The $500M GTM System Behind META and McDonald’s Launches

Most launches miss the date mainly because of internal reasons. Late approvals, messy hands-off, unclear owners. When nobody owns the plan, dates tend to slip and people tend to do a lot of rework. The fix isn't a bigger team, it's a better process. So the argument is build your go-to-market like a product: owned, repeatable, and predictable on purpose. Hey, what's going on everyone? I'm Mike Sirius and this is Mastering Tech Growth. Every week we chat with industry leaders to bring you no-fluff tips on how to grow. Today I'm joined by Ania Cheng, Founder and CEO of Tailor, an AI-powered menswear rental and personal styling platform, and previously a product and go-to-market leader at Facebook, eBay, Target, and McDonald's. Today we are discussing about turning go-to-market into a repeatable system. Welcome, Anya.

Hello, hello, this is Anya from Silicon Valley, and besides, uh, big tech companies where I help you, Facebook, Instagram, Shoppings, and go-to-market for Latin America, Africa, Ben Sharf for eBay. I'm also teaching at Northwestern University, so I'm excited to share a little bit more about my AI startup, TailorAI, which is where— how we get to use AI to pick clothes for busy men. And then also share a little bit more of both as academics and also the industry experience.

Excellent, thanks, Ania. I forgot to mention that you actually teach in university. How that happened? Like, how did you find yourself actually Yeah, teaching others.

Yeah, I am definitely not because of weather, because Northwestern University is in Chicago. It has snow 7 months a year. Uh, so, but, uh, I was an alumni from Northwestern University with a marketing degree. Uh, if people heard of Integrated Marketing Communications, the IMC, uh, so I, uh, have been lecturing there as a guest speaker in the last 15 years. 5 years ago, there was a professor that passed away. They are looking for replacements. And at that time, it was during COVID So they usually only want local professor, but this time they're like, hey, it's COVID, everybody online. So Anya, you're in Silicon Valley. Why don't you teach? And I start teaching and one class become two classes, from three classes, from marketing classes to engineering school, to law school, to MBA schools. So here I am. So sometimes opportunities are there when you are not looking for.

Here you go. Do you see yourself maybe writing a book at some point?

I wrote 2 books already.

I've written 2 books. Okay.

But definitely want to write a book for the UK audience one day. So, okay.

What are your books about? What did you write about at this point?

Yeah, I wrote 2 books. One book is for people who are not sure about what to do with their life and career yet. It was a little half, like half more of my bio on how I came from Taiwan to the US and how I graduate. And then I got into 2008 when Lehman Brothers went bankruptcy. There was no job anywhere. How did I find a company? I put together a business plan and proposed them to launch a new department and hire me. So I was kind of hacking my way as a growth hacker for my own job. And then I talk about how did I find my strengths during those difficult times when I feel like there was no hope. And then a little bit more job searching tips on like getting your job and resumes and interview tips. But my second book was what I learned on the go-to-market and Meta, eBay, and Target. You are right, I found that in those companies, go-to-market is very systematic. It's almost like an agile framework through alpha, beta, and launch, and then each of them has the criteria to go to next phase. So I learned a lot in those companies. I wrote down how they marketing, how they build product, how they do employee promotions, how you ask money for your— from your boss, how you ask money from your colleague, how you fight with your client while not making them feel offended. So I pretty much write down how to be a successful leader and employee in Meta, eBay, and Target in my second book.

Oh, that's an excellent book. I mean, we'll, we'll dig into that in this episode, but people listening, I'll make sure we have this in the show notes. I feel like that book will be a second step you can take after you listen to this episode to understand go-to-markets more and how they're done correctly at the enterprises. So before we dig in, Ania, we love to ask this question. When I say mastering tech growth, what comes to mind?

I think it's about finding a product-market fit. When you have a strong product-market fit solving a real problem, then you don't need a lot of marketing because people just want it. Like, when was the last time you see ad of ChatGPT, right? So And then finding what that product market fit start, first one was who is your audience? So for example, I recently see my friend's kids, they play around with this pretty expensive tiny digital camera, looks exactly like what I had 15 years ago, which no one use it anymore. But now you know what? It's so popular among kids space. Every little kid, 5 years old, have this digital camera, which I depend on this 15 years ago. So when you have the right audience, things become easier. For example, in my startup Tailor AI, you know, most people will use AI to pick clothes for men. Yeah, when we started, everyone say men has no market, women like fashion, fashion company should go after women. No, we are not selling clothes, we are selling the convenience and time. It's like, for someone to use analogy of cleaning house, some people selling the cleaning supply while I'm selling the main service. So for our customer, they don't want to pick clothes, they don't like fashion, but they are sales, single guy, executive, pastor, professor, recruiter. They need to look good, they need to go to speech events, go to meetings, go to date nights. So they want their fairy godmother, which powered by AI, to pick clothes for them. And we send them real clothes for them to wear, so then they can rent the clothes. So no more shopping, no more laundry, like their Netflix for outfit. So I'm solving another problem with very different audience and then still have a great market. So I think the go-to-market first step is the right persona and then getting the right product-market fit, which is starting again with the pinpoint that you are solving.

Okay. I actually, when I checked the tailor service you guys offering, I was like, this is a brilliant idea. So I'm definitely your ideal customer profile, as they say. I actually went on Google and I was like, what do we have in UK which does the same? So there's a couple of companies who are actually offering this as well. And it is what you said, it's a convenience and time. And I love that. I don't like shopping. Like I don't enjoy going to shops. I don't enjoy going online and choosing clothes and then measuring, sending back. If I have to, and time comes when you do need to renew your wardrobe, I just go on this sort of like one day, From morning until the lunch, I go to all the good shops. I'm being taken care in those shops. They just give me clothes. They give me advice. I just try them. I go like, this looks nice. This looks nice. You spend money, you go back home. You're done for a month or so. This is just brilliant that you go, here's my event. I need to look like that. You send the clothes, you put it on, you go to the event, you send it back. Done. It's excellent. I think it solves, you know, it's not like a challenge, but it's definitely a value add in the convenience and time perspective. How did you make, like, how did you know that there's a market for that? Like, how did you go about understanding that you're going to have that fit over here?

