How to Answer Go-to-Market Strategy Questions

Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy questions assess your ability to launch a product successfully. Example questions include:

• “How would you launch a new product recommendation carousel for Amazon?”
• “How would you launch a standalone Amazon restaurant food delivery app?”
• “Come up with a launch strategy for Google Glass.”

In addition to standard strategy concerns such as company mission, product strategy, and landscape, examine your user base more carefully.

Ask yourself:

• Does the launch aim to increase engagement among existing users, or is the company targeting new users?
• How will I reach my target audience?
• How will I convince them the product is valuable?
• What additional resources and support will I need to execute the launch plan successfully?

All of these are valid paths to explore as you answer a GTM question.

Step 1: Define the landscape

At first, your approach will mirror the basic strategy question framework. You’ll work to uncover the reason for the launch and in doing so, gain an understanding of target users, define a set of product goals, and consider the competitive landscape. Then, you’ll define a reasonable GTM strategy to support those goals.

When asking clarifying questions, be sure to ask your interviewer for clarification on:

• What the product does
• How it sits in the company’s product portfolio
• Why the product is being launched

Ask yourself “What is this company seeking to do as a business, and with this product specifically?” Any feature, product, and company strategies you discuss should align. For example, if you’ve been asked to launch a new feature, consider how the feature serves to accomplish product goals. If you’ve been asked to launch a new product, consider how the product serves to accomplish company goals.

Before jumping into GTM considerations, consider the competitive landscape at hand. As in general product strategy questions, ask yourself:

• What aspects of the landscape will influence the company’s options, and ultimately its decision?
• What opportunities or challenges might I reasonably expect to face?

Step 2: Identify a GTM strategy

Go-to-market strategies vary widely from company to company. Your answer will depend on the specifics of the scenario you’re given, but, it can be helpful to read about other companies’ GTM strategies to get a sense of what’s possible. For example:

• With an inbound GTM strategy, a company creates helpful content to attract the attention of its target audience.
• A sales-driven GTM strategy empowers highly trained and often technical salespeople to sell complicated products with long sales cycles.
• A demand generation GTM strategy aims to create audience demand by generating buzz around the launch.

Note that these are very general.

As you begin the GTM portion of the question, define the subset of users who will need to see, trust, and ultimately buy into the new product or feature. Follow this two-phased approach:

• Phase 1: Identify a user segment you want to acquire, and find ways to reach them.
• Phase 2: Brainstorm how to convince those users to first try the product, and ultimately stick with it.

Finally, prioritize the approach that makes the most sense and briefly discuss how you’d execute. You can return to the standard framework for this piece.

Let’s work through an example to illustrate this process.

GTM Example: As the PM launching Spotify’s Podcast product, how would you acquire users?

First, ask clarifying questions such as:

“Do we already have a catalog of podcasts?"

"Will this product exist inside the Spotify app, or will it be a standalone offering?”

Assume your interviewer gives you the following details:

• We do have a catalog of podcasts. We will offer the most widely distributed podcasts, and we have a few exclusive deals with big names.
• The podcast product will exist inside the Spotify app. There will be a podcast tab and podcast content will be listed on the homepage.

A GTM question essentially asks how you’d acquire (the right) users for a new feature or product, so you’d want to consider why Spotify wants to acquire users before proceeding. Explore the business and product goals:

“Let’s talk about Spotify as a business and what podcasts offer. Spotify’s business is based on a tiered model, where premium users pay a subscription and free users listen to ads. Spotify wants both types of users to spend time listening so they choose to pay for a subscription or generate ad revenue.

Podcasts are a popular content type. They can cover a range of topics and they appeal to many different people. Many podcasts have avid followers, and most release new episodes at a regular cadence. Also, podcasts are a different type of content than music, allowing Spotify to diversify.”

From there, connect the dots. Summarize why launching a successful podcast product would be a win for Spotify:

“If Spotify offers a compelling podcast experience, it could convince existing free users to spend more time listening, possibly even sign up for Premium features, increasing the Lifetime value (LTV) of our customers. Podcasts could also make Spotify attractive to new types of users, for example, podcast fans who weren’t interested in the music catalog.”

Before jumping into GTM options, consider the competitive landscape:

“Podcast services are a crowded space and it’s easy to enter with the widely available catalog of content. While users may be loyal to a particular podcast, they probably don’t care what app they use to listen to as long as they like the UI. This could make it easier to acquire a user, but also easier to lose them. There may also be some inertia in getting a user to change their listening habit. The most notable differentiation is that some services have exclusive podcasts, and it sounds like Spotify will also have some.”

Use your judgment as a PM to choose a product goal and user segment that are compelling for you. For this example, based on the above, let’s assume that you decide to focus on converting existing Spotify users into podcast listeners. For instance:

“I’m going to assume that the primary goal is to convert existing Spotify users, especially free users, into podcast listeners. This strategy makes it easier to get traction within the crowded podcast landscape, and there’s a significant long-term benefit to retaining users for longer periods of time.”

Now that you’ve laid out a product goal and a target user segment, and discussed the competitive landscape, it’s time to identify GTM strategies.

Using our two-phase process for thinking about how to acquire users, start on phase 1: Identify a user group you want to reach, and find ways to reach them:

“As I think about GTM strategies, initially reaching target users is going to be easy because our goal is to convert existing Spotify users. The most obvious way to reach them is through the homepage when they open the app. We have their user information and activity data stored in our database; we may even have product usage signals to tell us who’d be interested in podcasts. In a more general sense, we can identify places our users are likely to be – e.g. reaching out through targeted ads or partnerships with other products that our users also tend to use.”

Next, move on to phase 2: Brainstorm ways to convince target users to try (and ultimately stick with) the product:

“How we convince users to try Spotify Podcasts depends on the method we use to reach them. Convenience and exclusive content are likely to drive usage. If they’re in the app, we might present a personalized recommendation for a podcast so they can see the value right away — and they’re likely already intending to listen to something. If they’re not already in the app, we could reach them through email, getting them excited about the content, or giving them a limited-time offer to try podcasts. We could also make exclusive deals with podcasters.”

As you wrap up the GTM discussion, prioritize a GTM strategy that makes sense given all your work up to this point:

“In this case, given the immediacy and the scale of users to reach, in-app promotion is the most effective. Next steps include adding podcast recommendations within the cards on the homepage, directing users to the Podcast tab, and perhaps making personalized playlists for users to check out.”

Finally, finish with an evaluation of your strategy. What are the risks, challenges, and tradeoffs that could come with this strategy? What might you consider as the long-term approach? For example:

“In the relatively near term, Spotify wants to acquire new users. The existing user base is helpful for that: Attract more exclusive deals on better terms because you can guarantee a big audience to bring in these podcast audiences. A notable challenge is that podcast users might not be inclined to subscribe to Premium because podcasts have ads burned into them already. You would need to invest in valuable Premium-only features, such as auto-download for offline listening (assuming these aren’t widely available elsewhere.)”