Manufacturing Champions (Part 1)
The Shared, Latent North Star of Every B2B Product
“Goals are for people who care about winning once.
Systems are for people who care about winning repeatedly."
James Clear
This is going to be an evergreen series of essays that connects several concepts I’ve shared before while also serving as a foundation for future posts. It’s my thesis on the shared, but latent, north star of any B2B product company. Below is Part 1, you can read Part 2 here.
In any company, when different departments and functions row in the same direction, you’re more likely to meet your goals and hit your milestones than if teams are misaligned. And in a B2B product company, it’s critical that your engineering, product, and design (EPD) teams, which build your product, and your go-to-market (GTM) organization, which distributes your product, are in lock step. I’m oversimplifying a bit here, because people in either organization can and should get involved with activities across the aisle (for example PMs closing deals or marketers conducting research), but at the C-level, you have separate, single-threaded owners for both delivery and deployment.
This alignment matters irrespective of the playbook your company uses to get your B2B product into the hands of your prospective and paying customers; meaning, whether you utilize a self-serve motion, partner channels, or a direct salesforce, cohesion across EPD and GTM is the key to getting the growth flywheel going. The only thing that changes across models is the ratio of EPD staff to GTM folks and how much is managed in-house vs through external stakeholders.
So, the partnership between EPD and GTM is critical, and ultimately the difference between being a linear-growth services business and a compound-growth product company (see references below to understand the difference). Given how crucial this interlock between organizations is, you’d imagine it’s a huge focus area for EPD and GTM leaders? And the best B2B product companies must have this on auto-pilot? Right?
Apparently not.
I’ve been a product executive reporting to the CPO of public companies for the last 7 years and also a mentor and advisor to dozens of start-ups and scale-ups over that time - no one has this figured out. Whenever you get close to having a handle on it, something shifts and you’re back to square one.
What’s going on?
Well, as always, it helps to start by looking at the symptoms. What does it feel like when EPD and GTM are talking past each other?
sales feels like PM is not listening to them on new products to build for revenue
PMs feel like the demo team is over-indexed on “wow” features that no one uses
marketing feels like there’s no differentiation to highlight in a crowded category
support feels like engineering is ignoring quality issues affecting customers
growth feels like free users are not on equal footing with paying customers
design is frustrated that customer success showed internal mockups externally
CSMs are pissed that PMs won’t prioritize fixing longstanding onboarding issues
the business development team feels like partner asks go into an EPD black hole
research wonders why GTM won’t introduce them to power users to learn from
everyone feels like pricing and packaging issues are the other organization’s fault
you can see a longer, crowd-sourced laundry list of issues in this LinkedIn post
Sound familiar? Every GTM team feels that if it could just control the roadmap, revenue and retention are right around the corner. And all EPD organizations just know that if GTM stopped overreacting to every customer conversation, adoption and pipeline would materialize.
Are they both right? Is everyone wrong? And who the heck should own pricing and packaging?
A big part of the issue here is that these 2 organizations, which make up the bulk of people investment and operate much like a right arm and left arm for the company body, are running in different directions. They both have short-term and long-term objectives, but whichever mode they’re in, they need the other to drastically shorten or length their operating horizon. When PMs want to do market validation for a future product idea, it’s not a good time to distract sales from end of quarter chaos. When customer success needs a major feature delivered in-quarter to ensure an enterprise customer renews, the roadmap was locked by PMs months ago. When GTM proactively tells EPD they need to pull in a feature for demand generation, it turns out EPD doesn’t have enough engineers with <super special skill> and it’s going to take too long to hire. When EPD has the foresight to broadcast a product deprecation, GTM pushes back because there is a <critical customer churn> that they want to avoid.
These types of misalignments happen all day every day in a B2B product company. And even when they manage to get resolved through escalations and tradeoffs, rather than being able to celebrate the current win, employees fixate on the past thrash and future cost. It’s just more painful than it should be, but no one seems to have figured out a good solution other than tons of circular meetings, armies of operations people, and oodles of change management paperwork.