Yeah. So start with a minimal viable product, right? Just like building product, you have a hypothesis, you build minimal viable product to validate your hypothesis. Minimal viable product, MVP, is not the smallest product that you can build. It's the smallest product you can validate in your hypothesis. For example, when Zappos started, the hypothesis is people buy shoes online. So instead of having a real shoe store, when people order online, they went to Foot Locker and then buy the shoes and ship it to a customer. Because if people don't buy shoes online, why do you need a warehouse for shoes, right? When the Rent the Runway, the women's rental company, started, their hypothesis is women rent dress. So instead of buying any dresses, building any app or any website, they send an email to a group of students who are going party and they screenshot dresses from Macy's and ask them, would you like to rent dress? If they answer yes, then they make sense for them to start partnering with fashion brands. But if not, there's no sense for buy any clothes or open any store. The same thing for Echo. When they started, they asked, they have a real human behind Echo. Echo play music. Music. Real human play the music. Yeah, because if no one talk to machine, which is a hypothesis, why would you build any AI behind the thing? Because no one will talk to the machine. So when we started, we start with a landing page as a simple MVP. Just Shopify, $10, and there's a page. So if you're interested in this type of service, put into your email, join your waitlist. Once went by, a guy emailed me Hey, I'm on your waitlist, I'm so interested in the service. I ignore the guy. I thought the guy's a scam. We are like nobody, like we're a startup, like so eager, say please, please put me on the waitlist. So I ignore him. Another month went by, right before Christmas, a guy called me. Somehow that guy is a real estate agent, he sells, who is very determined. He went on LinkedIn and LinkedIn me, he found my phone number from my LinkedIn, and he called me. Hi Anya, I'm Michael from San Diego. Yeah, really like the brochure on your website. I have been on a waitlist for 2 months. You guys must be super popular. We were nobody, we're just not ready. We are— you are super popular. Can you please bump me up to your waitlist? I realized that he's a real customer. We put— going through the post office, we went into the post office, we bought a whole bunch of stuff from Macy's, we dumped the clothes into the post office box and ship it to him, and Michael became our first customer. From there, we're testing the same way to 100 people who got on the waitlist. We learn a lot. We know what people are looking for, which is actually the same framework that how Meta does go-to-market. They start with alpha. Alpha means what? Means, for example, Instagram shopping, Facebook shopping, it start with 20 people, 20, 20 pages using that feature. And what they were looking for is feedback. Qualitative feedback. Okay, so once we have feedback, people say, okay, it works, it seems working well, but here's things you need to fix. They get into beta. And beta means what? Means there's a single percentage of random customers. For example, they turn on 0.1% of all of the, the shop— the people who have a shop in UK on Instagram or Facebook, random 1%. And they have a selecting criteria, say, okay, if this 1% they make, say $3,000 this week, then we would need to move on to the production phase, which we start doing A/B testing, 10%, 20%, 50% A/B testing. So the same thing for us that we test this with 100 people, we are ready to move on to beta. What does it mean? Means that I wrote down the business plan based on their feedback. I went start fundraising and from there we raised $2 million from early investors of Lyft, Instacart, Spotify, and we start launching the business.

Okay. Before we go into the go-to-market more, uh, last question on this. How did you make your landing page, which was just the mailing list, known? Did you bought ads or did you just like organically somehow, you know, went to like podcasts and advertise? Like what was your, um, plan or strategy or process to actually get eyeballs onto your page?

At that time we didn't have any money, but I would say for everyone who want to try all of above, but this time we didn't have any money. So what we do was we start with the community. I belong to Northwestern University community, University of Chicago alumni. Okay, at that time the group still popular. I am a mini influencer, I have 50,000 followers, I publish books, I posting on my fan pages, I I asked around my neighbors and all kind of, all of the stuff. And we went to the connect networking event here in Silicon Valley, lots of networking event, went to networking event, tell people about the service, ask them to join a waitlist, cold calling your old friends and your grandmas and grandpas, ask them to ask their neighbors. So because of all you need for us at the time was just 100 people. So look at most people's waiting list. Is more than 500 people, right? So it's not too hard to get 100 people join waitlist. You are not even asking them to pay you yet. You just ask them join the waitlist and then hopefully start sharing your stuff. And then they willing at that time, they pay for like $50 to try the service. So the same thing, you are registered. If you are getting married, I'm sure people willing pay you $50 for your birthday, right? So just ask people, this is my birthday gift, which is get on my waitlist and tell me, give me the feedback. For the product. But I can tell you people on how we got our first supplier. So you're right, at that time I thought if we get PR, we'll have supplier. So I went to TechCrunch conference, the largest entrepreneurship conference here in Silicon Valley. So I went and I wait outside of the press room. As soon as a reporter came out, I approached her, hey, this is my company business card. I didn't have business card, it was just a random paper. Hey, this is my name, this is our that year, and I start talking to her, and I follow up again and again and again after the conference.

Yeah.

One day she responds to me, Anya, stop email me, I'm not interested in the topic.

Okay.

Okay. So a month went by, she emailed me again, Anya, I'm still not interested in this story, I think it's dumb, but my colleague somehow he really like this story, so I'm connecting you to my colleague, he's going to interview you.

Yes.

So I talked to Lokali, is a company called WWD, which is the trade publication in the fashion industry. Conversation went perfect. He really love it. He's a true believer. He's going to write the front page for us to get on the trade publication. Few months went by, nothing happened. So life went on. I went on startup competitions. We won the West Coast in the US championship. We will move on to the global championship in Chicago. So I thought this is a great opportunity for news again, but we are again nobody. No, we are somebody if I approach student newspaper because we— I am a Northwestern University alum and I'm also a teacher at Northwestern University, but I'm also University of Chicago alum, which means what means As a faculty at Northwestern University, I might win the University of Chicago startup competition. So if you don't know, these schools is like a little bit rivalry, you know, so they kind of hate each other. So these— I think this is a great topic, at least for student newspaper. So I talked to a student newspaper, I got on the news. Somehow the ABC News locally, they pick up the story from the student campus newspaper. Right. And we got ABC. From the ABC News, I sent the ABC News to the trade publication. I said, hey, we just got on this news, can you send this to your boss and convince them that this is a great story? The next day, the story came out. And from there, the following day, we got one, the first supplier from Canada, and we got the first brand. And fast forward, we have been working with over 300 brands. We now, after selecting among 150, continue working with them today, and we have over governments.

I love that. What a great story. Thanks for sharing, Ania. So it's one of these success stories. Things are just connecting well, but not without effort, right? This always— everybody, you know, would say it's a piece of luck, but it's not, because you were continuously thinking about it, continuously seeing opportunities, and continuously engaging and pushing yourself into those opportunities to actually seize the day and get your brand out there. It always is the founder who gets it done. I love that, right? So let me, let me read this quote. It's from McKinsey: inefficient decision-making costs a typical Fortune 500 company half a million days of managers' time each year, which amounts to $250 million of annual wages. Decision-making. That's the cost of people just not making decisions. When a launch is slipping because ownership is unclear, what's the first action you take in the next couple of days to stabilize the plan?

