95: How to form a go-to-market strategy

I’m writing about 100 things I’ve learned the hard way about product management. You can catch up on the previous entries if you like.

A go-to-market strategy isn’t something you tack on as an afterthought to an upcoming product launch. Instead it’s about understanding where value exchanges occur, and figuring out how to make them more frequent, consistent and predictable.

In this article

• Introduction
• The value exchange
• What is a go-to-market strategy?
• One approach is to work backwards
• The limits of working backwards
• Go-to-market emerges from your discovery
• Traditional thinking about go-to-market
• Product-led growth and sales
• Final thoughts
• Further reading

The value exchange

Ever since ancient humans started to barter instead of beating each other over the head and taking what they wanted, at the heart of every business transaction has been a value exchange. Each party swaps something that they (usually) regard of lesser value for something they value more. Best of all, both parties walk away from the transaction without head injuries and with a general willingness to trade again in the future.

This works because the value of something varies depending on the perspective and the context. People tend to value a thing they need (and don’t have) more than people who don’t need it (and may have lots of).

In our more enlightened¹ times, we typically think first of trading money for a product or service. This mostly works because we regard money literally as a common currency: the dollar in my hand is worth the same as the dollar in yours². Providing we can establish that our product is needed by the person we’re trying to sell it to, we should be able to exchange it for money. However, a value exchange can easily take other forms.

Imagine a market where several companies are reliant on a small number of suppliers. One company decides to adopt a policy of paying its suppliers immediately despite the downside to its cash flow. Immediate payment is of value to the suppliers for the same reason. And in return, the company asks its suppliers for preferential pricing or perhaps exclusivity (assuming they avoid falling foul of competition law). This is a different form of value: strategic advantage.

Product management is often about identifying possible value exchanges that are commercially worthwhile for all parties.

What is a go-to-market strategy?

In many commercial settings, a go-to-market strategy is a plan devised by the marketing department to augment their social budget under the guise of a product launch, i.e. to have a big party that is attended mostly by the marketing team.

What a go-to-market strategy is meant to be is a way of describing the details and sequencing of a process to allow that value exchange to take place, ideally lots of times. It should be the most expedient way to get a product satisfying a specific need into the hands of the people with that specific need, and to extract payment in return reflecting the value to the customer of addressing that need. Being able to describe it simply doesn’t mean it’s easy to do well, however.

Aside from the challenges of identifying a valuable need in the first place, successfully building a product that addresses that need, and doing all of that in a way that costs less than you’ll get back by selling that product to lots of people, a go-to-market strategy has to be a little more sophisticated than simply pointing at the product and shouting, ‘It’s here!’ There are usually lots of people involved from different disciplines, all of whom require different amounts of the overall context to do their own jobs effectively.

One approach is to work backwards

One way of forming a go-to-market strategy is to work backwards from the value exchange you’ve identified by answering the question, ‘How do we make that happen more frequently / consistently / predictably?’

Imagine you’re running a coffee shop and you’ve chosen to focus on encouraging groups of people to stay and chat over a few coffees and food. From your research with this niche, you’ve already established their context and what they value (their needs). Although these people do come for the coffee and food, it’s probably more important to them that they enjoy their time with their friends. If your coffee shop can provide all of this to the people who need it, then you should be able to exchange that value for enough profitable purchases of drinks and food to cover your running costs and then some.

Working backwards, your go-to-market strategy might include ensuring an ambience conducive to chatting, providing comfy seating, and training staff to gently encourage additional purchases (such as more coffee or snacks) as a customer finishes their initial order. You might also consider advertising directly to people more likely to have time on their hands and a willingness to socialise during the day. And of course, the coffee and food would have to be good enough to get people to visit and stay to have more of it.

The limits of working backwards

The problem with this simplistic approach is that it implicitly assumes that there is a single value exchange to work back from. In reality, a business can only grow and sustain itself if it’s able to keep most of its existing paying customers coming back (because it costs money to acquire a customer in the first place), and to attract more new customers than it loses to churn. There are really multiple needs and value exchanges happening beyond the initial sale of the product, and the challenge is for the business to figure out where they occur through experimentation and user research.

Coffee shops might encourage return visits by rewarding regular customers with a free drink every now and again; they might encourage groups to return by allowing reservations of the comfiest seats; or encourage word-of-mouth referrals by rewarding regular customers who bring along friends.

