The three-leg stool of GTM

Sales, marketing and product

If you’re an open source startup, you should be following a product-led growth strategy, at the very least for your open source project, in the vast majority of cases. And if you’re following a product-led growth strategy, your product strategy is a critical component of your growth strategy.

I’ve seen a fair number of discussions lately about the relationship between product leadership and engineering / CPOs and CTOs. But to me, thinking of product leadership as intimately connected primarily to engineering is wrong. Perhaps because I’m not an engineer myself, but engineering is about the how, while product, sales and marketing together figure out the what and the why.

In short, I think if you’re talking about growth, and especially if it’s ‘product-led’ growth, your product leadership has to be at the table with marketing and sales. Not just at the table, but peers in the discussion.

When I work with companies on positioning, I think very few (not zero — sometimes it is the CPO who reaches out to me first) of them start the exercise intending to alter their product roadmap in any way. But a good portion of my clients do end up adjusting their roadmap as a result of the positioning exercise.

Growth is fastest when there’s alignment, both internal and external. Alignment between what the product delivers, what the marketing team proclaims on the website and what the sales team says during demos. This does not look like the product team whipping up some software with engineering, then wishing the marketing and sales team good luck. It only happens through tight collaboration and feedback between the three: You get feedback from sales about why people buy, you see what language works in marketing campaigns, you have both product and marketing teams do user/customer interviews… and you adjust your product roadmap, your sales strategy and your messaging as a result.

Of course, you need that external alignment too: That’s usually called product-market fit. Your product meets the needs of the market. But finding that external alignment is only possible if you find internal alignment first. You will only get your company aligned internally if product, sales and marketing are working together to discover the desires of your users and customers and deliver something that meets them.