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Chapter 19The One-Sheet Product Go-to-Market Canvas

One recent fall morning, the product team at Bandwidth was concerned with solving a thorny problem: the top 10 accounts at the company weren't growing as fast as the next 50. Here's the kicker: the next 50 accounts had vastly different needs than those of the top 10. This was causing friction around how to prioritize development and go-to-market.

John Bell is a smiler and exudes level-headedness. It has served him well leading products at Bandwidth for a decade. As he listened intently to the team discuss solutions, it was clear that for long-term growth, they needed to focus more on companies like those 50—and really push for better alignment between product and all the go-to-market teams.

Bandwidth provides technologies that power almost anything voice- and message-related over a data network. Their products are highly technical, deep in features, span multiple product lines, and have complex, long sales cycles and big competitors. They are precisely the kinds of products that benefit most from strong product marketing.

But at that time, product marketing was a lean team and not consistently empowered to act with clear purpose. They tended to focus more on tactics and tools. It's not surprising (or uncommon) that go-to-market misalignments were more visible to John's product team—which had much deeper category and product expertise—than to those in product marketing.

It's why the product team was the obvious choice to pave ...