This is a great conversation for anyone in product management, especially those concerned with go-to-market strategy. Elena’s background is incredible and I was so honored she wanted to invite me to discuss this. Here are some of my main takeaways from our conversation:
Go-to-market is a team sport: Product Managers need to break down the silo mentality and work with marketing, data, and sales throughout the entire product development lifecycle. This avoids last-minute scrambles and ensures everyone is aligned on goals and responsibilities. Barron emphasizes the importance of early and frequent communication, suggesting regular check-in meetings and shared documentation (even a simple spreadsheet!) to track progress and ownership.
Don't overcomplicate things: While there are fancy tools available, sometimes the most effective solutions are the simplest. Both Elena and Barron highlight the value of clear communication, asynchronous updates, and concise documentation over complex project management systems. This minimizes overhead and keeps the focus on the actual work.
Think beyond the launch: A successful product launch isn't the finish line. PMs need to be involved in driving adoption and gathering user feedback after launch to inform future iterations. This requires ongoing collaboration with marketing and data teams to track key metrics and identify areas for improvement.
AI can supercharge GTM: Elena highlights how AI tools like GPT can be leveraged to streamline content creation, analyze customer feedback (from sources like Gong), and even generate sales enablement materials. This allows product teams to be more efficient and data-driven in their go-to-market execution.
Essentially, successful go-to-market requires a collaborative, organized, and customer-centric approach, with a willingness to embrace new technologies like AI to enhance efficiency.
The full transcript is below:
Elena Luneva: Hi, everybody. I'm excited to have Barron on. He's the head of product at Figure. He's previously been the head of marketing there, and he's worked at Snap, Showmax, and [invalid URL removed], among other great companies. He's also into backcountry skiing like myself, so we'll get into that.
Barron Ernst: Yeah, I'm excited to be here. I think when we first met, backcountry skiing was the common theme that connected us, beyond the product and all the other things that we have shared in common. I'm excited to talk about product and marketing, given all of your experience at Nextdoor and Braintrust, and share some of my experiences as well. I'm excited to learn from you, too.
Elena Luneva: Oh, awesome. Likewise. So it's raining in Marin, so I bet it's snowing in Tahoe. Are you going to hit the slopes right after this?
Barron Ernst: Not right after. The plan is to get out. I am generally a morning person; I try to go in the mornings before work, so I'm usually up there at 6 or 6:30 with a headlamp on—one of those crazy people. So, most days I'll try to do an hour or two and then get home in time for all the excitement of running product here at Figure.
Elena Luneva: Wow. That is hardcore. Yeah. For us, I think we're weekend warriors and go when the kids have school.
Barron Ernst: Yeah.
Elena Luneva: But, yeah, we might be going up to Tahoe this weekend, so we'll see.
Barron Ernst: Yeah, it should be this week. It should be a great weekend. It's supposed to be sunny Saturday and Sunday, so I wish you the best of luck going up to I-80.
Elena Luneva: Yes. That is the big battle. All right, before we get started, do you have a favorite place to ski or a favorite ski line?
Barron Ernst: Probably my... So I lived in Europe for seven years and I fell in love with Chamonix. I skied a lot of lines there. I still, every time I go, do the Vallée Blanche, and usually now I do touring around it and, like, usually add something like going up to one of the peaks or doing a summit. But it's still one of the great ski lines. Even though it's not really that technically challenging to do, there's really nothing else like it in the world where you can ski for, I think it's, you know, four or five thousand meters—basically, you get so much skiing in on one single run. But it also has all these fun other elements. And so I love Chamonix. I'm back in the States now and I love Tahoe desperately as well. But I think Chamonix is like one of my favorite places I've ever been.
Elena Luneva: Amazing. I've been there one time, mostly on the Chamonix mountain itself. But yeah, it was really nice. I really liked Whistler. The musical bumps; you can take the lift up and then go into the backcountry. And I've never seen crystals like that. It just, in the sunshine, the snow makes this sound that I haven't experienced elsewhere.
Barron Ernst: I know what you're talking about. Beautiful.