Yeah, I think so. It's, uh, every company— I have to say every company is different because I can tell you at Meta, everyone can do another people's job. So If you finish your job, you can do finishing your colleague's job. No one will stop you. And the performance review, which is coming every 6 months, reward those people who get most of these things done. So you can do nothing for 6 months, but you will be fired after the 6 months. So everybody work a lot. However, the criteria for that is the whole company are Ivy League graduate. Everybody's overachiever. Everybody is like the, you know, the lady in the Harry Potter, you know, the raise a hand lady in the Harry Potter. So she's like, me, me, me, like everybody's like that. So I think it's very different while in, uh, when I was working for eBay or McDonald's, the role is extremely clear. Nobody's supposed to touch anybody's things and, um, it's very well organized and they have a clear ownership. But that also means people may not always be proactively thinking something because they just want to make sure their job is done. They are not losing their job. The company is not growing as much, therefore holding down to a job is extremely important because next day you might be fired as well if you are not doing your job right. So I think really a growth company or a margin-focused company is very different. But answer your question, if you don't find the owner, I think it's important to really have a clear KPI because the things for Meta is that there's no clear owner, but there's very clear KPI, which is For example, how many customers retail, how many engagement from customer, how many posts, how many items being sold on Facebook Shopping, Instagram Shopping. So, true measurable. So, everybody just almost like bounty hunter and just go hunting for the reward. So, I would say clear, find the person, but really clearly outline what's the real KPI and measuring everybody's KPI, then, and people will figure things out. And if not, then I would say, Using the way that was a little bit more someone who might potentially be lead and then having the team to have a clear supporting role, almost like in Agile. You have product owner to decide what to build, while your engineering team, which we call developer team, were the people who make the requirement from product owner to be a real product. Product owner decide what, while engineering team decide how. And the Scrum Master are the person who know the best about when, almost like the project manager. So at least you have a clear kind of functioning role, and they also help people to know who to follow.

Okay, so how— that's very awesome you gave that, um, two different environments or two different cultures, if I might say. I know Meta and Amazon is very aggressive in getting the bottom of the barrel sort of let go and rehiring. So it's always very sort of, you know, refresh talent pool. And if you want to sort of not be at the bottom, you have to perform. And then you have others, you know, other cultures which are more of longevity, you know, they're more care of people staying within the business for years to come. and as a result, there's a different approach to how work is getting done. If we talk about, you know, the culture which is not like Meta, if we talk about more like stable ownership, titles, responsibilities type of setting culture, right? So if we have a go-to-market plan and we have these ownerships, right? How do you actually go about setting that? Is that, you know, something like RACI, which is Responsible, Accountable, consultant informed, or like a DAISY. Is there a process of how you give ownerships to everyone involved? Or is it just like a self-selection type of situation?

I think it's more of not of about. I mean, every company use what you described it before. So I think this table state, if you don't know how to start, start there. But I can tell you, I think, which you tied back to your opening, said the most successful one, which I think Meta did a pretty good job, Not just because their people are overachievers, but also they have system, right? So you already pre-agree on this go-to-market plan, which we're going to run alpha. And when we run alpha, they select these 20 companies. The criteria is 90% of them say they will use it again next month.

Okay.

And when it comes to beta, how do we get into production? It means 0.1% of the product, the page will have this feature, but again, 90% of them will make more than say, $3,000 this month, for this week, right? So there's very clear, almost like A/B testing, go or no-go criteria. So nobody need to fight and you just, we are following these, this is the next step. This is day, we're going to do what and pre-agree upon that. And who is owner of that? It should be a product marketer. Product marketing manager is the person who's supposed to create a plan. And who is the owner for make, make sure the numbers, right? Data scientists, product analysts, marketing analysts are supposed to be the person who make sure the numbers right. Okay. And then what product are we testing? Product manager are supposed to be person who decide what product are we testing. If you are in retailer, like the product manager are the person who most important in the company, like what's most important for the company. For example, in retailers, the product managers are not very important while merchants are very important. Because in retailer, it's all about what are you selling and how much it will be. So the merchant who decide on the pricing and decide on the merchandising and sourcing, buyers are the most important. So who, what are we going to test will be based on the merchant. So based on that rule, what are we testing, how are we testing, when are we testing, and who is the true guardian of those number, I think you will have a really clear role.

Okay. So this is still ownership is sort of tied to what you bring to the table, you know, your skills and effectively your role. Let me ask this. How did you split central or local ownership? So effectively central ownership, you know, at Facebook, which is a global company— oh, sorry, Meta now— at Meta, which is a global company, you know, versus local ownership. And And how do you prevent these, you know, like, like rogue launches? Like you have, let's say, 3 regions who needs to launch this at the same time, but some communication goes somewhere and someone launches sooner or something like that. Like, did you have like any situation like this and you know how you sort of dealt with that?

Yeah, exactly. That's a great question. All the time. So that's where product marketing job is, right? So for example, Google Maps. We want to promote Google Maps in every single country. So then marketing manager in Thailand and in Japan, in Singapore, Italy, and Netherlands, and they are going to have their own plan because they know the local marketing best. However, now we don't need product marketing manager because this person is the head of marketing for this product. This person is in charge of everybody, make sure everybody are coordinated. So we are not positioning Google Maps very randomly or in a different country. So this person is actually not a real marketer. This person don't have a marketing budget. However, this person write a playbook to help everybody loosely follow the guideline. So being consistent with the brand.

Okay.

So, but how would you believe that this person can write a guideline? You don't, because like, I'm a marketer in Italy. I know Italy so well. I don't believe anyone will do a better job than you and me. How, why do I need to follow your guideline? Therefore, the product marketing person actually have a tiny small testing budget. The project is not real marketing budget, is a testing budget.

Mm-hmm.

So almost like the same thing for Meta when they launch this 1%, 0.1% for beta. This budget is for testing. Means what? Means, okay, I'm going to write a playbook for any emerging market. Yeah, Indonesia, India, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, everyone who are emerging market. I'm going to write a playbook. Therefore, I will do run a test campaign. I will say select 4 country that's similar to everybody. Then I'm going to run this campaign for 3 months. I'm going to collect the data. And then now you have a guideline. You don't believe me, it's okay, but you have to believe the test result. The purpose is not doing marketing. They might buy beer or more, but the purpose is not about marketing the It's about testing a framework for both message, channel, and also who's the audience in those market that with similar conditions so everybody can follow. So I think answer your question is that you have this central product marketing person.

Yep.

Oppositely, in some country, but they only work for the company, they are centralized like Meta.

Mm-hmm.

How about for eBay? eBay is extremely decentralized. They buy companies country by country. So local general manager has the largest profit and loss, P&L, so they have most powerful. The same thing for McDonald's. Even though it's a central team who build the technology, but McDonald's in different countries owned by the franchisee. They are the real boss. Yeah, they have money, they are the real boss. So what they usually do, like McDonald's for example, would be, um, let's make sure we align with everybody by having a global conference, almost like sales conference, like, hey franchisers, come this year, we want to spend money here, please do vote and agree that so we can do those things. So ask them heavy education to ask them give the power back to McDonald's so then they can do something globally. As for eBay, they don't have any power, so what they do is the same thing they do the going product vision. They shoot those videos, they do research for everyone. Hey, globally, consistently, we see, for example, the trend is chat interface. Amazingly, 10 years ago when I was there, they predict the number one trend is chat interface, which is what ChatGPT does today. But 10 years ago, they say this is number one product trend. All the product in the future will look like this. So what they do is they research and they find out the trend, and then they tell all of the country managers, I cannot control you. You have your own power, but let me tell you what's coming. So then at least I do one research for everyone, and that's also help me— I also build a platform where you share knowledge to each other so you don't duplicate the work. So long answer— the short answer is that it depends, but it's really important that you have a kind of someone playing a central role to coordinating with everybody. And it's also important that you let people know when you need to find resources, like eBay. Sometimes you need to fight for the central resources, then you say, you know what, you tell me what, what, what problem are you solving? Because usually, for example, the country A will say, I want to launch A. Country B say, I want to launch B. But when you ask them, what problem are you solving behind the thing? In fact, you should have launched feature C, and the feature C can actually solve both problem A and B. So many times you don't know, you have to ask the bottom of it, and then you can come out a solution that makes sense to solve both profits.

