20 Feb What Product Managers Get Wrong About Go-to-Market
There is a version of this post that lists common GTM mistakes and tells you to avoid them. This is not that post. The pattern worth examining is not a list of errors but a single, recurring misunderstanding that produces most of them: product managers treat go-to-market as something that happens after the product is built.
It is not. And getting that sequencing wrong is expensive.
Harvard Business School puts the annual product failure rate at 95%. That number is contested, but the underlying cause is not: most product failures are not engineering failures. They are go-to-market failures. The product worked. The market did not receive it the way the team expected. And in most of those cases, the team’s expectations were formed without enough market contact to be reliable.
Launch Is Not Go-to-Market
The most common confusion is treating a product launch as a go-to-market strategy. A launch is an event. Go-to-market is a motion. The launch is the moment you make something available. The GTM strategy is the system you build to create demand, enable sales, and drive adoption over time. Conflating the two leads to what most PMs actually build: a launch checklist masquerading as a market strategy.
A real GTM strategy answers questions that most launch plans never ask. Who specifically is the buyer, and what does their decision process look like? What do they need to believe to say yes? Who else is involved in that decision, and what do they need? What does the competitive frame look like in the buyer’s mind, not the product team’s mind? What happens to a customer who buys and does not adopt? These are not launch questions. They are GTM questions, and they need answers before the product ships, not after.
Positioning Is Not Marketing’s Job
I came to product management from software engineering, and early in my PM career one of my most reliable frustrations was marketing asking me for positioning information. My reaction at the time was something close to irritation: how do they not know this? I am apparently writing copy now, and they just pretty it up?
That reaction was wrong, and understanding why it was wrong changed how I thought about the entire GTM function.
Marketing was not asking me for positioning because they were lazy or incompetent. They were asking because they genuinely did not have the context to do it well. The new features we were shipping were not the result of a single obvious customer request. They were the result of weeks or months of aggregating customer demands, prioritizing across competing needs, and making judgment calls about what would move the needle for the broadest set of buyers. Marketing was seeing the end result of that process without any of the reasoning behind it. There was simply no way they could write positioning that captured the actual customer problem we were solving.
The mindset shift was from being annoyed that I had to write copy for marketing, to understanding that we could not let marketing write the positioning statements if we wanted customers and prospects to actually recognize the value we were delivering. Those are very different orientations toward the same work.
Positioning is the work of defining how your product fits into the buyer’s existing mental model of the problem space. It requires knowing what the buyer currently uses to solve the problem, what they find frustrating about it, and how your product creates a meaningfully different outcome. That knowledge lives with the product team. When PMs abdicate positioning, they get messaging that describes features instead of outcomes, and a sales team that cannot articulate why a buyer should care.
April Dunford’s framework is useful here: positioning is not a tagline or a value proposition exercise. It is a structured decision about competitive alternatives, unique attributes, customer value, and target segments. Product managers who own that process produce better launches. Product managers who delegate it produce brochures.
The Narrowing Problem
Most product managers are afraid to narrow their target. The logic is understandable: a bigger addressable market feels safer, and narrowing feels like leaving revenue on the table. The opposite is true in practice.
Broad targeting produces generic messaging, unfocused sales motions, and customer success teams stretched across too many use cases to serve any of them well. The companies that build durable go-to-market engines typically start narrow, dominate a specific segment, and expand from a position of strength. That pattern appears consistently across successful B2B software companies. The ones that try to be everything to everyone in the early stages rarely become anything to anyone.
The discipline of defining who is not your customer is as important as defining who is. It forces clarity in positioning, focus in sales, and coherence in product development. Most PMs resist it because it feels like a constraint. It is actually a competitive advantage.
GTM Readiness Is a Product Requirement
The mindset shift that separates strong product managers from average ones is treating GTM readiness as a product requirement, not a downstream activity. That means doing customer discovery before roadmap commitments, not after. It means defining success metrics for adoption before launch, not when the CEO asks six months later why usage is flat. It means building sales enablement materials alongside the product, not as an afterthought once the engineering team ships.
The product teams that get this right ship less frequently but land more cleanly. They spend more time in discovery and less time doing post-launch damage control. Their sales teams can sell the product without the PM on every call. Their customers adopt without heavy onboarding intervention.
That is not a description of a perfect team. It is a description of a team that has internalized the idea that building the right thing and getting the market to receive it are the same job.
Sources: Harvard Business School product failure rate research; April Dunford, Obviously Awesome, 2019; Martina Lauchengco, Loved: How to Rethink Marketing for Tech Products, 2022
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