Elena Luneva: Then I think the storm came in. All the clouds were beautiful. So it's just this being in really big nature with great runs and very cool scenery.
Barron Ernst: That's awesome. I've been to Whistler once and it was an awesome experience. It's a beautiful place up there.
Elena Luneva: Amazing. All right, so let's get into it. Barron and I have both been in product for a really long time, but I think we both really value go-to-market marketing. So we wanted to spend some time there. So throughout your career, what are some of the blind spots that you've seen product managers have when approaching a go-to-market strategy? What are some things PMs get wrong about it?
Barron Ernst: I think the biggest thing I've seen commonly—and this is going to be obvious—is product people are like, "Well, the day that we're code complete and we push the thing out means that it's done and that's like the biggest element of work." And it sounds so common, but it's a mistake that everyone seems to continue to make. And there's a lot of sub-areas of this as well that are important to think about. But when I see my teams thinking about go-to-market, I'm usually asking them questions like, "Who in marketing have you communicated with in terms of getting copy, in terms of building landing pages? Are they thinking about the GTM strategy—are we doing paid search? How are we generating initial traffic? How are we generating ongoing traffic?" And surprisingly, like a lot of PMs, those who maybe aren't as much in the growth side, still tend to think, "My job is to get from point A to point B, get the thing shipped to customers, and then someone else figures out the rest." And I think the best GTM teams tend to be those where that handoff isn't a handoff, but it's more of a partnership and it's done a bit more seamlessly.
A good example, back to the point about skiing. For about a year, I ran the ski and beach businesses at [invalid URL removed], and the PMs who were doing basically... the thing that happens with an OTA like that is the ski bookings all happen in a very tight window. It tends to be the fall, right? Everyone's booking their ski trips in the September, October, November time frame, which means that you actually, for your big changes—and we were doing a bunch of changes, making it more clear where lifts were, making it more clear where hotels were; we had some hotel revenue guarantee programs that we were putting into place, all these things—you basically get one chance to ship it annually. You can iterate throughout the season, but if you don't get it out there by the time that most of the bookings occur, you really miss a massive window of opportunity. And that was one of the things I was seeing with the product team that worked with me. They were very much geared toward getting all these things out—these lifts, these other things—but there wasn't good communication where they were also involving the marketing team and the marketing organization.
While this is not my preferred approach, the approach I found that works a lot in these cases is, sadly, just to force everyone into a weekly or bi-weekly meeting, like, "Who's responsible for what?" And it's almost like a bit of a stick and a carrot, right? It's like, if everyone's doing it well, we don't need this 30-minute check-in every week or every two weeks to make sure we're on track. But I found—and I'm the last person who likes more meetings—that having that check-in in some form, asynchronously, where it's clear who's owning what, becomes a really important thing to do. I think the other thing I found is it's important to do it not a week before launch, but months before launch, so that everyone is on the same page. Because what I found is the thing that causes that last-minute churn is when people were told last-minute, like, "Hey, this is launching in two weeks." But if you have that progressive process to getting a really big thing like that out, it means that the launch doesn't turn into this massive, chaotic, crazy moment, but instead it's more orchestrated. And I think that really matters, and I think that's an important lesson for product people—their job doesn't just end when they ship, their job continues on from there. Just like they need to continue iterating on the feature, they also need to continue iterating with their partners to get the traffic so that they know what to build next. And I think that's a big important piece of GTM.
Elena Luneva: Yeah, no, I've definitely found that as well. It's like the worst thing is those surprises because then the temperature in the room gets higher and people have a shorter fuse. Thinking through lots of foundational things together...
Barron Ernst: Exactly.
Elena Luneva: Yeah, I'm good with that. And so when you organize your teams like this, what are some metric considerations, or how do you know that the teams are working well together for those launches?