Okay, so we mentioned go-to-market system or, or a playbook multiple times. So from your perspective, if you've— if you think about go-to-market, like, you know, owner's framework, let's call it like this, and the one which, you know, the biggest body would give, like centralized body would write that and distribute it to others, or if you don't have centralized body, you know, you would get still from your manager or whatever, what does that have? Like timelines, asset list, decision logs, like what's a must for the go-to-market playbook or framework?

I think you don't have timeline. It's because it should be goes back to the local team to decide on the timeline. What's the right time to launch their product? Yes, you can still coordinate a little bit, but in fact, in most of Product is not that important country-wise. For example, who cares this feature launch in UK? I don't know, but who cares? Singaporean doesn't care, right? So I think most important is actually the insight. So I'm assuming, for example, when Meta launched their Wi-Fi technology, people may not know, but Facebook actually have a Wi-Fi technology team. So they work with local company like Vodafone, AT&T, Verizon, and they launched this Wi-Fi to rural area. So in this case, the hypothesis was, hey, people, we sell Wi-Fi, therefore we should do advertising on area where there's no heavy Wi-Fi. For example, we should use billboard, we should use billboard, we should use local activation, we should have people who send out flyer on the busy street, we should have people in the mall and talk to people as ambassadors, we should have a dance floor to attract attractions for people, should be very traditional. So then people will buy the Wi-Fi because these are people haven't been online yet. So does it work? Is it— doesn't work? We don't know. So most important is that we test it and see what happened. For example, how we found was that after we tested, the billboard stuff work, but local activation also equally important because once people see the billboard, first thing they want to do is they want testing the Wi-Fi. They want to know it's really fast. So we need to make sure they can test. And after the test, need to someone there to sign them up right away. So you need real human being, a salesperson there say, hey, in this park you get free Wi-Fi. Now you test it, super fast, right? Do you want to sign up for your home? And you, so yes, leave this email right now and sign up today. You give me 25% off, right? So we found out this is our learning. So the learning and the insight behind, yes, these are the channel, but it's not about the channel because These things work in UK. In India, I might use tutu, those like little car, little taxi, right? So it can be the same effect. So it's not about just one channel, it's about why that channel work. Oh, because you need awareness, and then you need try the service, and then you need someone to close a loop. That's the insight behind that's most valuable. So the playbook mostly because behind is who, are you selling, how are you getting your message out, and why the message works, and why the channel works. For example, in that case, was they start with thinking we are launching to people who are not on internet, so people who are not savvy at all, old people, people who are home, who are not very tech savvy. Turned out what they found was that most of people who buy the internet are young kids, teenagers, who use internet cafe. They're applying job, doing homework. That's why they need the internet more than anyone else. That's why they want to buy Wi-Fi, because it's faster than 3G at that time. So it's about the persona, it's about the problem, and why they get on internet. Not just because they play video games, is because they actually apply for job or look at school videos, or they wanna— they do hustling, they have different hustling project they need to get done. So Who and then why, what's the pain point are you addressing and the insight behind the channels?

Okay, so that's, um, it's already launched, right? So that means that the playbook we have, um, has a hypothesis, um, effectively we launched, we coordinated that well, it went out, uh, we getting data back, uh, closing the loop, we can make our decisions. So what happens after that is just like when we iterating on that, but that's another launch and is being managed through the same playbook again?

Yeah, yeah, it could be launched like if you launch a different product, then it's different playbook again. But your playbook, you might already have a lot of information you learned last time, right? So you did this and launch one, you already learned about these things. So second time you're like, hey, we— this time we want to only focus on testing the persona, right? We only want testing who is the audience. Next time we want to testing who is on the message. So it's about, first of all, you need to understand what's your goal. Is your goal to learn or is your goal to drive revenue? You can be have both, but then each time you pick one learning goal, which is what Meta does. There's always this, we want to drive a lot of people buying Wi-Fi But it is one thing we want to learn, which, for example, we'll learn if people will buy home Wi-Fi after they're testing the service in the park. So always there's a clear learning goal, and the learning goal is not just to learn, is really to get real insight that you can apply for the next go-to-market.

Okay, let me take us a little bit into the process of actually launching that. We can use the same use case with Meta's Wi-Fi. So before you actually go and launch, let it be to test the hypothesis. What is the internal communication when it comes between legal, sales, and product? I mean, it's a big launch, it's a big product, and the handoffs quite often are very messy, right? Like someone needs to receive information from you so they can advance their own stuff. So how does that work in like these scenarios? Like how does handover sort of compound towards the actual loans happening?

Yeah, yeah. So, so there are two sides. One is whoever will for sure need to be, you know, before launch. There is also whoever may or may not need to know about launch. What I mean is that you make a comment earlier, which I partially agree. You say this is a big launch. No, in all, most of the company I work for, you know, tech companies, there's no big launch. There's always an integrated process. You start with 0.1%, it works, launch to 10%, launch to 20%, launch to 30%. You work for these segments, let's try another segment. It's tech company, it doesn't have to be We launched, everybody have to be able to use.

I see what you mean.

Meta, right? So we launched Facebook Shopping, is only available in UK, but only for the shop with more than 20,000 followers to start. Only with a shop less than 20,000 followers to start. It doesn't have to be everybody. Even for physical product, we only launch this region with this store. We're still going to this supermarket. The next phase, we'll get into more mom-and-pop shop in the restaurants. It doesn't have to be But for sure, there are something that you have to get done. For example, you mentioned about legal. Yeah, no matter you launch 0.1% or 100%, you need a legal done beforehand. But again, there's also different phase for legal. In fact, if you ask a legal team, there's always must to do, there's always nice to do. Because if you want to be done 100%, 100%, 100%, I can tell you no company is 100%, 100% legal because you can always guinea pig on, hey, let's double check on these tiny little word and tiny little "Let's do this accessibility testing with blind people on every single page, every single word," right? There's always must-to-do, there's always nice-to-do. So the same thing for legal. You can always start with a must-to-do, and then once you have more and more people, now you do more and more, make sure you mitigate the risk. So I think all of these are fluid. It doesn't have to be big launch. When it comes to communicating with people, Of course anyone be impacted. All you need to think about is that if I told you, how would you, would you do something differently? If no, you shouldn't be informed. I don't care if you are going to do something differently. For example, I'm going to launch like in, in my company, um, Taylor, we use AI to pick clothes for men. So if we have supplier, when I launches, they will start making money. So I should definitely tell them because they should expecting their revenue will grow. Because they might have their P&L goal they need to hit, right? Or for example, when I show this new banner on the website, people might start requesting for these clothes. And so then our stylists alongside with our AI should be able to— we should let the human stylists know so then they should prepare like, okay, this brand is getting advertising, so more people will request renting for it. I will probably pick more of this polo. Therefore, we should make sure we have enough inventory. Or for example, we are launching a new Meta Ads and we encourage people to go buy our gift card. So I should inform our operation team, say, hey, if people buy the physical gift card, you might have to start shipping the gift card out. So make sure we have enough physical gift card in the warehouse. If not, we should source more, make sure we print out more from the vendor. right? So anyone will be impacted. Or for example, if I have big influencers and it's suddenly tomorrow, like one day we'll have a lot of customer. We use AI to pick clothes for man, but our human stylist will double check before you go out, which means I need to make sure there's enough human stylist, there's enough warehouse worker tomorrow. So then those people will need to be informed. So the simple principle is Who will need to do something differently? If the person will do, then inform them.

