Know the "So What" Like a Digital Science PMM

0:02Hi, friends. Welcome to Product Marketing Adventures, the only show that takes you beyond theory and into the real execution of product marketing. My name is Elle Grossenbacher, your trusted guide and host of this show. In each episode, I bring in expert product marketers to co-host two segments of this show. First, a case study example of their work, followed by a messaging critique for companies we admire. So if you're a PMM looking for practical guidance and inspiration, you're in the right place. Are you ready? Let's go.

0:41In product marketing, there's a moment that separates reactive teams from strategic ones. It's the moment when product says, hey, we're launching next week. Ready? Go. And everyone scrambles, no clear definition of success, no clarity between release and launch, no agreement on who owns what, and somehow PMMs are expected to just make it happen. Today, we're talking about one of the most transformational things a product marketer can do, rebuild the entire go-to-market function. Not tweaking it or optimizing it, rebuilding it. With that, it is my pleasure to have Doug Kimball on the show. Doug is one of the best PMMs in the business.

1:20Let me tell you why. He successfully built and managed global marketing and product marketing teams in multiple companies, helped plan and deliver several global field kickoffs, and flipped product launches on their head using the Pragmatic Institute principles while improving pipeline impact, team collaboration, and lead development. And most recently, he has been delivering his expertise to the masses. He just published a book on upleveling B2B positioning and messaging. It's called So What? Why? Who Cares? Check it out. You can find it on Amazon. Oh, and if that weren't cool enough, he has also been training and teaching Brazilian jiu-jitsu for more than 18 years.

1:59Doug, it's amazing to have you on the show. Thank you. I may have to pause for the blushing part of this, but thank you for that intro. I've had an amazing, fortunate career. I'm just happy to be here. So thank you. So cool. And I'll have to pick your brain on the jiu-jitsu piece. We've been thinking about trying that out for our daughter. I just feel like it's something every kid should do. Highly recommend. All right, let's dive right in. So bring our listeners up to speed a little bit. You currently work at Digital Science. What do they do exactly? Good question. A lot of people don't know that one.

2:30So we are a Digital Science is a company that basically has a lot of B2C and B2B focus looking at how to help bring research and information to market, which is a lot of ways to bring to that. But we focus on academics, funders, not-for-profit, government, publishers, B2C. And really, it's about bringing and streamline the research process to market. And I have the privilege, I enjoy managing their product marketing team. Been there since August. Awesome. It's helpful to have some of the context about the company itself, because the first segment of our show is the case study. And the case study is exactly about rebuilding the go-to-market function at your current place, at Digital Science.

3:10So let's dig a little deeper into that now. So in the first segment of our show, we're going to do this case study, right, of rebuilding the go to market function. And it's so meaningful, because it sits exactly at the intersection of strategy and influence and ultimately operational excellence. So take us back for a minute. What was happening when you first joined Digital Science? Controlled chaos. They had gone through they've gone through a lot of acquisitions in the last several years. And in the beginning of 2025, they'd gone through the call evolve and kind of tried to merge a bunch of different units together.

3:45We had disparate marketing teams, disparate product teams, there really wasn't a cohesive part. So they did a very good job of trying to put that all together. But when you have five different segments, and you've got products to go across segments, and some that are segment oriented only, there's a lot of challenges going on. Yeah, not from being negative, it was just more, the usual chaos. It's more sophisticated. Exactly. What was really cool, one of the reasons I was interested is they do a lot of really innovative stuff there. The ability to, for example, track where a researcher might be cited in a publication someplace or track patent information, things I really hadn't thought about before.

4:23That's really important stuff they do. But the challenge was that these business units weren't always really working well together. We did a lot of product launches. I mean, more product launches on average, companies our size, we were doing twice as many product launches than most companies. So when I talk about launch, it wasn't just launch, sometimes there was a release, hey, we're gonna release this, let's make a PR. I'm like, that's not really the same thing as a launch. So part of it was me just getting them to understand that release and launch and go to market, there is a little bit of a difference piece of that.