Barron Ernst: So I think, from a metric perspective, usually I'm assuming that the PM team working with data and marketing are kind of outlining what success looks like. But it shouldn't just be the PM team that says, "We're going to drive X and Y in revenue." It should be a combined effort of product, data, and analytics, looking together at what we think the opportunity for this new feature is. But then also, if there's a signup goal or a usage or an adoption goal, it's also how we're going to drive enough users or enough new people to actually do that. And so that's where I think the alignment between marketing and product becomes really important. In terms of artifacts that we've used, I'd love to say that there's some beautiful, perfect tool that does this, but sadly most of the time this ends up being a Notion sheet, a Google sheet, a Google document, with clear ownership for who's responsible for what. Who in marketing is writing this copy, who in product is doing this? And it's also just coming with clear ownership and then clear action items every week. And it sounds so simple, but I see this mistake still made so regularly that that's why I go back to basics with it. It's like going back to basics with, "You talk to your customers." This is going back to basics with, "This is how you do a launch." Communication, clear accountability, clear ownership, documented somewhere with some linkage to the expected outcome. And it's surprising, but it's so often not done that way that I tend to go back to basics on it more than I would expect, even having done this for 20-ish years, like you have as well.
Elena Luneva: Yeah, I agree with you. I mean there's all these tools, and there are a different level of fancy, but really a spreadsheet with who's doing what by when, and what do we do if that didn't happen in the conversations? Yeah, I agree.
Barron Ernst: I'd love to... you know, I've tried—and this isn't for lack of trying—I've tried so many of the tools—Airtable, Notion, et cetera—I've tried so many of these different things and I usually just end up coming back to "simple is more important." Simple and understandable is more important than learning a new tool because you add an overhead and a burden when it's, "Hey, we have to learn this tool in addition to just doing the thing to get the product out."
Elena Luneva: Exactly. And then you run into permissions or somebody can't access something.
Barron Ernst: Yeah, exactly.
Elena Luneva: Has your perspective changed? So you've been in so many leadership positions, at some point you were a wee tiny PM. Has your perspective changed over that time?
Barron Ernst: I would say that the things that I took early in my career that were some of the best advice I got was—and this is related—make sure every meeting has a clear agenda. Make sure that if there's no need for the call, you find a way to cancel it. I think earlier on in my career I would probably just have had these calls on a regular basis and not focused as much on what can happen asynchronously before. And I think as we've evolved and also as more hybrid, remote, multi-office situations have been created over time, whether you're in an RTO or you're not, you still have probably multiple offices to communicate with.
Elena Luneva: Absolutely.
Barron Ernst: In that scenario, you need to have some form of clear asynchronous communication, which I think is an evolution that has happened since earlier on in my career. Getting really good at identifying it, sharing the notes out in advance, making these conversations about not just, "I'm going to read to you an update of statuses," but instead, "We're going to have the discussions that came out of this," as the way to start... I think that's a really important way for these things to start and evolve.
I'd say the other evolution from when I was more junior is realizing that there's often a tendency when you're younger to involve everyone. And I think as you get more advanced, trying not to take everyone's time with these sorts of conversations but having it be a small, short meeting with the key people becomes really important, and then having some mechanism to share out what decisions were made in those conversations. Even if you don't want everyone to attend, sharing action items in a Slack channel or email... I know that's boring, but... or in some way to keep people accountable, some sort of board, et cetera, so everyone knows who's responsible for what coming out of that call. That transparency I think really matters as you're driving toward a launch over time, and that can take whatever form is best, but it has to take some form is what I would say.
Elena Luneva: Yeah, I agree with you that asynchronous communication... I feel like we almost don't do it enough. So I always work with my teams to where there's always feedback. But I've already told them that I'm like, "Well, how many times did you tell them?" My magic number is seven because frequently at three or four we all give up and we think it's done. People consume information in different ways, in different channels. So keeping that cadence and pushing yourself and your team goes a long way.
Barron Ernst: I have found that part of my job is reminding people to get the asynchronous document out. That is a thing I do and it's not the most exciting part of my job, but it actually matters a lot because there's a very marked difference between how these types of conversations for GTM go when there is content to read in advance versus when people have to consume and then ask questions about the content all in a single 15 to 30-minute meeting. I think you're making more productive use of your time if you're giving people something beforehand to think about and to react to.