So yeah, it's just a chain of handoffs. In your experience, Anya, it's like, where do challenges or bottlenecks usually exist? Is it when the product is ready to go to the next stage and we're talking about sort of like legal team looking at it? It, or it's maybe it's a release process, or maybe it's sales, or maybe it's a totally different department, maybe it's customer support, whatever. But with all the different functions involved in launching a product, where in your experience is majority of the pain when it comes to handoffs?

I think majority of the pain is that you didn't leave buffer. So most of the time we're like, okay, this should great, we'll take 2 days, you'll take 3 days, this way, all good. No, it never like that. The reality is there's always a delay.

Yep.

There's always delay. So build a delay into a buffer. For example, the same thing for tech team, the Agile Scrum team. People ask me like, how you— on your head of product for those company, you teach product management. So tell us more about how you decide on the backlog for the engineers in Scrum team. I say 20% go to buffer. 20% that much? Yeah, 20%, because you think that always taking longer than you think. 20% goes to buffer. You, I usually plan 10% for big bet because sometimes you just need to bet big and you might go big or go home. You might, but if it's more than 10%, if you screw up, then you're bad, right? Leave 50% for dry real goal. You for sure is safe. That's 50% will get you money for sure. And then leave another like 10-20% for your TED debt. What's TED debt? TED debt means anything if you don't do Next time when you do that thing will be slower. In go-to-market, for example, if you don't well document who you should inform, next time when you launch will be slower. Because yes, you get this thing done this time, I already know who, so I didn't— don't need to write it down. But next time will be slower. The same thing for reporter. If you don't write down who is your source, new source, the next time when you try to find it will be slower. It's like chef. If you sharpen a knife, next time when you cut the food, it's going to be slower. So anything you don't do will be slower. Make sure you also save time to that buffer. And then, uh, and, and then trying to, um, and then do something that is marketable. If, for example, when I was at Target, we launched a new feature called Shoppable Instagram because we found that a lot of people go to Target store, which is Walmart's competitor here in the US, They like to browse around. The store is fun, and you buy something that you don't need. That's their superpower. So in fact, I spent half of our team's time in fixing crashes and website bugs. It just doesn't work. It's slow. The website is slow. You crash. When you load the page, it doesn't load properly. There are so many problems. But I don't do something that's marketable. Like shop over Instagram. How do I get on TV and say, Target just have new app that we fix crashes? No one is going to buy that, right? It's not marketable. So again, you get 20% of time using stuff that is marketable. So you set the time for a specific area. But answer your question, like how to prevent, I think buffer is extremely important. And the other thing is that usually the mistake people make is that you don't have a backup plan. Again, backlog. For example, backup. For example, you have one set of creative and you start running, you realize it doesn't work, and you realize you didn't have another set. The same thing for when you are running product for Scrum team. For product manager, if you only write the backlog, the ticket, enough for this sprint, which is 2 weeks, like most of company 2 weeks, then if you don't have any ticket for the following sprint, then you are screwed. Why? Because if your engineer finish early or they block, there's no more work for them to do. So then same thing for marketing. If you don't have other creative, or you assuming these other younger audience are your persona, but you didn't have other persona in mind, that, oh, if you— this segment, I couldn't find this segment in the system in Meta, what else should I test? If you don't have a plan, then you're screwed. So most of time is that you don't have the the plan B is where will make you in— have you in trouble. And the same thing, you don't have the A/B testing plan, go or no go. If we don't hit 50% purchase rate, then no go. But no go means what? Continue running. Go means what? Go means launch to 52%. Go means launch to 100%. If you don't have go or no go plan, if this work, we'll do what? But if it doesn't work, we will do B, then that's where you will have trouble.

Okay, so a couple of things. I really love how you put that. It's not necessary that you need to have big launches. And it seems, you know, from the companies you're coming from, which are all, you know, enterprises and some being heavy tech like Meta, there's a, there's a constant launch. Effectively, there's a go-to-market process and it's just there and it's just constantly, you know, putting something out, which is not big launches. It's just hypothesis being checked and it's just things coming out. I do still believe like, you know, you have something which can constitute as a big launch. Like, you know, I know Meta launched quite recently, you know, the glasses, right? Where it's just a glass, but it has like camera. Like for me, that's a big launch. Like you can't make it like a small launch, like you can't just like—

not available in every store, in every channel, right? Okay, the product didn't launch, but doesn't mean tomorrow I'm launching marketing for every single country, every single store, right? Okay, it's a product itself, it's a big launch, the milestone of a product for availability to go to market, because we're talking about go-to-market, right? So So doesn't mean that yes, it might be available in UK tomorrow, but only in limited store.

Here you go.

We promote it to like the gamers, right? So it's always— there's other layers, like the media might be a big launch because we need everything goes in bottom up because then we are going to talk about it. But the go-to-market may not be— there may be supply chain, you're not available in certain country where you order now. Even for Apple, you order now, you're not getting it until 2 months after. Okay. So the supply chain can still be out of the launches later.

Yeah, I love that. And actually, once you started saying this, I did remember seeing a guy, an influencer promoting Meta glasses way before an actual launch or a big launch happened, which, you know, got advertised on YouTube ads. And that probably was, to your point, a small launch, you know, maybe maybe giving the glasses to some influencers to try out and promote and see, you know, what people are saying. Okay, so now come back to that playbook and that go-to-market framework. So someone put that process, you know, together. Again, let's use just Meta as a, you know, sake of argument. It exists and it's being managed either locally or centralized. So the question is, when things change— and, and I do believe, you know, things tend to change maybe you buy a new company, maybe it's a merger acquisition, and you know, you suddenly get more talent, or maybe you're going after new markets, or whatever is the reason. How do you keep those, uh, you know, processes like up to date? Like, who's actually managing the ownership of documentation if it exists, you know, assets of— or if they exist with that framework? Like, is that like everyone's job to contribute to it, or is this like in of you, uh, someone who owns that, like a go-to-market manager or leader or something like that?

