Rebuilding GTM Ownership and Tiered Launches at Digital Science

It was controlled chaos. Product owned the commercial decision to go live and treated finish-date releases as launches. There was no shared definition of success, little pre-launch planning, and almost no structured post-launch work to drive leads, awareness, or revenue. Sales often learned too late, pre-sales lacked demo prep, and demand-gen wasn’t fed early enough to build campaigns. Business units weren’t consistently working together, and release versus launch versus go-to-market meant different things to different people. “We like this new feature” was treated as enough reason to launch.

I spent my early months asking stakeholders—sales, product management, leadership, and my own team—what “good” looked like, what was working, and what wasn’t. I made product marketing the owner of the commercial go/no-go decision and put two launches on hold in my first two months when readiness wasn’t there. We defined what PMM does and does not do, tightened PM–PMM role alignment, and introduced a three-tier launch framework with clear asset expectations per tier. We embedded a 30-60-90 post-launch cadence (ongoing engagement, nurture, and feedback loops) and a “so what, why, who cares” lens into PRDs so they arrived closer to outcome-based messaging. We stood up a launch council with the PM, segment lead, PMM, pre-sales lead, and PMO for commercially impacted work, secured an executive sponsor mindset, documented the process, and socialized it through webinars, email, and slides—including senior-management briefings. We kicked the operating rhythm off in early January, emphasizing progress over perfection and an 80/20 bar while we smoothed the remaining edges.

Three-tier launch framework with defined asset expectations per tier; 30-60-90 (and 90-60-30 planning) engagement and feedback cadence modeled on staying “in mission control” after liftoff; “So What, Why, Who Cares” framing embedded in PRDs and messaging translation; launch council (PM, segment leader, PMM, pre-sales, PMO) for readiness and blocker removal; clearer RACI between product management and product marketing; CRM and historical launch data to pressure-test whether big launches actually moved leads, awareness, and pipeline.

We went live with the new process and held the first launch council in early January. In that first meeting, product managers and others were already writing in chat that this was what the organization had needed and that it was a real upgrade to how we go to market. Relative to four or five months earlier, alignment, readiness, and commercial rigor are hugely improved. Education on PM vs. PMM boundaries continues, and we are not at 100%, but stakeholders see the progress, the rough edges have been chipped down, and we are operating on progress-over-perfection while the 30-60-90 loops and tier discipline keep compounding.