Elena Luneva: I agree with that. We went even more pedantic at Nextdoor where the first five to ten minutes would be spent on reading the docs. I think we adopted it from Amazon, but we're all busy. We're all probably in back-to-back meetings. And so that assumption that people have read your docs is generally a wrong one. And so a lot of the fluff or the circular conversations are because people don't have that same foundation.
Barron Ernst: Yeah.
Elena Luneva:...In having a productive discussion. So, I agree with sending it out before if you can and potentially spending that extra time within the meeting having people read the information you shared with them.
Barron Ernst: Yeah, absolutely.
Elena Luneva: Yeah. We're not children, but sometimes we act like it.
Barron Ernst: You know, it's like one of my things that I'm always surprised by is, back to basics, it turns out, a lot of times solves many more problems. It's easy to assume, I find, that there's a tool or something that's going to solve it. But a lot of times solving these problems really just comes down to who needs to be there, what sort of communication needs to happen to get people aligned, and then also who's the owner. Who's the owner matters so much because if no one owns it, then nothing happens. And I think that's... I mean, these sound like such basic things, but I wish that they weren't as basic. But honestly, the more I do this, the more it turns out that a lot of these things are practices that both senior people, but also junior people, can come into an organization and introduce and have an immediate impact. I find a lot of times that's the other thing, is that this isn't just tips for senior product leaders or senior GTM leaders. But a lot of times if you're the PM and you come in and you see that these practices aren't happening, it's a really unique opportunity where you can immediately add value, where you're not stepping on other people's toes or criticizing how the organization works. You're just trying to get everyone organized to get an important feature out. And it's a really good way, I think, as a more junior person, to build your internal reputation, but also to get an important skill set down the line.
Elena Luneva: Yeah. And you mentioned valuable, and I absolutely agree with that because you'll actually reach your outcomes if everyone's aligned to get there together. So, yeah.
Barron Ernst: I think it's my turn to ask you a question. Having been at a variety of different companies, from B2B to B2C to B2B2C, how have you navigated GTM in those different types of organizations? What are the similarities? What are some of the differences that you've seen when it comes to shipping to a partner versus shipping directly to customers versus the in-between, where you're shipping to partners and their customers?
Elena Luneva: Yeah, absolutely. I think the similarity is knowing your ICP—who you're building this for—and that frequently dictates the channels or how you get to them, so that stays consistent. I think for B2C, because generally there are more customers and there are more emotional drivers or that immediate value, there's a focus there on mass-market messaging. For example, I worked at Nextdoor on overhauling their navigation. We had to take pieces out of the application, move things around, and change how the posting button worked. We had a lot of upset prospective customers because we had a pet directory and Fluffy was no longer on the front page of the pet directory, and people were very upset about that. So we really needed to work with my PMM to send those communications, share where things were moving or, if they were moving out, why they were moving out, and share some of those principles: we're trying to declutter the app; we're going to try to clean things up because the feedback is that it's becoming complicated to use. Having that communication with our neighbors early and often—almost six months before the changes were going to happen—really helped set that precedent and get neighbors along for that ride.
I think for B2B2C things get slightly more complicated because you have multiple value propositions. You have that dual value proposition. You've got your decision-makers and then you have your product users. As a product manager, you're frequently building for that product user, but as a go-to-market team—as a sales or marketing team—you're trying to convince that decision-maker to buy your product. So some of the tension I see is that tension between product—"I fulfilled the needs of the user"—and then the sales and marketing teams being like, "But our decision-makers are asking for different features." Having those ICPs clearly defined and making sure that GTM teams and product teams are working off that same data set, that same information set, and understanding those differences have been critical for launching B2B2C products because the go-to-market motions for the decision-maker are different and they also need to be complemented with the B2C motions.
And then for B2B companies, the sales cycles are just so long. Having that clear partnership between product and sales early on, to have that empathy for each other—that building and shipping takes time, but so does sales—is important. Focusing on tools to accelerate sales, perhaps even before the product is built, but then building in conjunction with that feedback from your sales team and being in those sales conversations really helps both teams to not be surprised and to have that empathy for each other's work.
