Breaking into Product: Part 7 — GTM Questions

3 min readMay 25, 2023

Hey there!

Welcome to “Breaking into Product” — post #9.

If you are planning to enter (or have recently entered) the Product space, you will love our posts! With this series, we aim to share exclusive content and insights on preparing for product management interviews, common Q&A, interview preparation strategies, etc to help you ace your interviews.

“A ride-hailing platform wants to enter Indian Market. Can you form a Go to market strategy for this?”

These are GTM Strategy questions. In addition to usual Product thinking, a candidate usually has to think about the Growth and Marketing aspects of a product also. Through these questions, interviewers test your ability to break down a vague problem and think like a CXO.

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The Framework

Step 1 — Understand the Product & the business model

Your first step should be to understand the Product that is given in the problem. Understand its users, market, revenue, goals, competitors, etc.

🧐 For example, if the interviewer asks you “A ride-hailing platform wants to enter Indian Market. Can you form a Go to market strategy for this?”, understand the features of the platform, how it is different from Uber, what is the business model, who are the target customers, why the company is thinking of entering India, who are the competitors in India, etc.

Step 2 — Understand the new market

Take a pause, and try to think about what you know about the new market. If you do not know, ask about it. Get a deeper understanding of the customer journey in the new market, alternatives available for customers in that market, any market size, etc. Particularly, you should also understand if there are any regulatory challenges.

🧐 For example, for the ride-hailing platform, you should understand how current target customers in India commute/travel, how much they can afford to pay, what’s the demand like, regulations on owning/running a cab, etc.

Step 3 — Create a Pre-launch strategy

Based on the above 2, take a few minutes and write down all the things you would need to be able to operate in the new country. These can be technical, legal, product changes, operational, etc. Particularly for Product/Tech changes, think of the user journey and see what might change from the existing product.

But make a list and create a plan to work on each of those. If you think you are not able to cover everything, you can ask the interviewer if you have missed anything.

🧐 For example, for the ride-hailing platform, you would need:

Drivers
Cabs
A corporate bank account
Mechanism to disburse earnings to drivers
Mechanism to collect payment from users
Training for drivers
An office/space to onboard drivers, etc

Step 4 — Create a launch strategy

Based on the short-term goal for this launch (usually, it is not revenue) — think about where you want to launch — should it be across all the geographies? Or should you pick one city and expand gradually? This should cover how you will launch — all the initiatives around how you can acquire your initial set of customers.

🧐 For example, for the ride-hailing platform, as the goal is not revenue, you can first start in big cities like Bangalore as the demand is usually heavy. You can think of launch events, acquisition channels, and growth hacks to be able to get Word of Mouth going.

Step 5 — Create a Post-Launch strategy

After the launch, how do you keep growing? What should be the short-term and long-term goals? how do you keep acquiring customers? How do you work on every aspect (funnel) of the product?

Consider potential risks and challenges, and propose mitigation strategies. Be realistic and practical in your approach, and demonstrate your ability to think through the execution phase.

We hope this helps you approach such questions better. Feel free to reach out at thehustlers2021@gmail.com for any questions or guidance.

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