Rebuilding GTM Ownership and Tiered Launches at Digital Science

This case study was created from an episode of the Product Marketing Adventure Podcast. It has been adapted into Dusted's case study format to preserve and showcase the guest's real-world experience. Written to preserve the voice of the true author, Doug Kimball.

When I joined Digital Science to manage the product marketing team, the company was still absorbing years of acquisitions and an early-2025 “Evolve” effort that tried to merge multiple units. We sat across five segments serving academics, funders, not-for-profits, government, and publishers, with products that sometimes cut across segments and sometimes stayed segment-specific. Marketing and product teams were still largely disparate. We were running roughly twice as many product launches as peers our size, but “launch” often just meant “we’re done coding, issue a PR.”

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.