as a new business. Of course you'll be able to find efficiencies with your current operation. But mostly a new category means going for new customers and this requieres a whole set of different skills, people and go to market strategies. 3. How connected is this new category with your core business? : Creating a new category is challenging by itself but you can make it easier by avoiding going to far from you main activity, for example: if you are in the soda business you could move to alcoholic beverages before thinking on moving to chips or sweets. The same if you are a clothing company, you will have a better chance to succeed if you move to footwear than going to the tech industry.

Some of the most important decisions you need to consider as a product manager are: 1. How competed is the new category?: There is no right answer. More competition means more barrier to enter but less means fewer information at your disposal. Just make sure your strategy consider the external factors as-well. 2. Champion products: Could sound obvious but there are products that with minimal adjustments could serve more than one category. Example Soda and Soda with alcohol. Staying close to your core expertise could facilitate things for you when entering new spaces. 3. Test and learn fast: get into the start-up spirit of fail, learn and upgrade as fast as you can. Pilot projects could be a great a idea for minimizing risk. 4. Have a good user feedback process in place: Probably the most important of all is to understand how your brand or new product will be perceived. So make sure you have a robust feedback process in place at different stages when creating the new category

There are several risks you may encounter while creating your GTM strategy. Here are the three most common ones in my opinion: Incorrect Target Audience * Impact: Targeting an incorrect audience can result in wasted marketing efforts and ineffective sales strategies. Essentially, you could have an excellent product for the wrong people. * Mitigation: Ensure you invest sufficient time and resources in the pre-launch stage to conduct thorough market research. This will help you understand your ideal customer profile, including demographics, needs, wants, and pain points. Use customer personas to guide your targeting efforts. Ineffective Pricing Strategy * Impact: Pricing can define the future of your business, especially if you are a one-product company. Pricing too high can alienate customers, while pricing too low can damage your brand perception and profitability. * Mitigation: Conduct competitor analysis and market research to determine an optimal pricing strategy. Consider offering different pricing tiers to cater to different customer segments. Inefficient Distribution Channels * Impact: Knowing your target audience is as important as understanding how to reach them. Get this wrong, and you could limit product accessibility and affect sales. * Mitigation: Choose distribution channels that align with your target audience's buying habits and preferences. In the initial stages, I would advise to stick to a single channel, first learn and improve and then scale.

The great thing about being the underdog is that you can also be the disruptor. The category's leader role is to maintain its position, this limits how many risk they can take and usually makes them over confident. So if you find your company in this position my suggestion would be to follow the path of the disruptor. There have been many companies in the past that enter a category in a second place or even in a later stage and now they lead that category. In this situation it will all come back to your business strategy and capabilities. One important watch out when trying to disrupt a category is make sure you are doing it for the right reasons. Disruption just for the sake of doing things different doesn't normally work in long term, you have to make sure what you are offering brings actual value to the category and the consumer

There is no one-size-fits-all GTM strategy; it will vary significantly depending on the specific product, target audience, market conditions, and other factors unique to each business. However, there are some general considerations I can share to help you structure your strategy. Every strategy should have three main phases: Pre-launch, Launch, and Post-launch. Pre-Launch Phase: * External Analysis: Understand your market (target audience), competitors, industry, government policies (if applicable), threats, and opportunities. * Internal Analysis: The easiest way to ensure you don't miss any critical components of your internal analysis is to cover the five Ps of marketing: Product, Price, Promotion, Place, and People. Ensure you create your strategy with all these elements in mind. The Pre-Launch phase could take the longest, but it will also define 60% of your strategy's success, in my opinion. The other 30% is execution, and 10% is learning and improving. Launch Phase: * Define Clear Goals: This phase is all about execution. But before you can execute a plan, you must have clear objectives and KPIs to measure your success. * Activate Your Sales Channels: Understand how to get your product to the end customer. Map out the best channels to achieve this. Be aware that more channels are not necessarily better in this case. You may want to stick to one profitable channel, especially in the initial stages of your product. * Ensure They Know Who You Are and What You Offer: At the first stages, awareness must be your primary marketing goal. Whether you're introducing a new product or entering a fiercely competitive industry, if consumers don't know you exist or why you're a better option than everything else on the market, you'll struggle to get them interested in your product. Post-Launch Phase: * Feedback: Ensure you're getting as much feedback as possible from different perspectives: clients, consumers, and distributors. At this point, this feedback becomes your most valuable source of information. It's the actual feeling your product has in the real world, and you need to get the most honest feedback if you truly want to improve and grow.

I would suggest to think of entering or creating new categories with the same complexities of creating a new business. So definitely it is easier to promote products. Depending on how far form you core business will be the level of difficulty of creating a new category, so I would suggest to try to stake within your industry and your sector. When deciding to start on this journey make sure you are taking into consideration both internal and external factors: Internal: Resources available; expertise of your team; time available. External: Saturation in the new category; entry barriers; policies and legal considerations. But the most important thing to consider before you decide to create a new category is to make sure your core business is protected and prioritized.

It is relatively easy to get it wrong when creating a new category, the complication is in the word "new". So it is very important to make sure you understand all the implications for your business to reduce the possibility of failure. Here is in my opinion some of the most common mistake done by organizations trying to expand to new categories. 1. Bad resource management: You must make sure you understand the economics of this decision for your business in every way: People, money, know-how and time. 2. It work once it will work again: You need to treat this almost as a new business and no a new product line. What help you succeed before could be a good north star, but bear in mind you are entering unexplored waters and you must be smart and humble to learn before going all in. 3. We don't need new expertise: Depending on the situation of your business, you might need to think on recruiting new people to help you understand this new process. It might seem something you would want to safe money at the beginning but not having the right expertise could be the difference of succeeding or not when creating a new category. 4. Too big too far: If possible try to stay within a sensible range of your main activity. If you want to be over disruptive you need to understand that you will need to consider more of everything (more resources, more knowledge, more variables to fail) to make it happen.

To be a product marketer you will need different skills but these are my must-have skills: 1. Customer Insight knowledge: Make sure you really understand your target customer. And make sure you fall in love with the problem you are trying to solve and not with the solution. This means no matter the product you are launching you should always go back to answer how you are serving your user or customer. 2. Strategic Thinking: You must have a strategy in place and make sure you understand market trends, competitor positioning, and customer needs. 3. Cross-functional Collaboration: Product marketers are the bridge between different teams within an organization. Your goal should be to ensure effective collaboration to ensure alignment on product goals and go-to-market strategies