Barron Ernst: Yeah, makes sense. One of the things that we've seen is... so Figure has a good combination of D2C and B2B2C. Maybe one of the things we've been working on is how do we learn things in the D2C channel that we can apply to the B2B2C channel? Do you have any learnings there, or have you had businesses where there were those similarities, and how have you made them work? For example, we experiment a lot on the D2C channel and then, based on what works, we apply it to the B2B2C channel. I'm curious if you've had similar insights with businesses where you maybe had multiple ICPs like that.
Elena Luneva: Yeah, I think the biggest one for me is that agile methodology, where even though B2B channels take longer to get to the right product, or maybe the shipping cycles are longer, the conversations can be shorter and the incremental value chunks can be shorter. Some of the things that we've applied were coming up with a customer advisory board. You get a cohort of customers to work with you, so at least you're not having those individual conversations, and you're kind of A/B testing but on a much smaller scale than millions of users.
Barron Ernst: I think that's helpful.
Elena Luneva: So you're moving faster than traditionally possible. For example, I was at a company called Nuna, which was in HealthTech. We were building data systems for value-based care for government and insurance clients. Traditionally, the contracts were very organized around, like, "Here are the features you will deliver to us." My suggestion was, "Hey, let's change this structure to, 'Here are the outcomes we're going to get you,' but let's determine the structure of how we talk about it together and how we review the progress so we actually get to those outcomes instead of shipping you the features we think are right six months ahead of that." That really changed the conversation.
Barron Ernst: That's awesome. That's a really good learning. We've done something kind of similar, but I think we could do better with having more tight feedback cycles like that. I think a lot of times these GTM teams get framed as part of growth or one of these other organizations. How do you think about growth and GTM teams if they're all owned inside of the product organization? How do you organize the product team to include GTM functions and growth functions alongside the classic product—core product—types of functions? And then also, in your case, when you're managing design and data and other areas, how do you include those as well?
Elena Luneva: Yeah, I think this depends on the stage of the company. At a startup level, where you have fewer people, there are functions that do multiple things. At Braintrust, for example, I thought of the product team more as a general manager. They not only owned the shipping, but they also owned the go-to-market and the outcomes. I think that really helped align R&D and GTM because they were all on the same team; they were all going for outcomes. That changed that "passing the baton" mentality of many companies I've been at before, where product is responsible for shipping, and then it's not their problem anymore. That changed the mindset. We did have a growth team that was separate. The growth team was really focused on experimentation, top-of-the-funnel acquisition metrics, and was able to run in parallel to the product work that was going on. How you structure a growth team really depends on the stage of the company. Do you have the people? Do you have the resources to align a growth team around various channels? At Braintrust, for example, we didn't. There was just one awesome IC who was responsible for content, for SEO, for landing page experimentation, et cetera. She was amazing and was able to supercharge that team, but we also didn't need more people at that point. However, in larger organizations, it tends to be either a fully formed growth organization or just specialized teams for different parts of the funnel. At Nextdoor, we had folks focused on retention, folks focused on engagement, folks focused on activation. There's a benefit to that specialization as long as there's somebody who's responsible for the end-to-end experience, because otherwise you have these surface owners that run into each other and some of that decision-making gets marred.
Barron Ernst: Yeah, that makes sense. The other thing, related to company size that I've experienced, is do you even have enough traffic from a growth team perspective? I know that's an obvious one to throw out, but it's...
Elena Luneva: You can't A/B test, you can't...
Barron Ernst: It trips up a lot of companies, right? Based on stage, they say, "I'm going to build a growth team," and it's like you don't have enough traffic to even start A/B testing. So I think that's another good one to throw in.
Elena Luneva: I love that. Like your point of going back to basics, like who's your ICP?
Barron Ernst: Yeah.
Elena Luneva: Do you know what they want?
Barron Ernst: I'm a bit of a broken record, which is sometimes... I feel like we all jump to "everything is different," and it turns out that a lot of times the "back to basics" pieces still make such a difference. With all the advances in AI, how has AI changed how you think about go-to-market, or has it? Has it made a difference, and how have you used it?