4:56Yeah, yeah. And that's, it's so funny, you mentioned that, because I feel like that's happened. Every PMM out there can attest to experiencing that happen is what I'm trying to say. So when launch means something different to everyone, and you don't really have a go to market function when you're doing that when everyone kind of is speaking a different language. So tell a little bit more about specifically like what was what do you think was broken in that situation? The first thing that was identified as broken was that product on the commercial part of launch. So product would say, we're going to release XYZ product feature name where it's going to be on April 15th.

5:32Why? There wasn't really a plan. It was more, well, we're done, so we're going to release it. Again, that's correct, the release versus launch, which I can't be difficult about. A lot of companies do that. They confuse release versus launch. So one of the first things that I pushed in there was saying, no, marketing, specifically product marketing, needs to be the one that owns the commercial decision to make a launch. We're the ones, as you know, just as well as I do, that make all the pre - and post-launch, especially the post-launch people, get things successful. And if we're not involved in that, if we're just being tossed over the fence and say, go launch, run, we're going to run really fast in a lot of wrong directions.

6:12So the other thing I started asking about was, basically, why are we doing this launch? Is there a particular audience we're going after? Are we trying to prevent churn? Do we have a new competitive response we want to do? All those different reasons of what is the reason behind this? I like this new product feature. That's not enough to make a launch out of it. This is going to help us to push back a competitive incursion. Now I'm listening. Or this is a major enhancement to our AI capabilities. I'm going to differentiate us. Now we're doing something. So we really didn't have this shared definition of what success looked like from a launch.

6:48It was more, we have released it and we have launched, we have made noise. And then we kind of paused there. So that was one of the biggest things I think that was broken beforehand. Yes. Yeah. So you have this like lack of clarity, lack of alignment. And then you already mentioned right away, like ownership. So now talk a little bit about like the task at hand. You know, at what point did you realize like, okay, this isn't something you need to tweak. We need to actually rebuild this. Seeing a couple of launches that got pushed out while I was still coming on board, that again, I don't want to say nothing has failed.

7:22The company is quite successful, doing great things. But we don't want a launch to do okay. We want a launch to really just kick butt and make some serious noise and drive leads and drive awareness and call it, you know, we all want revenue. And I started asking a lot of questions and meeting with the sales teams, the product marketing team, sorry, product management team, leadership, and just asking these questions of what it was that we wanted to get out of a launch, what that meant and what release meant to them, and realizing that we weren't doing enough before a launch to have things planned effectively.

7:55And we weren't doing things as well after a launch for them to have true impact from the market and drive a commercial impact of that. So it was really just me. I mean, I'm very good at asking questions. Sometimes they're good. Sometimes they're dumb, but I'd rather... No such thing as a dumb question. Exactly. I like that. I'd rather be persistent and get the answer to a question and then, okay, what's the second level of that question? And okay, great. Now I understand that you and I are not speaking the same language when it comes down to the answer to this question. And here's what I define this based on my 15 plus years of product marketing as a launch, as a commercial success.

8:33Here's what you define that. And then looking at it from what are the revenue goals that we're trying to accomplish? Because again, a go to market should drive revenue. Are we mapping that back? And so it was just a lot of questions, a lot of conversation. But also, because as I said, we were kind of not a cohesive product marketing team when I came on board, just because of the situation was to, I had to rebuild the go-to-market function and all to define what product marketing is, what we do, what we don't do is just as critical as anything else, and then start to develop those processes around how we bring a product to market.

9:10Everything from the, I have a product release to talk about, to I'm nurturing the flows 90 days later. Yeah. You make it sound easy by saying, yeah, I just rebuilt the go-to-market function.