Yeah, yeah. So it's, it's usually a product marketing manager's job, uh, PMM, product marketing manager's job. So each product have one product marketing manager. It's very small. For example, in the glasses, probably have one PMM. That's it. In Meta, a big product, for example, like even Messenger might have like one person or two That's it. It's like the person's job just more of making sure everybody is aligned, clear positioning for the product, really clear pinpoint and persona for the product. In many companies, there is no PMM. So even eBay does not have PMM, for example. Then in those cases, it's a product manager job because you own the product, right? Again, in retailers or merchants, then it's more of a merchant's job because in retailers, the product is the physical stuff like garbage cans or clothes or earrings or TV, right? Then who manage the product is a merchant, the buyer, the sourcers. So whoever really, if it's a PMM in most company, like who is best practice is PMM job. In smaller company with not much resources is whoever manage the product.

The product, okay.

If you are in some countries, if you already have a product, like the product is already exist, exists for a long time. For example, in McDonald's, you might like, oh, the kiosk is already available in for a long time, but we just first time bringing this to a certain country that we launch a table service or kiosk or something. Usually they partner with a local general manager, and whoever owns the P&L locally is in charge of that person. And of course, the person might assign, say, okay, in this my country country, I will say this will be marketing person, or this will be the tech team product manager or project manager's job. So it depends on is it centralized or decentralized. Decentralized will be based on whatever GM think will make sense for the country, and it also depends on what's the go-to-market really mean in terms of resources needed. For example, at Meta, talk back to the Wi-Fi things, in many country, our go-to-market is managed by TPM, technical program manager. Why? Because TPM tend to be someone very technical. And in those Wi-Fi product, the go-to-market doesn't mean communication, means go to the tower, put on the devices, implement the devices, make sure the tower of signal works. So it's all engineering, all technology. So the person who manage your process are technical program manager. It's a little bit like project manager, but they are technical. So they communicate with local telco, and those are the true person who actually manage the go-to-market. So I would say, do not try to limit yourself on who should do this. Think about in this process, what role is most needed? In Meta is about, you know, Wi-Fi thing is about technically implementing and integrated with the local telco. Role. In some scenario that you mentioned, it's about communication, it's about marketing, managing the PR, managing the press, about the content. In some area, what I mentioned, um, earlier on educating the local people, is about testing the channel. So the marketer, well, who are channel manager, play most important role. In McDonald's, it's a lot of convincing of the stakeholder who are the franchisers. So the person who manages franchisees is actually playing the key role in the go-to-market. So don't think of it that have to be whatever title, think about what is blocking you to go faster and whoever holds the key is your go-to-market person.

Okay, let's take it to a smaller domain. Let's talk a little bit about startups, right? So they are always budget tight, you know, there's always, you know, lack of people. If you would come in into that domain, what would be your, you know, like 30 Days Playbook? Effectively, what are the musts to launch something bigger? Let's not talk just about like a feature. Let's say it's almost like, you know, a pivot. It's a bigger piece of something startup is launching. Like, what's your lightweight playbook you would do in startups?

Yeah, I just did it yesterday. Or you can like, for example, in my startup, it's changing the pricing and program is big, right? So we used to have like, hey, people pay, say, $100, you get 2 shipments per month. Each time we'll send you 5 items. You can wear the clothes. Our AI will pick clothes for you. After you wear these 5 clothes, you return and you send to other people. And we decided to launch a brand new program, which is you only get 1 shipment per month. You get 7 items. Times per month. And then it combines with other features like you can do extended rental after you rent for one cycle, like few weeks. Now you can keep it for another billing cycle because you just love it so much. So then you don't have any gap in between shipments. Um, in the past when you ship back and there might be a few days in between, while it seems minimum, but just like Uber or Netflix, one day you don't have that, you feel like, oh, I don't have it today, am I going to watch DVD, buy DVD? That's inconvenient. So we decided to launch this brand new pricing programs and very different how you work stuff. So this means what? Means that I need to— we need to change your website copy. We need to change your website creative. We need to inform the operation team. So when they are packing stuff or our AI picking stuff, our tech team need to assign, it will be 7 items versus 5 items. When they are packing item, we need to make sure we have bigger bag. So then the clothes go out will be able to fit. When our stylist, human stylist, talk to the customer, they will know that they have 7 items to fill. So they might be 3 outfits versus in the past 5 items, maybe 2 outfits, right? So a lot of people need to be informed. And then also on the marketing side, when we run advertising, you will need to say differently. So simple thing, we start— I start with the simple one-pager. We are launching these things. The reason is what? Most important is why we are doing so. We are doing so because we found that customer hated the gap in between shipment, and by having more item, less shipment, they will have less gap. So, and, and we launch those features that allow them even have no gap, right? So this is the reason. And how do we know it will be successful? The hypothesis The hypothesis is that retention will go up, and the hypothesis is the purchase rate will stay the same because you used to rent 7, 10 items per month. So if you buy, purchase item 20% of time, then you buy 2. But if I send you only 7, then the purchase rate will be less, right? So I need to make sure the purchase rate stay the same. I also need to make sure the monthly average order value stay the same because I used to send you 10 items, so I charge you over $100, but now I only send you 7 items, so I charge you slightly less. So I need to make sure, because the retention is higher, so the total margin will still be the same, right? So I need to make sure I have this hypothesis in place, which is a metric we want to track. And then I wrote down for the marketing side, okay, the phase 1 is that we are going to just no marketing, launch into a website and run for warehouse and see what happened. And then one for one week, if it worked well, now get into the alpha, right? And now you get into beta. If it works well, we will start doing advertising. And on advertising, this is the theme that we will run for Meta ads and search ads. And then on ChatGPT, these are the stuff SEO we will run. And hopefully over time we see the impact, right?

So, okay.

And All I did is I grab a meeting with everybody, say, this is our plan. Are you okay? Are you okay? Are you okay? Okay. So now we know like everybody go, this is stuff that we, you are in your channel, you need to do. And then before even get to phase 2, you should start preparing for the copy and the creative for media buying. And then we should have a backup media buying assets. So then if it doesn't run well, we have a second set of creative that we can use.

I love that. So, um, I want to talk a little bit about internal alignment— not internal alignment, internal buy-in, which effectively is very important for external buy-in as well. You talked a little bit about this on LinkedIn, a couple of your posts. You basically said like, look, internally everybody needs to understand and buy into hypothesis of that launch, and then, you know, you know, the external sort of works. It's a sort of like a two-sided funnel, as you put it. Can you talk us through why it's important that internally people get on the side of that go-to-market hypothesis being either true or successful or whatever is the notion?

