Episode 60: Liza Collin on Product Readiness

Ensuring Complete Readiness for Market For Your New Product

Liza Collin, our guest this episode, is the Market Readiness Director for Visma, one of the largest software companies in Europe. After a decade in product management, she realized there was a need to put more structure around ensuring that new products – especially for such a large company – could be successfully brought to market. Keeping all the affected business organizations in the loop – legal, customer success, services, and of course sales and marketing – required more focused attention and processes than had been in use previously.

Liza therefore drove the creation of the Market Readiness Director position, which you can think of as an enabling function to help product managers and product marketing managers collaborate better, and to lift the product marketing management function to a new level of business impact.

In this interview she describes her role, and goes into detail about the way Visma now approaches market readiness – which has met with great success!

Links to Resources

In the episode Liza mentioned two resources she highly recommends for people concerned with successful go-to-market:

• The Product Marketing Manager: Responsibilities and Best Practices in a Technology Company, by Lucas Weber. Liza describes this as “an easy read that covers being a product marketing manager in SaaS companies very well.”
• She also recommended the amazing article by Andy Raskin called The Greatest Sales Deck I’ve Ever Seen. It’s simply one of the best and quickest guides to telling a compelling story that you can find.
• You can connect with or follow Liza on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/lizacollin/.

As I mention in the episode, Liza lives in a small Swedish village called Fjällbacka, which is the location of a series of very popular mystery novels by Camilla Lackberg. If you’re interested in reading those, the first in the series is The Ice Princess. (For an idea of where she lives, check out this LinkedIn post she did recently showing her in her home office with a view of a fjord out her window!)

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