
In this lecture you take one product you are taking to market and choose its route, comparing a sales-led route and a self-serve route on the four criteria that actually decide the answer.
This course is built from six commercial disciplines: product leadership, customer service, brand management, marketing leadership, selling and revenue operations.
The map of the course
A simple dictionary for reading lectures from other functions as go-to-market work
Three questions to ask after every lecture
A short self-diagnostic that shows which sections to watch first
Download the Route to Market Sheet and fill it in for your own product.
How the role evolved from product manager to executive
How it differs from technology, marketing and general management
Acting as the voice of the customer inside the company
Balancing business, users and technology when the three disagree
Product vision and mission
Finding product-market fit, and sustaining it as the market moves
Setting strategic priorities and product goals
Linking product strategy to business goals rather than beside them
The product life cycle
BCG and McKinsey matrices, and the other approaches
Deciding to invest, maintain or retire
Balancing core products, adjacent bets and genuine innovation
Methods for researching a market and real customer need
Jobs to Be Done and Design Thinking
Customer journey mapping
Tools for validating a hypothesis before building anything
The roles around a product: managers, designers, analysts, researchers
Structuring a product organisation, and aligning it with OKR
Agile and Lean as an operating model rather than a ritual
Building a culture where experiments are allowed to fail
The North Star metric and the supporting set beneath it
AARRR and the pirate metrics
Product analytics tooling: Mixpanel, Amplitude, GA4
What data-driven product management actually requires
Monetisation models: freemium, subscription, transactional, licensing
Growth loops and product-led growth
Unit economics, and the LTV to CAC relationship
Where financial accountability sits for a product leader
What happens to a product as the company scales
Supporting expansion into new markets
Managing technology and market risk
Building security and compliance into the product process
The product leader as a driver of digital transformation
Innovation: AI, platform business models and what follows
Partner ecosystems and open innovation
Where the role is heading within company leadership
The main tasks and functions of the role
Its effect on customer experience and on business results
The core indicators: NPS, CSAT, CES, FCR
Working with marketing, sales and product, and leading change in service
The goals of an audit and how to assess the current state
Customer journey mapping applied to service
Collecting data through surveys, interviews and feedback
SWOT on the team, and identifying bottlenecks and growth points
Building the vision and mission for service
Defining long-term and short-term goals
Developing service policy and standards
Choosing the model: omnichannel, self-service and the alternatives
Recruiting and onboarding into a service team
Training, coaching and development
Financial and non-financial motivation
Performance management, culture, and building career tracks
Analysing current processes to find what actually needs optimising
CRM and customer communication systems
Automation: chatbots, AI and self-service
Building SLAs and standard operating procedures, with quality control
Experience metrics: NPS, CSAT, CES
Team performance metrics: AHT, FCR, SLA
Analysing customer feedback
Reporting systems, visualisation, and using analytics to decide
The types of difficult client and how each is handled
Conflict management and active listening under pressure
Escalation: how and when to involve a manager
Communication standards in a crisis, and preventing negative feedback
New technology in service and what is worth adopting
Global trends and best practice
AI and big data applied to customer care
Innovative omnichannel approaches, and long-term service planning
Why an undefined position makes every campaign more expensive
The BRAND OS model and its six layers
An AI stack mapped to each task
Why a clearly positioned product beats a better one
What an audit covers internally and externally
Running one with AI in four hours instead of three months
Competitive analysis, and how you are currently described
Health metrics: awareness, consideration, share of search
Mission, vision, values and purpose, formulated rather than borrowed
Architecture: one message or several
The positioning statement formula, and generating options with AI
The messaging matrix: one position turned into six versions for six audiences
Visual identity: colour, typography, graphics
AI design tools and when each is worth using
Verbal identity: tone of voice, vocabulary, do's and don'ts
Holding it consistent across every channel
The anatomy of a campaign: big idea, creative, channels, activation
Generating concepts with AI
The production stack for video, voice and copy
The channel mix behind a message that outlives one quarter
The metrics framework
Building a brand health dashboard
Social listening and mention monitoring on autopilot
The crisis playbook for the first 24 hours, and a 90-day roadmap
Where to start in a new marketing leadership role
A fourteen-day audit of team, channels and effectiveness
Ten questions to ask the chief executive early
The action plan for the first thirty days
Assembling a competitive analysis quickly
Estimating a competitor's unit economics
Where insight comes from and how to turn it into a decision
Building a strengths and weaknesses table that is actually used
Building a strategy the executive team will approve
The frameworks: 4P, STP, the Ansoff matrix, customer journey
Linking business goals to marketing indicators
The annual strategy document and its one-page summary
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
Marketing hits its lead target. Sales says the leads are unqualified. Product ships what the roadmap said. Customer service knows exactly why people churn and has told nobody who can act on it.
Every function is performing. Revenue is not.
The problem is between the functions
There is no shared definition of a qualified lead, so the handover between marketing and sales is a monthly argument. Positioning exists in a slide deck and nowhere in the sales conversation. The product roadmap was built from feature requests rather than from the market research anyone actually ran. Nobody owns the funnel end to end, which means nobody owns the leaks in it.
Go-to-market is not a launch plan. It is the operating system connecting six functions that currently optimise separately.
Product, service and brand
Forty-three lessons across six commercial functions. Nine on product leadership: the role, product-market fit, portfolio decisions with life-cycle logic, Jobs to Be Done and journey mapping, product organisation design, North Star and AARRR metrics, monetisation models and unit economics, scaling and risk, and where the discipline is heading.
Eight on customer service as a commercial function rather than a cost centre: NPS, CSAT, CES and FCR, service audits with journey mapping, service strategy and standards, team building, automation with chatbots and AI, SLAs and SOPs, difficult clients, and the omnichannel future.
Six on brand: the message architecture, an AI-assisted audit in a day, the positioning statement formula, the messaging matrix that turns one position into six versions, tone of voice, campaign structure, and brand health dashboards.
Marketing, sales and revenue operations
Eight on marketing leadership: a fourteen-day audit, competitive diagnosis including a competitor's unit economics, strategy with 4P, STP and Ansoff, budget defence with CAC, LTV, ROMI and CLV, the brand plan, the digital funnel with attribution, department structure, and an AI roadmap.
Six on selling itself: AIDA, SPIN, FAB, the value proposition canvas, BANT qualification, the elevator pitch, objection handling with LAER and Feel-Felt-Found, CRM technology, and funnel analysis.
And six on revenue operations, which is where the other five connect: the end-to-end funnel from lead to retention, where revenue leaks, SLAs between functions, a metric system that ties to the profit and loss, CRM as a single source of truth, AI forecasting, and a ninety-day rollout plan you can sell to an executive team.
Who is teaching this
Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy. More than 1.6 million course enrolments, over 150,000 professionals trained. I built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals. This particular course draws on the commercial side of that work, and on the executive programmes I built for product, marketing, service and revenue leaders.
What is included
Lifetime access to all course materials
Active instructor support in the Q&A section
Udemy Certificate of Completion
Practical assignments and real business cases
A section with additional courses, tools and resources
One diagnostic
Ask your marketing lead and your sales lead, separately, to define a qualified lead. If the two definitions differ, you have found where the revenue is going, and no amount of extra spend at the top of the funnel will fix it. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.