9:25All right, guys, we're done. Seriously, this is where a lot of PMMs get stuck. And I'm sure there's a lot of differing of opinions or approaches out there around like, how do you do this? But I guess like break down for me, like your plan of action and how you how you actually like did it. You don't have to. We're not going to go into the specifics quite yet. Obviously, we're going to build a playbook together in just a just a moment here. But real quick, like just kind of bullet point, like what the action was, the plan of action. Yeah, it really was. Again, I always go back to the questions because that's just what I'm good at.

9:58But it was really just like, okay, so to your point, it was not an easy thing. It was not a short thing. There's so many stakeholders because, again, we have five segments in the organization. We've got product and we've got sales who are my, let's call my key audiences. And then I have my boss as well. I spent a lot of time with each of the stakeholders for each of those groups basically saying, what is it that you are looking for when it comes to defining a successful product launch or a go-to-market? And go-to-market and launch in the conversations were treated kind of a similar conversation.

10:30And really, you know, where are we now? What are we doing now that is our kind of our state of the union, the regular thing we're doing? What's working? And like I said, some things were working very well. The person who was managing this at the product management office, fantastic job. But what wasn't working, and a lot of what wasn't working was, I mean, sales wasn't being notified early enough. Pre-sales wasn't getting the information in order to prepare for a demo. Lead generation or demand of growth marketing teams weren't being fed information in order to plan for campaigns. I could go on and on about that.

11:03And once I understood all that, again, like I said, I came back and said, product marketing is going to be the ones owning the decision to go live. And I put, during my first two months, I put two launches on hold because the product marketer came to me and said, here's where we are. They want to launch by a date, which was like next week. I said, well, do we have this, this? No, we don't. I said, no, we are not launching. I made myself a little unpopular. I probably still am a little. But again, it's not about Doug. It's about, does this have a success with that? Is this going to serve the company?

11:37Is it going to serve the customer? Like, we're going to try to take the best action that's going to do that. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, we talked about, and, you know, I don't want to get into it, but, you know, we moved into, we tiered launches. Nothing that's, you know, dramatically new and surprising there. Tiered launches have been talked about. A lot of these, you're a great podcast. Yeah. But, you know, I had to go then and say, now we've educated the teams on what a good launch means. How do we put that in place? So another thing we did, and again, nothing dramatically unusual for product launches, is talking about a tiered framework and really provide more clarity around what those were.

12:10We have an agreed-through framework, what assets will be part of that. Introduced a new, basically a framework of 90, 60, 30, 30, 60, 90. We can talk about that later. Really worked to improve our product requirement documents. So taking that, the so what, why, who cares framework, embedding that in there. put together a launch council and just really made it much more clear where stakeholders were going to be involved in this process. And that only took two hours. You know, as you were like right before you said it, actually, as you were answering some of my previous questions, I could actually start to see the so what, why, who cares just in how your brain thinks.

12:47So I just really love that. You mentioned so much here that I want to unpack further, which I know will come to the playbook. But first, I want to quickly ask about stakeholders. how did you manage their expectations and like i guess with all these big changes you wanted to make like was there with their pushback and just how did you manage all of that very fortunate in that the i guess her i'm not sure exactly her title i call her head of product she's kind of she's not a cpo she's that reports the cpo she is also newer newer to the organization she is she's awesome she's a gem and we have we gelled very early on so we've got a very good rapport where we don't always agree, but we disagree constructively, if it makes any sense.

13:29So having her on board and she and I very aligned, she's also gone through the Pragmatic Institute training, which was helpful. That was really, really big. So she was able to help go upstream on her side and had the alignment on my side with things. But she also would say, you should talk to so-and-so forth and have those conversations with that particular product manager or that particular product lead, that pre-salesperson. And so there's a lot of just identifying, you know, who had a stick in the fire that needed to poke. And that was really important. But also then going back and looking again at the massive amount of launches you already had and seeing how they did and seeing where they did well and seeing where they didn't do as well.

