Tool:

Product Go-to-Market Canvas

A canvas to help facilitate your thinking when taking new products or ideas to market

I developed this canvas after working in a digital product agency. 

During the few years I was there, I brought multiple products to market and shipped even more ideas for different clients.

After I left back in 2019, I moved into Product Coaching (helping product people and companies do product better and become more product-led) — what I do now — I found a need to package up those learnings and practices from shipping so many products to market into a digestible format that I could give to the product managers I was coaching.

After a few iterations from a dot-point list to a simple canvas, I’ve developed the GTM (Go-to-Market) canvas below and expect to continue to iterate upon this as time goes on.

And, of course, feel free to iterate on it yourself! I’ve deliberately added creative commons for this reason — please download, change and amend to your context.

The Product Go-to-Market Canvas

The canvas contains ten sections. Each is a dimension when taking new ideas, features or products to market that needs to be considered. Some will be more applicable than others to your context. 

Each of the sections contains several prompting questions. These are questions that I typically asked myself and/or I often found myself asking the Product Managers/Owners I coached.

In no particular order, the sections and the prompting questions are:

What are you selling?

  • What is the product?

  • What are people buying? What problem is it solving?

  • Be specific — what features will it have at launch? How much will you charge? etc

Who’s buying it?

  • Who are your customers? Customer segments?

  • Are there different types of customers? (i.e. a two-sided market)

Target Market

  • Who are your target market for launch?

  • Who are you specifically not targeting at launch?

Value Proposition

  • Why should people buy your product?

  • What is your market differentiator? What makes you different from competitors?

Distribution

  • How do you plan to reach your target customers?

  • Where will your customers buy your product?

  • Do you have a marketing distribution strategy?

Competitors

  • Who are they?

  • What are they doing?

  • What risks do they pose?

Launch Strategy

  • What is your launch strategy?

  • Do you plan to launch to the entire market (big-bang) or will you have a staged release?

  • Beta? Pilot?

Post-Launch (First 30, 60, 90 days)

  • What is your post-launch strategy?

  • What are the critical things that need to happen in the first 30 days? 60 days? 90 days post-launch?

  • What’s your customer engagement plan for those first 30, 60, 90 days?

  • Do you have any specific Marketing strategies during this period?

Metrics

  • What needs to be true at the end of the first day? week? month? quarter?

  • What signals would indicate that these are true? How do you intend to measure these?

  • What key outcomes (metrics) will you be tracking post-launch?

Assumptions/Risks

  • What assumptions are you making about this GTM strategy?

  • What risks are we taking with the current approach?

Considerations

  • What considerations do you need to take into account with the current strategy?

  • Do we have technical considerations? Constraints?

  • Are there teams/stakeholders/existing customers who we need to engage or inform?

Download

Canvas 👉 https://drive.google.com/file/d/185Trjd-iWurJkEazRCwRx7e33dBa1UZv/view?usp=sharing

Blank canvas 👉 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uBqbv1ieFgYp3q7k6fbtdnFKg3n8Wj-J/view?usp=sharing