My fellow Balderton Capital EIR Dan Teodosiu and I recently published an article on aligning product and go-to-market teams using metrics, specifically customer-value metrics. In this post, I’ll talk a bit about the article and how we came to write it, with the hope that I’ll pique your interest in reading it.
First, a bit on the authors. The definition of EIR (here meaning executive-in-residence) varies widely — as does the job itself. At Balderton, it means that we are on-staff resources available to help portfolio companies, on an opt-in basis, with the issues that founders and executives face in building a startup. Dan focuses on technology and engineering while I focus on sales and marketing. Dan’s founded two startups as well as having technology leadership roles at Criteo, Google, and Microsoft, and I’ve been CEO of two startups in addition to having served as CMO of three. That means we are both able to see the bigger picture in addition to our purely functional views. Not to be immodest, but I’d have trouble finding two better people to write an article on how to align product/technology and go-to-market. Heck, we even had the expected us vs. them disputes!
I write a lot about aligning sales and marketing (always remember the CRO is the #1 cause of death for the CMO), but I’ve not written before about aligning product and GTM. So this was a new, fun challenge that necessarily led to strategy, organizational behavior, and leadership. Yes, often, the CEO is the cause of the problem. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve said: “You want to know whose fault this is? Grab a mirror!” But knowing that doesn’t necessarily help the particpants in a mess unless they know how to get out of it. Usually that starts by asking one simple question: why would anyone want to buy this again?
Does any of this sound familiar?
It’s a 2,750-word paper, which should take around 10 minutes to read, and I’d encourage everyone to check it out. We’ve got some nice, juicy historical examples in there where good companies, even great companies, lost the plot, forgot about customer value and wasted tons of resources as a result. Spare yourselves that pain. Or, if you’re in the thick of it already, step up and start asking the one big question: why would anyone want to buy this again?