I'm not sure if everybody needs to buy in because especially in big tech companies, there are just too many people. If you're on all day long trying to get people buying, then you're doing nothing else, right? So I think whoever will be impacted need to be buying, right? So I'm going to launch the 7 item, it's going to impact inventory, right? Because you used to have 5 items go out and then 2 items come back and we send you 5 items again, which means at any given time you only have 5 items, which means any given time there's only 5 items that is being rendered that is not available for someone else. But if I change it to this 1 shipment, 7 item plan, now means any given time you hold on to a 7 item, which is 7 clothes that can— or pants or jackets— they cannot be used by other people, right? So first of all, the merchant is going to be impacted. So I need to check with inventory team, do we have enough clothes for people if we change this program? Secondly, the operation team will be impacted because they need bigger right? The bigger bag also means that bigger bag means heavier, means shipping cost is going to increase. So I need to let the finance team know because we need to calculate, is still the right pricing? Because 7-item plan is more item and it's bigger bag and it's more heavy in shipping, right? So whoever it will be impacted need to be informed. But I would say not just informed, try to think about bring them to your strategic player to help you. In PMM, product marketing manager, I only talk about go-to-market so far, but in fact, half of their job is actually before you launch to help you to form the launch better. For example, how do I know my Wi-Fi people are people who are not, who are technically already savvy? How do I know in Tailor AI, our customers are single guys, sales guys, who are not into fashion? but need to look good. They wanna look great, but they hate laundry. They hate picking clothes, and they have been wearing the same thing again and again last 10 years.

Mm-hmm.

These are all from the original insight from the product marketing person. So not just only inform, but leveraging them to build your product marketing plan. So you are not like just doing yourself, like trying to convince somebody in the end. No, you were in the process. I asked you, should we launch a 7th item? You say, 8 items will be too much. 6 items will probably be enough, but maximum I can fit into the bag is 7 items. That's why you told me. That's why I launched a 7-item plan, right? From the get-go, when you're designing the go-to-market, you already involve those people. So the goal is not make sure everybody know. The goal is that everybody help you. So when you launch, you don't have to convince anybody because these are your ideas.

Okay. So let me read this quote from Salesforce, and it's about sales team. So sales teams turn to enablement as a top tactic for growth, and 3 in 4 sales reps say that the company's enablement programs prepare them to meet the quotas. So effectively what they're saying in this report is that whatever is the launch, whatever is the product, sales team will need to get educated, uh, on how to actually sell that product. That, right? And that will help them to meet the quotas. So that is sort of like internal market fit, as we say. You do that with the sales team and you sort of give them whatever you're launching and you go like, can you sell that? And they go like, yes, or whatever the advice you give, your feedback. And we do that while we're formulating the go-to-market plan, right?

That's right. That's right. So is it a ready process that your team already just like In agile, in building product, the goal for running agile is not about building product faster. How is it possible? Like, suddenly you implement a new framework and everything is faster? No, it's faster to get feedback. For example, if I'm going to build a car, instead of buying— instead of building 4 wheels and a window, and after 6 months you realize no one is buying a car because everybody works from home, you should already sell a bicycle. And then you realize no one buys bicycle, it's not because it's too slow. It's because everybody work from home. So you get feedback earlier. So just like in our model, we testing with this 100 customer before I fundraise $2 million. Because if I raise $2 million, at least from my investor, like founder of YouTube, early investor of Hello Kitty, Spotify, Facebook, and I spend— start spending money. But what if it's something that people don't want? So I have testing with these 100 people. The goal is getting those insight. It's almost like my go-to-market, right? For startup, your go-to-market is when you— yes, beside your product go-to-market, your real company go-to-market is also oftentimes tied to your funding. You now have money, so then you can really start doing go-to-market. But before that, getting your input, which is the testing stuff, your piloting. For example, we will be launching, say, data monetization one day because we found that The 300 fashion brands we work with, they really value the insight coming from the customer. Say you are a brand in UK, you haven't been in the US market yet. So we help you to get your unsold inventory, get into the US market and start using AI recommending to a customer and people start renting them. I realize that when I started, I realize I only think that you only care about this because you want to sell your unsold inventory from your warehouse in London to the US single men and busy men. But I quickly discovered you actually care this more because you want the input, you want the insight, you want to— you want me to tell you what Americans are really wanting to wear so then you can do a better collection next year, so then you can make a lot more money and really open up the whole US market. What we found was through this small testing, we realized this is what the real purpose and pinpoint of my supply So this become a foundation for my launching my data monetization because today I don't charge them. I use it as a negotiation power to say, okay, instead of doing 50/50 revenue share, how about we do 40/60? You get 40, I get 60, but I will give you data and insights. But in the future, it become foundation for me as a data monetization plan. So if you did use the go-to-market framework, this is almost like the same thing. Now I'm collecting this piloting and getting insight. So then when I go to market, it's not like first time in the market, it's actually have strong through a lot of testing and then a lot of iteration. So I know for sure my go-to-market will be successful.

Okay. I love how you put that agile is not about getting things done faster, but it's actually about getting feedback faster. I love that point of view. I don't think development teams use it like that. Everybody thinks thinks, you know, velocity, and we put this in and everyone's going to be faster, right? So let's go into rapid questions, 30-60 seconds per question. First question: before you start the go-to-market plan, what single condition must be true? Or put it in other way, your personal do not start rule.

Uh, if you don't know who is your audience, your persona. Who is the audience? What problem are you solving for them?

Okay. Uh, can you— how can you fake that with AI? Like, would you trust using AI to define that for you without actually going to the market and doing that?

No, not at all. Yes, you can use AI research, but you will still need to, uh, validating with your real customers.

Okay, so it's just you can use AI to get some ideas, but you still want to go to market to actually talk with these personas and actually validate whatever you're planning to launch.

Because you are go-to-market means what? Means it's not yet in market. Means what? AI only know the past, not the future. So if you are building something old, which you can find it on AI, then you shouldn't go to market because your stuff is old. Why would you launch something to a market that already exists? So you are for sure, you are launching something new. And AI only know the past, not the future. So you can as a reference, but you will never know the truth until you test it out in the future.

I love that. All right. Second question. If the data, if the date must hold, as in the launch date is not negotiable, what's your kill switch for a no-go call?

I think it's that you, if you are, if you are, if you are, you, if you already know certain key part of a journey will be broken, outcome. For example, I know my— for sure my, uh, the, my warehouse won't have the capacity to ship those items to the customer. Then you are creating angry customer. However, you never really know. So you can also do is that you make sure you have a backup. So tomorrow we'll launch this, but if it's not doing very well, we will also inform every customer, say, okay, we are bottleneck right now, but we will ship your item next week, and no worries, we won't charge until next week. So you can always have a contingency plan.

So you never been in a situation where something needed to go live and then the decision was made to just not launch at all?

Oh, all the time. In Meta, like most of stuff build, not everybody being launched. And the same thing for eBay, like all the time, many things are not going to see the customer where you get kills very soon. All the time. So, but the, the kill switch will be like, why you need alpha, beta, and launch? If everything go production, then why do you need go-to-market, right? The point for go-to-market is to go to market, is to test it. So if we have alpha and testing with 20 people and some of you are not liking it, go back to the drawing board. You never get to beta. If you are for sure knowing that you are launching 100%, then you don't need go-to-market. Right? You just done. It's not go-to-market. The point for go-to-market is to make sure we minimize the risk and make sure that we can really well smooth and make sure when we launch to a customer, this is something they want. So all the time, why would you do A/B testing? In fact, research shows real A/B testing less than one-third of time is actually working. So most of the time are not. So you should have from the get-go knowing that even you are not going to market, market is a success because you actually testing it and you prevent a disaster. Okay, what you learn, you learn something, and that's the insight, is still valuable.