The go-to-market strategy is a connected system of multiple approaches, each of whose efficacy have to be tested. Comfy seating intended for groups might end up being monopolised by lone laptop users who don’t buy as much as the intended ideal customer, so the coffee shop might entice them to sit elsewhere by only providing convenient power points in a different area. The business is a system that includes many value exchanges beyond the primary one, and adjusting that system in one place will often require trade-offs in another.

Go-to-market emerges from your discovery

Working backwards from a value exchange kinda works when thinking about a comparatively well-established business system such as selling coffee: most of the dimensions of quality, delivery and experience have already been explored by large chains, small independents and everything in between. Our own familiarity with the means of supply and consumption give us plenty of prior context, and that gives us (possibly unearned) confidence on what is likely to work and why.

This is also why working backwards won’t necessarily work as well when thinking about the go-to-market strategy for a novel product or service. At the outset, we don’t yet have enough context of what will work and why in order to home in on the right approach to take. In this less well understood scenario, although we may have some hunches, we don’t yet know precisely when and how our users or customers will experience different kinds of value, and what they would be willing to exchange with us in return for that value. This is where many go-to-market strategies fall down. They work off too many untested assumptions and simply don’t hit their mark.

The good news is that this is a previously solved problem. When we do discovery for our product or feature by conducting user and market research, we’re trying to refine and test our assumptions about four things:

1. Identifying the need: What is the unmet need that is valuable to a group of people?

2. People with the need: Who are the people who have that valuable need, what are their shared characteristics and context, and where would you reach them?

3. Meeting the need: What are the different ways you can meet that need, and which ones will work best for the people with the need?

4. Value exchange: Of these ways of meeting the need, which ones will allow your business to sustain itself and ideally make a profit by doing so?

These four things provide the essential context you need to figure out whether it makes sense to pursue the idea in the first place and build a business model around it. They also begin to give you strong clues about your go-to-market strategy, which emerges naturally alongside the product itself as your ongoing research and experimentation deepens your understanding.

Traditional thinking about go-to-market

Since E. Jerome McCarthy published Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach in 1960, go-to-market has traditionally focused on a different set of four things: Product, Price, Place (or distribution) and Promotion (the Four Ps). Your earlier discovery work leads you to figure out what each of the Four Ps should be:

As should be second nature to you by now, the product draws on everything you learn from identifying the need, people, meeting the need and value exchange, which in turn inform how you package and place (distribute) the product to the customers it’s meant for, in a commercially sustainable manner.

The value exchange and your business model determine what price you should charge customers, and how you structure the payments in a mutually beneficial way for your company and your customers. (Pricing strategy is a series of articles all by itself, and for another time.)

Your research into the people, their context and when they typically experience the most value from the solution help you determine the place (or ‘your method of product distribution’) – or in other words, how and where customers will access the product – and how best to promote (and sell) the product to them.

Rather than treating go-to-market strategy as an afterthought once the product has been created, you can and should be gathering the information you need while researching and developing the product, and sharing it with the people (marketing, product marketing, customer success) who will later be responsible for executing the go-to-market plan. That is, providing you’re talking regularly to the people who will actually be using and buying the eventual product as you go along.

Product-led growth and sales

Two approaches to go-to-market strategy have become more popular particularly for cloud-based and SaaS (Software as a Service) products. Product-led growth (PLG) and product-led sales (PLS) both take a ‘show, don’t tell’ approach to value. They are better suited to browser-based products with established product-market fit because it keeps the bar to entry for new users nice and low. Everyone they’re bothered about selling to will have a browser already, so no software to download before they can use the product.

The basic idea for both is that people discover and start using the product for free. So far, so freemium. However, the product itself proactively guides the user to discover its value to them by helping them to complete a valuable task. This happens without much traditional (and costly) marketing and sales involvement.

Ideally the product demonstrates enough of its value while it’s being used in order to prompt the user to purchase or subscribe without human intervention (in the case of PLG). It then continues progressively unlocking more value for the user to retain them over time. It’s similar to the way immersive video games progressively engage, challenge and train the player through natural gameplay and just enough challenge to encourage them to stick with the game.

PLS (product-led sales) is a related approach that uses live product usage analytics to identify users at the point they are experiencing the most value, thereby creating ‘product-qualified leads’, which a traditional sales team can then work to close.

In both cases, the product is effectively driving its own growth in a compounding loop. By having it’s entry point on the web, the product’s landing page sets out a compelling value proposition and ideally becomes the preferred destination from search results. The entire purpose of the landing page is to funnel people into their first use of the product itself, and their first direct experience of value with as little friction as possible – show, don’t tell. In exchange for that initial value, the ask is to get them to sign up, often positioned as a way from them to preserve that initial value by ‘saving’ what they’ve just achieved.