14:12So it was really just one understanding all the facets of what happened with the product launches, releases, and launches to define where it didn't work. Yeah. Yeah. And I could imagine that as you're the new guy in town and here you are evaluating past launches, that could not feel great, I would imagine, to the person whose work is being evaluated from a person who wasn't even there when it all happened. So I'm curious and you have new ideas and thoughts and it sounds like you're lucky that you have a stakeholder who is amenable and open to hearing you out and wanting to support you. So that's already a step ahead.

14:55But how did stakeholders and leadership respond to you coming in and doing that? I got really good at tap dancing. Overall, I would say pretty good. There were a couple of conflicts here and there that I created some challenges with, some that was more miscommunication. Here's what you mean. Here's what I mean. Some just plain disagreement. No, we're going to do it like that. I try to find that balance between, you know, being the new guy and having that honeymoon period and coming in, hey, let's do this and full of ideas and full of energy. You know, also having been there, done that a few times, been on both sides of that, that I can't just walk in like the bowl in the china shop and say, I have all the right ideas.

15:35We're going to do it Doug's way because it's not Doug's way. It's our way. But also having had several people in the first three or four months say, we think you should be more pushy, which was weird for me because it's just not my style. and I'm used to working in a global organization. I've had people say that to me too, and that's not my style either. I'm just, I'm a little bit softer in my approach. Yeah, and I think there's definitely a time to do that. And I'm all about collaboration. Let's get all in the same boat going together. But also I have learned over the years, sometimes you just got to push forward, knowing that you're doing what is the right thing for the organization, not for Doug, but for the organization, and just really push through.

16:13And so again, taking it back to why it was so important that the product marketers own the commercial launch decision. Because again, we understand what's going on the marketing. We handle the messaging. We're looking at revenue outcomes. Not that product managers don't care about revenue, but we're closer to that revenue and that strategic side of things. So yeah, there was some education and there was some little bit of bruised feelings. And I had to step back sometimes and say, I'd like this, but I'm going to get this. Yeah. A lot of compromise. And I'm sure over time, you prove, you kind of earn trust and you you prove how your ideas and your frameworks are working and then you, you get a little more.

16:52And that's sometimes that's just how it works. So it sounds like, you know, stepping back here, you had to rebuild this go to market function, a lot of sophistication, a lot of like layers of complexity with all these different business units. And it's kind of messy and you're in your reaction mode or the, the team is in reaction mode. And then you've come in, you did all this research, You implemented all of these things. What happened in the end? Success, honestly. That's what really kind of feels good about this is that I was just on a call about an hour ago that had a product I was talking about.

17:26We kicked it off January 1st. So we have a backup. That's jumping ahead. We put together all the processes, laid them all out there, documented them, communicated to the teams that were going to be involved, both on webinars and on email and in slides. I presented to some of the senior management to say, here's what the short version. Here's what we're going to be doing. Here's what the why behind this is. Here's the value it's going to yield. Made better role alignment between what product managers do and what product marketers do. Still some education on going on with that one, but making a lot of progress.

18:01Put together a launch council as part of the whole process so that, you know, there is the key stakeholders from each group that needs to be part of this whole launch success process. were involved, kicked the first one off early part of January this year, 2026. And even in just that first meeting, you're watching some of the chat come through. It's like, this is what we've been needing all along. This is a great way for us to change our go-to-market product. People are saying that, not product marketers. You know, product managers are saying positive things in the chat. You're like, win. I'm going to go home now.

18:35And also, to be very honest, and this was just talking about how to have a product about, because she was, you know, I feel like we're not doing this. People are complaining about this. I said, I agree. I said, remember, 80-20. Let's get 80 % of the things lined up and we're doing great things and making great progress. Where we are now to where we were four or five months ago is hugely improved. I said, we have to sit back and go, okay, we're making progress over perfection. We've chipped away all the rough parts. Now we're smoothing things off. So you have to remind people that we've made tremendous progress.