Uh, what single one-pager speeds a launch more than any other document?

Your persona and pinpoint are you addressing and why your product is addressing the pinpoint. Okay, so my customers are single guy and busy men who are not into fashion fashion. So by AI styling them, they don't have to do shopping, and they don't need to have a GQ. And by renting them clothes, they don't have to commit to buy something because they can just like open your Netflix show, watch a show for 3 minutes, if you don't like it, change the next one. You don't have to buy a DVD. The same thing for our model is renting clothes. You are not buying clothes, like trying the clothes on for you for a couple weeks, and if you love it, you can buy it with discount. If not, you don't. So your persona, your pain point, are you addressing? How are you addressing that?

Okay. In the final 2 weeks before the launch, what's a single metric, uh, that becomes your North Star? And who owns, uh, who owns that and, and make sure that every day it's moving?

I don't think it's— that's a real answer to this question because every Every company will be different, every product will be different, right? So for example, if I, uh, at eBay we launch the, the homepage redesign, which is a big product, like the revamp the whole website, and website for eBay is a product, right? So the hypothesis is with bigger pictures, more people go to view item page, which will eventually they will buy the house, book a time and buy the house. So their metric will be the click-through okay, well, in my business, once I launch this new plan, my metrics will be the revenue or margins coming from the shipments or retention coming from the product. I don't think there's a single answer for this, but who is in charge to make sure the number goes up? It really depends on what go-to-market tactics are you doing. For example, if I already have a product, all I'm doing is marketing, of course, it's marketing I just launch your product, make sure it's right. Then you probably make sure that we still have engineering team every day fixing problems. Then they should be owning that. If I am launching this product and then what I need to do is to make sure testing the creative and creative is my go-to market, then probably the creative team, designer teams are the one who, who, who is launching this. So it depends on what's the lever and what are you really testing for this go-to market is Okay.

Before public release, do you run any fire drill rehearsals? As in, if something happens, let's just sort of be ready for that.

Yeah. So that's what your A/B testing plan for, or go-to-market plan for. You always have all those rules. You say, okay, when we launch, if there's a major bug, like people just cannot load the homepage at all, we will reset the testing, go back to day zero. If it's a small part bug, which is P2, P3, which is not impacting checkout, for example, but impacting view, but not impacting people pay us, then this P2 means the testing will continue and we will be fixing it within 1 week. So you always have those rules. Okay, if that happen, how will we do? So no one need to fight because what happened is When you launch like A/B testing or go-to-market, you're like, but this part is great, my baby, I want it to be there. And people start arguing, should we launch, should we not launch? No, we talk about this, this conversion rate is worse than 10% than before, we will not launch. Or we talk about this, if revenue is less than 5% lift, we will not launch. We'll continue going back to the drawing board. So you already have the if rule. Go-to-go or no-go rule in place.

Okay, so that's go/no-go or success metrics, which gives you a real decision framework based on that. Okay, what's one automation that quietly saves your team hours every week?

Uh, the automations, I think it's— I, I would say back to is will be that, that's a plan, because then If you don't have that, it's an oversight. It's better to talk about if we won the lottery, I'll give you 50, I'll give you 50 before you won the lottery. Because once you won the lottery, you will be a hard and tough conversations, right? So it's always easier to have that beforehand. And I think it's also another thing is really important is that if do you have a really clear single one metrics that everybody agree that's most important, because I can tell you many times when you launch your go-to-market, Something will go better, something will go worse. And Meta, for example, remember used to be Facebook have a thumb up, but then Facebook changed to reactions like haha, happy, the heart. So when we launch the reaction, comment drops. And is it important or not important? Less people provide comments. So how do we know is it good or bad? Then they go back to original goal. The goal is to help people better express their feeling. Therefore, they need to see if the comment is replacing by the reaction, like, haha, you used to write, okay, now you use a haha emoji. So that's okay because you still better express feeling. But if the previous comment are all, haha, I think it's so funny. Last time have this, my dog also do this. And now that you only use reaction, then that's not good. So you need to align one single goal or metrics. That everybody thinks that's why we're doing this thing. Whenever really you have a doubt, go back to that goal.

I love that one. Define one single success metric or a goal and come back to it if you're not sure. What's one thing leaders do that burn the teams out during the go-to-market, and how would you fix it?

Burnout the team?

Yeah, just overwork people.

I think you are doing the— you were saying that from the beginning of the show, not making decisions. So not making decisions is what burns the team, because everybody's not sure what to do. People worry about that. People are not doing the next thing because they are afraid if they start doing the next thing, you will ask them to do this current thing. So not making decisions is making a decision. Decision. So have a go-to, go or no-go plan in place so you don't have to make decision once you launch.

I love you putting this. I'm on the receiving end very, very often when decisions are not being made and weeks pass when you're busy very quickly and everyone's busy all the time and suddenly it's 1 week, 2 weeks and you're still making on that decision. It's very draining because it just puts you in this waiting pattern. And it's, uh, I wouldn't say it burns you out, but it's definitely a pain of not making decisions. All right, so that was excellent. Uh, thank you for giving us a glimpse into your experience with Meta and other enterprises, and as well with, uh, with Taylor and how you guys did. It is very big when it comes to go-to-market, and it's very contextual as well, but hopefully we, you know, gave justice and gave some good ideas to our listeners. And to our listeners, if you enjoyed that, make sure to drop your questions in the comments. We love to answer them. And for Ania, do you want to leave our listeners with anything where they can learn more about you, learn more about Taylor?

Yeah, so if you are— you people in the UK who are traveling to the US next time, don't need to bring a lot of clothes coming to the US and don't need to bring dirty clothes home. Use our service, that's TAILOR.STYLE. That's T-A-I-L-O-R-S-T-Y-L-E, TAILOR.STYLE. We pick outfit for busy man and we all send the hotel to close to the hotel. You wear for whole weeks. Once you're done, then return the dirty clothes to the hotel lobby with prepaid envelope. No more shopping, no more laundry. You can use the code PODCAST25, PODCAST25, to get 25% of first month. And if you are amazing fashion brand in Europe, then talk to us and we would love to help your brand to enter the US market, to have a white-collar busy man to wear your clothes and send you insight that you know how you compare to another 100 brands in the US. How would you better? How would you less better? How can you improve? So then you can open a new market. So email me at anya@ @taylor.ai. That's T-A-E-L-O-R dot A-I. A-N-Y-A at T-A-E-L-O-R dot A-I. And finally, if you are AI investors or sustainability lover and want to get involved more in the AI space and sustainability or US markets, feel free to reach out to me as well, Anya at taylor.ai. Thank you.

Thanks, Anya. And scroll down to the show notes. We have all the details there as well. If you're not tuning in live. They will be there, all the links and all the information. Thanks everyone for tuning in, and as always, until the next time, stay safe and be online.