There has to be a better way. And there is.
There is a flaw in the logic of how EPD and GTM teams are set up in most companies. It’s even apparent in this essay until this point. There is an implicit assumption that EPD and GTM have different goals and operate on different time horizons, and that inherent tension is the source of eternal conflict and necessitates all manner of people, process, and tooling to maintain a balance. Because no EPD rockstar wants to work at a sales-led product company. And no GTM hotshot wants to work in an environment where commercialization is an afterthought thrown over the wall.
What if I told you that this framing was flawed? What if EPD and GTM actually shared the same goal and could operate in concert, both in the short- and long- term? What if there was a shared, but latent, north star that could align the right arm and the left arm?
There is. The shared objective across EPD and GTM that no one talks about is…Manufacturing Champions!
What do I mean by that? Let’s define both aspects of it:
Manufacturing = making something, usually on a large scale, via an automated process, with controls for quality, guarantees of volume, and monitored SLAs
Champions = advocates for a product, who may be direct users or indirect beneficiaries, who can tell stories about ROI, and serve as both evangelists to the broader market and enablers for future adopters
In short, Manufacturing Champions is the idea that you need a playbook for regularly and reliably creating advocates for your product who can drive current user adoption and generate future customer pipeline.
I don’t care if you work in EPD or GTM, that sounds like exactly what your product and company need to scale. In fact, if you could mash together EPD and GTM into some sort of hybrid role with shared goals, let’s say Growth, this is how they would approach the problem. Said another way, if you are regularly manufacturing champions, then you have a reliable growth loop.
Let’s delve into why this shared objective is so powerful for employees across EPD and GTM:
a champion speaking at your conference helps create qualified leads
a champion at a prospect helps shape your demo script for success
a champion in a deal helps navigate internal stakeholder objections
a champion in an account helps make the budget case for procurement
a champion in a company helps onboard new and novice users quickly
a champion on a team helps drive sophisticated adoption and usage
a champion is a power user who provides insightful product feedback
a champion takes the time to write feature requests and support tickets
a champion at a customer helps prepare for the exec business review
a champion on the ground helps smooth the way for renewal and upsell
Everyone loves a champion! They are instrumental for both EPD and GTM success. They are essential now and in the future.
So why isn’t every B2B product company spending the majority of its time trying to create a playbook for Manufacturing Champions? I share my thoughts on that in Part 2.
As always, I’d also love to hear from readers about their approaches to manufacturing champions and navigating EPD/GTM misalignment - please chime in via comments👇 or join the chat via the Substack app.
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further reading / references
Rich Mironov’s explanation of the difference between a product company vs a services company is a good distillation of what happens when R&D and GTM aren’t in lock-step
I’ve talked about manufacturing champions before - it’s a critical step in both landing deals and moving upmarket
I’ve used the literacy vs effort chart before to explain Product Market Flex and the importance of Teaching Users Your Product
Repeatability as the key to scaling in B2B SaaS is something I expand on in Consumerizing Enterprise == Loop Sequencing
childish drawing / interpretation
Note: if you’re a fan of the practical advice I dispense in this newsletter, read more about how you can work with me as a consultant / coach and let’s collaborate - I’m taking on new clients as a strategy advisor and fractional CPO for companies that are scaling - you can reach out via LinkedIn or just click the message button below
Also note, I have 2 upcoming interviews as part of 60 Minute Stories that you won’t want to miss: Charlotte Burns discussing From Good to Great: Coaching for Ambitious PMs and Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia talking about Creating Impactful Relationships: Mentorship for Product Managers. Both events are free, live, and virtual webinars…but seats are limited so sign up today!
Lastly, I’m once again running a cohort-based course on Maven on Scaling B2B Products - if you’re a subscriber to Run the Business, you get a discount!
Looking forward to part 2!