19:06We're not 100%. We may never get to 100%, but we get a lot better than I'm happy. I love it. Okay. So what I want to do is take this case study and now turn it into a playbook. So again, just quickly summarizing here, we're rebuilding the go-to-market function. No easy feat. So let's say that I'm a PMM. I just heard your story. And now you're coaching me on how I can replicate it. and if I needed to rebuild my go-to-market function in my company, what is step one? What do I need to do first? First, if you have experience, first put on your humble hat is the best way to start and then start gathering information.

19:50Because again, if you walk in as a person that I know how to fix everything, you're going to get the same response that most people will do. But understand where are we now? Where do we want to be? What's been successful? What's not been successful? What does good look like? is one of the things I always go back to. And how do we, everything we do when it comes to the go-to-market launch change, how does that end up driving or impacting or benefiting revenue or preventing revenue leakage? You know, we're looking at churn. So start there. Who are my stakeholders? Who needs to be involved? Who should I talk to?

20:25Be data-driven. I mean, understand what's happened well in the past. If hopefully your CRM is halfway decent, you can dig into your CRM information or at least get some kind of launch details back and use that to plan the future. Got it. Okay, so step one is to get this State of the Union, dig into the data, gather information. Is there anything specific that you're looking for? I think you mentioned a couple of things, but are there like specific measurements or signals that you could be looking for that would specifically help you identify like what's broken within a like go-to-market function?

21:00Let's take a 2.1 launch as a good example. So we have a tier one launch, which in our case, it's a big launch. We're doing big things. We're going to make a lot of noise, a lot of assets behind that. And we do this big launch. Maybe we do a webinar. We do some lead activity. But then we look back at the leads that have come in and the awareness that have come in and the click-throughs that have come in after that. And if the numbers are low, and, of course, metrics are going to be defined by a lot of different things. If the numbers are low, but we had a really big deal we tried to make, then something got missed.

21:30So that's where I look at the data. is that we tried to, we made, this was a powerful solution, but we didn't do a good job of engaging the market before and after the commercial part of the launch. We missed something. So that's one of the places you can look at for data is, did it resonate? Were we excited to launch it? And was the market excited to hear about it? Yeah. Yeah. Good one to call out. Okay. So again, quick recap, step one, gather the data. What's step two? Make sure that your product marketers and your product managers are hand in hand. They don't have to be best friends, but they should be very much embedded, be aligned.

22:04Make sure they know what you do this and I do that. Here's where my job, I hate to say job stopped, but here's where I stopped being involved and I hand it off to you. Clarify again that product marketing slash marketing should own the commercial part of this. Make sure there are other ones that say yes, ready to go. And you absolutely have to be involving sales. And by that, I mean, they are educated, they're aware. You don't launch something, the sales goes, oh, hey, what's the pricing on this? Or what's the messaging? Or who's the audience? Make sure that they're involved in all that. And have an executive sponsor.

22:38That's one of the most key things. So that way, it's not just the product marketer saying this. It's the person sponsoring saying, I'm sponsoring this launch. We've got to get in line here and get things successful. Yep. I love that. Essentially, what it sounds like you're saying is establish or reestablish the product marketing charter. So I have had to do this before and this is so, so I did it at Cisco. Cisco obviously has been around for a long time. There were product marketing teams ahead that, that were this portfolio ahead of me. But when I presented the draft of a charter before I socialized outwards, I had product leaders, the VP directors, right?

23:19That I want to be my first draft harder before I socialized it even to my team. And they, they had some feedback, but like overall they were like, we've never seen something like this before. Like we love this. And I think it's because they're like, yes, product marketing is collaborating. Yes. Well, of course we want you to have a seat at the table. We just, you know, I think so. It's so interesting. I'm glad that you mentioned it. I guess is what I'm saying because they, it's not that they want to exclude product marketing, but just someone to come in and really like own the, uh, function I think is actually something that your PM will appreciate.