Design thinking. Wait, for go-to-market strategy?

The tenets of a go-to-market strategy are the foundational structures - the first principles. If things go awry in the muck of execution complexity, you go back to the tenets and then try to find where things got squirly. They need to be developed before a full go-to-market strategy can be fleshed out and a plan put into action. At Bamboo Growth, we believe that Design Thinking provides a great guidebook to identify your go-to-market tenets that are at once thoughtful, actionable, and effective.

Really, can design thinking do all that?

Design thinking isn't only useful for product innovation. And there is plenty of literature that espouses both the pros and cons of design thinking for this use case. At the end of the day (always first principles!), the primary objective of design thinking is to put users' needs and desires at the center of the process to create new products and services. Bamboo Growth believes that going-to-market with a new product is inherently intertwined with how well a product performs commercially, and so here we are. At Bamboo Growth we put users' needs and desires at the center of the process to create a go-to-market strategy to successfully launch a product.

What does that mean?

Here are a few examples:

• Questioning who the users and payors for your product really are - there may be other aspects of the market you serve that are needier or less thrifty either for your product or adjacent benefits that your product provides.

• Contextualizing your users in the broader ecosystem of your market can trigger creative new revenue streams. You may discover other players who also value the benefit you're providing and become payors (the famous Google model of ads paying for the benefit of getting in front of Googlers) or users themselves.

• Nailing down precisely what a user is trying to accomplish informs some key features of product interaction and correspondingly forms the basis of all positioning and messaging.

• Understanding users' go-to sources of information and help directly inform marketing and sales distribution channels.

• Humbly grasping how much the user actually values your solution will inform your pricing model and help you develop a sales motion that corresponds to healthy unit economics.

• If you really "get" your users, you can even turn them into champions to refer your product, build a referral mechanism directly in your product, and further support strong unit economics.

Bamboo Growth has conducted several projects using the principles of design thinking to build go-to-market strategies that are still going strong today. The mechanism we have in place has routinely shown success in: finding interviewees and deeply probing into their motivators; synthesizing data and turning them into insights; and finally formulating the tenets of a go-to-market strategy based on those insights.

To learn more about how you can build an effective go-to-market strategy, reach out to natasha@grobamboo.com