What’s the other half?

Empowering go-to-market teams & creating cross-functional alignment.

Skipping this half puts the product in jeopardy.

When GO TO MARKET & support teams are out of sync, a lot can go wrong.

Regardless of how great the product is, if it struggles to find its way to the “right” customers (& sticks), growth will taper out.

Below are “some” questions cross-functional teams should be brought up before or during the rollout of new product updates.

(Don’t get overwhelmed – while PMs/PMMs can facilitate a number of these, all the questions don’t need to be answered by them. The conversation, however, needs to happen in some capacity.)

Product Marketing

1. What’s our unique value proposition?

2. How do we verbalize the benefits?

3. Who is this for? What audience pools are we targeting?

4. What message themes make sense?

Sales

1. What’s the benefit of the feature? Who will benefit?

2. How do I demo it end to end?

3. How is it better than the competition?

4. What’s in store for the future? Is there a roadmap for this?

5. How is this priced? What tier does it show up on?

Leadership

1. How does this align with the vision & strategy?

2. What does it solve, and for whom?

3. How does it work?

4. Did we test it with customers?

5. How will we monetize it?

6. Why now?

Customer Success

1. Why did we build this?

2. What existing customers have been asking for it?

3. How does this make the product sticky & retentive?

4. How does this translate to business impact?

5. How do we measure it? 

6. Can we add its performance to a QBR template?

Analytics

1. What trackers do we need for this?

2. What metrics make sense to track? What benchmarks make sense?

3. How should we represent this on dashboards?

4. What do these metrics mean for the customer?

Customer Support

1. Can we get a step-by-step walkthrough?

2. What edge cases should we be aware of?

3. What are some known defects & limitations? Workarounds?

4. How should we update our training & call scripts?

5. What’s the escalation procedure for this?

Informed cross-functional teams mean customers will receive a coherent experience – both on and off-product.