If you’ve done your job right, your product can build on this good start by helping them to unlock more value, and to re-engage them when their first and subsequent sessions end. At a very basic level, you’re using the product to help users to establish a habit loop: trigger, behaviour, reward (= value).

Trigger: “I need to do this task quickly and easily”

Behaviour: “I’ll use that new online tool I tried out the other day”

Reward: “Job done, quick and easy, and I’m pleased with the results”

This habit becomes your product’s retention loop.

Fast-forward a bit and the user is now reliant on your product for this task, and their usage is increasing. At an appropriate point, your product can offer them the possibility of future, additional value (more of what they want, with less friction) in return for a paid subscription. And if your product can continue to unlock new types of value for the user, it will further drive both the retention loop and perhaps start driving the referral loop, where one experienced user promotes it for you to someone else, and perhaps gets some additional perk in return.

Because the product itself becomes the mechanism for most of the go-to-market and growth strategy, it also becomes the test bed for figuring out which things are valued most by the people.

Final thoughts

A go-to-market plan is often used to describe a one-and-done launch event. However go-to-market strategy is something that starts to form long before, while you’re exploring the problem and solution spaces in product discovery.

Your bets on where users will unlock value by using your product will remain guesswork until you build in ways to test whether your understanding of users’ needs is accurate.

Unlike the approach I described at the beginning of working backwards from a single value exchange, a more sophisticated approach builds habitual usage of your product. The go-to-market strategy needs to consider a progression of frequent value exchanges, each with a appropriately sized ‘ask’. Together they reinforce desirable, connected and compounding growth loops including user acquisition, activation (sign-ups), retention, monetisation (conversion to paid) and referral.

Increasingly, the Four Ps have all become intertwined, with the product itself becoming the mechanism for all. A product manager should never be thinking just about the feature, but about the value it unlocks for the user and what to ask for in return, and how to encourage a habit loop – the trigger, behaviour and reward – that allows the value exchange to happen as predictably and frequently as possible. This is what your go-to-market strategy is ultimately all about.

Further reading

1. ‘E. Jerome McCarthy‘, Wikipedia, 22 May 2026 [accessed 7 July 2026]
2. ‘How to build a winning go-to-market strategy [including template]‘, Paddle, (undated) [accessed 7 July 2026]
3. Adigun, Olajumoke, ‘How solo Product managers can own go-to-market strategy in lean teams‘, Mind the Product, 23 October 2025 [accessed 7 July 2026]
4. Belsito, Mike, ‘Deep dive: A product manager’s guide to product launches‘, Mind the Product, 11 December 2024 [accessed 7 July 2026]
5. Black, Zoe, ‘Interactive Video GTM Strategy at Vimeo‘, Reforge, 3 August 2023 [accessed 7 July 2026]
6. Busuttil, Jock, ‘89: What games taught me about customer onboarding‘, I Manage Products, 3 May 2023 [accessed 7 July 2026]
7. Busuttil, Jock, ‘PRODUCTHEAD: The value of a drink in the desert‘, I Manage Products, 17 July 2023 [accessed 7 July 2026]
8. Dunford, April, ‘Value vs. Objection Handling‘, Positioning with April Dunford, 6 February 2025 [accessed 7 July 2026]
9. Etsion, Yohay, ‘Product orgs: Owning decisions to steer the future‘, Mind the Product, 28 January 2025 [accessed 7 July 2026]
10. Patel, Neil, ‘4 Ps of Marketing: Definition, How-To & Examples’, NP Digital, 2 June 2025 [accessed 7 July 2026]
11. Sanchez, Elias, ‘Fungibility: The Legal Fiction at the Heart of Modern Money‘, The Cobden Centre, 25 July 2025 [accessed 7 July 2026]
12. Tharin, Leah, ‘Leah’s Product-led Growth Guide 3.0‘, Leah’s ProducTea, 16 March 2023 [accessed 7 July 2026]
13. Tharin, Leah, and Vincent Jong, ‘#3 – Leah Tharin @ Leah’s ProducTea‘, Growth Machines, 10 March 2024 [accessed 7 July 2026]
14. Saez, Andrea, and Vijay Damojipurapu, ‘Understanding the Nuances of a Launch in GTM: A Conversation with Andrea Saez‘, B2B Go-To-Market Leaders, 26 June 2024 [accessed 7 July 2026]
15. Wallace, Christina, ‘Go-To-Market Strategy‘, Rock Center for Entrepreneurship, Harvard Business School, 2021 [accessed 7 July 2026]