I love having checklist’s to ensure that I am not forgetting important repetitive steps of a feature development. Let us discuss the benefit’s a little later but first let us discuss why do we even need to worry about building a Go-To-Market activity checklist?
Most product managers believe that the most important KPI for them is to “ship“ the feature. You can ship 100 features but they are of no use if the customers are unable to discover them or find value in them. There are a few basic steps that should be added to your go-to-market activity checklist.
| Channels | Activities | Details |
|---|---|---|
| Website | Product pages | Update the feature on existing page/ create a new page |
| Hello Bar / Popup | Adding a nudge on the website to inform the users about the new feature | |
| Blog Post | A blog post explaining the new feature | |
| Inapp | Walkthrough | Feature walkthrough using a tool like Appcues , Whatfix etc |
| Chat drip | Creating a drip campaign using inapp chat tools like intercom , drift etc to drive adoption | |
| Feedback Survey | Preparing surveys to collect feedback | |
| Upgrade Nudges | In-app nudges to upgrade (For example if the feature is available for higher-tier plans then you can create nudges to push people from lower plans to upgrade) | |
| Feature launch email | A launch email sent to customers or to subscribers of newsletters | |
| Nurturing emails | Drip email campaigns to ensure adoption of the feature | |
| Education/Use-case emails | Educating the users about the important use cases that can be solved with the feature | |
| Social | Content distribution | Blogs , use cases , ebooks etc distributed across various social channels |
| Paid Ads | Running paid ads to promote the feature | |
| Internal Enablement | Sales training | Educating the team about use cases , pricing, selling strategy etc |
| Customer success training | Educating the team about use cases , pricing, selling strategy etc | |
| Support team training | Educating the team about use cases , technical case handling etc. | |
| Collaterals | Building collaterals (battle cards , use case document etc) | |
| Pricing | Plan details | Plan feature matrix updation |
| Pricing page | Updating the pricing page |
The activities mentioned in the above checklist may or may not be applicable to every feature that you build but it definitely won’t let you miss out on important steps required to ensure that the product/feature is properly shipped.
It is time that we change our definition of done from ‘shipping’ the features to ensuring that the features are being well adopted.
If you maintain your PRDs in confluence then you can create a template of the above checklist and ensure that it is being used for every feature launch.
I would love to know more about the activities that you feel are important to add in this Go-To-Market activity checklist.
P.S. In this entire process it is important that you capture product usage data to measure and learn more about the usage patterns. Read this article to learn more about it.
