by Mariana Abdala
Think back on the last 10 years. Can you remember a seemingly well-concepted, useful product from a reputable company that hit the market, but ultimately failed? Why do you think it failed?
More often than not, there are two reasons: either the product was not satisfying customer needs or the customer didn’t grasp the product’s value. A team can spend months crafting an exceptional product strategy, only to discover that customers never perceive its value or never hear about it in the first place. The gap between what a company builds and what a customer buys is bridged by a go-to-market (GTM) strategy. A GTM strategy is the connective tissue between product decisions and customer experience. Product Managers should not leave this work to Marketing and Sales teams without getting involved and properly preparing their stakeholders. Here’s why.
Product & Market Drift Apart
Early in a product’s life, alignment feels natural. The Product team and stakeholders are close to the customer, iterating quickly, and reacting directly to feedback. The story of the product is simple and coherent.
As an organization grows, that clarity fragments, and as the product reaches different levels of complexity and maturity, it’s easy to get distracted in the details of the development cycle. This is the point at which we are forced to divide and conquer; Marketing starts owning messaging, Sales adjusts positioning based on deals, Product teams continue refining based on roadmap priorities.
The result is a widening gap between product intent and market perception.
A strong GTM strategy closes that gap. It ensures that how you talk about the product matches how it actually creates value. It connects product insight to commercial reality. This strategy is everyone’s responsibility, not just the Product team’s or the Marketing team’s.
Translating Product Insight into Market Language
Every great GTM plan begins with product truth—the set of insights about what your product does uniquely well and why that matters. But truth alone is not enough. It has to be translated into a language the market understands. That translation begins by reframing features into outcomes.
Instead of real-time data dashboards, it becomes faster decisions with fewer meetings.
Instead of AI-powered recommendations, it becomes acting before competitors react.
A solid GTM strategy simplifies without diluting. It bridges the internal logic of the product with the external logic of customer motivation. It turns capability into clarity.
Positioning as a Strategic Decision
Positioning is a decision, not a tagline, about which customers you are choosing to serve and which you are willing to ignore. You need to analyze and thoroughly understand your customer segments in order to land on good positioning statements and messaging that supports those statements. When teams skip this step, they fall into generic messaging that appeals to no one in particular. A clear position defines both the audience and the context in which your product wins.
Strong positioning statements have three components:
Customer context: what situation are they in?
Value shift: what problem changes because of your product?
Competitive contrast: why is your approach distinct?
A well-defined position allows every downstream GTM activity, including pricing, campaigns, adoption, and enablement, to align around a single narrative. It reduces interpretation risk because everyone knows the story they are telling.
During my time leading product initiatives at Williams-Sonoma, positioning became a pivotal strategic decision in how we rolled out digital experiences across our Pottery Barn, West Elm, and Williams-Sonoma Home brands. One example was our work on mobile and omni-channel enhancements.
At one point, multiple Brand teams were experimenting with offering new features that supported product discovery, registry tools, and new experiences like Augmented Reality product previews. However customers weren’t perceive them as part of a larger cohesive experience, and we realized it was because there was no single strategy or narrative tying everything together into one story for the customers. The GTM challenge wasn’t articulating the features themselves; it was who we were building it for and why.
When we reframed the positioning around a specific customer context, that being “time-pressed shoppers seeking confidence in high-consideration purchases”, everything clicked. Our messaging shifted from “new app features” to “helping customers buy with certainty, from anywhere.” This clarified the value story for Brand Marketing, guided how store associates talked about digital tools, and ensured that each feature launch reinforced a consistent narrative rather than a scattered set of upgrades.
The GTM Engine: Where Strategy Becomes Execution
Once positioning and messaging are clear, GTM becomes a system of rhythm and learning. At its best, it is not a one-time launch motion but a continuous loop.
Product teams share what customers value most.
Marketing tests which messages convert and validate Product’s assumptions on value prop.
Sales surfaces objections and unmet needs.
Each signal feeds back into the next iteration of the product and its story. This loop prevents the organization from treating GTM as an endpoint. Instead, it becomes part of the product lifecycle. Every release, feature, or change becomes another opportunity to refine the narrative and strengthen alignment.
I’ve observed that the most effective GTM teams operate like cross-functional squads. Product, marketing, sales, and customer success each own part of the customer journey but share a single definition of success: adoption and retention.
The GTM Loop
At Williams-Sonoma, this GTM engine was essential as we evolved the Pottery Barn mobile app and in-store digital tools. We shipped features in tight loops and treated every release as a hypothesis:
Product monitored adoption patterns in the app and store interactions.
Marketing tested narratives about design confidence, convenience, and personalization.
Retail teams reported friction points and customer objections directly from stores.
That closed-loop system informed subsequent roadmap decisions, sometimes validating a direction, sometimes prompting us to pivot. GTM wasn’t a launch checklist. It was an engine that aligned how we built, how we talked about value, and how customers experienced it.
Change Management Is Also GTM
GTM isn’t limited to external products. Internal platforms, shared services, and foundational capabilities need it just as much, if not more, because internal users behave like markets: they have habits, perceptions, incentives, and competing tools.
For internal products, change management is GTM.
You still need:
Clear positioning (“Why this tool? Why now?”)
Messaging (“What changes for me?”)
Segmentation (different functions adopt differently)
Enablement (training, support, ongoing reinforcement)
If internal teams don’t understand the value or don’t believe it will make their work easier, they won’t adopt it, regardless of how elegant the solution is. Internal GTM ensures that new capabilities land with context, confidence, and clarity, turning organizational change into measurable behavior change.
The Takeaway
A strong GTM strategy is how product vision becomes market reality. It ensures that what you build and what customers experience stay in sync, even as the organization grows and technology evolves. When product and market move together, when insight meets execution, growth and adoption become intentional, repeatable, and real.