Elena Luneva: Yeah, I think it really has. I think the opportunity for me was at Braintrust and sort of seeing the light early on because we had to; there was pressure to keep the team small and to be able to do more things. But at the same time, we were building a full AI recruiting suite: job description generation, matching, AI avatars to do the screening... And so I think there's a lot of push right now in product management. People say that managers are not going to be around in ten years; they're all going to be coders. I have a counter-vision to that: what are product managers good at? Understanding the customer, figuring out what they want, building for them, and generating a lot of content along the way. What's AI good at? Content. So my dream for product managers is that they become general managers and really lean into that—"I know the customer and I can generate content and AI will help me"—and we were able to do that at Braintrust. For growth, content marketing, SEO, blog post generation, all of that, we were able to really lean into GPT and other tooling to have only a few people really focus on what the strategy is, how do we recombine pages instead of having human writers, how do we leverage AI to generate that mass amount of content for us so that we can stay very lean and still have the metrics and outcomes that we want.
The other piece is just product development efficiency. As a manager, you're constantly pinging your team to send you updates or update a doc, or, based on all the dots of information you've collected, put together a strategy doc. Claude has become my very underpaid but very competent assistant in helping me collate all of that information and operate much more efficiently as a manager. My team has also been able to use it to create not only the product specs of what we're going to build, but also to work off the information sales is getting—in Gong, for example—and really come up with the patterns of what customers are actually asking for in their own words and then be able to create that sales enablement documentation and content for GTM teams to be effective in positioning the product that we're putting out there. So instead of a salesperson coming to you saying, "Oh my gosh, I just talked to a really large customer and they want the following things," you're still taking that in, but extracting patterns from the 300 conversations rather than the most memorable one just because it has that recency bias. I think that has helped us, and I'm seeing more and more product teams adopt some of that tooling to just be much more effective at understanding the customer, building for the customer, and figuring out how to position that more effectively.
Barron Ernst: Yeah, I agree. The trend tracking across all the different points of feedback... in a weird way it's another "back to basics" thing, which is, "Are you talking to your customers?" AI makes it a lot easier to talk to your customers, but also to generalize the insights that should help inform the roadmap, which has been really beneficial for us as well, in addition to other areas that it makes easier to automate. But that whole process of making it easier to get to the insights, which was always important but a very time-consuming thing, making that cycle time faster is really important. I totally agree.
Elena Luneva: I love that. Well, I know we have a couple of folks on the call. If anyone has questions, just put them into messages. Otherwise, any closing thoughts?
Barron Ernst: I've probably broken the record. Think about who your stakeholders are when it comes to GTM. If you're a product person, who are your key partners that you need to work with to get something shipped? I like to think about this in terms of... I had a good learning from our CEO at Showmax, which sounds obvious, but it was not something I thought about actively. He was big on pre-morteming a release or pre-morteming something going on, and his general concept was, "We're going to ship this thing in a month. What are all the things that could go wrong and how would we either prevent them from going wrong, or if they went wrong, how would we respond to it?" I think that's a really good mindset to use when it comes to thinking about GTM. You think about what you want your ideal launch to be, but then you also think about what are all of the most likely variants of launches that could happen, and how do you either make one more likely or make one less likely and use that to feed into your planning methodology for this? That goes back to who should own what, what are the key channels, how does this all work together? That mindset of, "I'm going to think about where I want to be before I get there" has been a really important lesson I've learned in my career.
Elena Luneva: I love that. Getting back to basics, getting past that launch date and figuring out how you can really drive that outcome, and who it takes besides just you to get those people involved early. That's awesome.
Barron Ernst: Yeah.
Elena Luneva: Yeah, it sounds like there are no questions from the audience. Thanks so much, Barron, for joining.
Barron Ernst: Yeah, thanks for having me. It's been great.
Elena Luneva: Awesome. Have a good one. Bye.
Barron Ernst: You too. Bye.
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