Case 04 — MyLINK Engage — Global GTM
MyLINK Engage — Global GTM
Taking a German product global — provisioning, politics, and the collaboration that made it work
MyLINK Engage — originally WebSMS — was a messaging platform built and owned by LINK's German team. The group decided it was the right product to standardise across all markets as the primary messaging solution. My assignment: take a product built for Germany and make it launchable in Norway, Sweden, Denmark — and eventually beyond.
A product built for one market carries all the assumptions of that market invisibly inside it. Provisioning processes designed for German sales teams. Invoice structures matching German billing systems. Support workflows built around German customer expectations. A pricing model calibrated to DACH competition.
I was accountable for the group GTM — sell, provisioning, billing, support, monitoring, security, legal, marketing — but I wasn't the product owner. The product belonged to the German PM. She had her own roadmap, her own engineering team, her own priorities, and her own customers to serve. I needed her collaboration without her feeling that the group was taking over her product.
That dynamic — being responsible for an outcome without authority over the product — is one of the harder positions to operate from. It requires a different kind of influence than product ownership.
The collaboration that changed everything
The relationship with the German PM started carefully. We had clear roles on paper, but in practice the boundary was blurry. I was asking questions about her product, requesting changes to her processes, involving her team in planning conversations that affected her roadmap.
I was deliberate about how I showed up — asking rather than telling, framing every request as a shared problem, making sure her priorities were visible in the group roadmap. But it was still formal. Productive, but guarded.
The shift happened when I stopped treating our calls as coordination sessions and started being honest about my own challenges. I told her what was hard on my side. I asked how she dealt with similar problems. I shared my frustrations about the organisation in the same way she was sharing hers.
The calls changed. They became conversations between two people trying to solve the same problem from different angles. We started sharing information that wasn't strictly required for the GTM — context, history, political dynamics. That informal knowledge made the formal work significantly better.
Discovery first — understanding the as-is
Before planning the launch, I ran a structured discovery across three dimensions: commercial (customer lists, pricing, migration paths from legacy platforms), technical (provisioning process, integration architecture, API dependencies, monitoring setup), and operational (support requirements, security assessment, legal compliance).
This discovery revealed that several legacy platforms — Turnpike, Fenix, Intouch, Silver Bullet among others — had customers needing migration to Engage. Each had its own pricing history, feature usage, and contract status. Building that picture took weeks.
Defining what "group-ready" meant
One of my most important contributions was defining the criteria a product had to meet before it could enter the group portal. For Engage, this meant: unified provisioning through Salesforce following group standards, invoice structure aligned with group billing, support documentation and training completed for all target markets, and a feature parity assessment per launch market.
This wasn't just operational hygiene. It was the same gate I had established for every product entering MyLINK Portal — the principle that complexity stops at the portal door.
Phased launch and portal integration
We launched in phases: Norway, Sweden and Denmark first, with each market requiring its own readiness check — sales training, support onboarding, provisioning setup, and validation with local account managers. I joined Nordic sales meetings to present the product directly for the first five minutes, then handed to the local team.
The phased approach meant we could learn from the first market before scaling. Issues that appeared in Norway could be fixed before Sweden and Denmark launched.
The MyLINK Portal integration — making Engage statistics visible in the portal dashboard, surfacing Engage in navigation, enabling upsell prompts — was defined as a separate phase. Trying to do portal integration and market launch simultaneously would have created too many dependencies and too much risk. Prove the product works in the market first. Then connect it to the platform.
3+
Years active
Q1 2024 through 2027 and beyond
3
Markets launched
Norway, Sweden, Denmark — with phased approach
7+
Legacy platforms
Assessed for migration — Turnpike, Fenix, Intouch, Silver Bullet and others
8
Workstreams owned
Sell · Provisioning · Billing · Support · Monitoring · Security · Legal · Marketing
4
Roadmap phases
GTM as-is · migrations · portal integration · self-service expansion
The technical complexity of this GTM was real but manageable. The organisational complexity was harder. Being accountable for an outcome without owning the product requires a very specific kind of influence — one built on trust and shared interest rather than authority.
The lesson I carry from this project is about where collaboration actually starts. It doesn't start when two people agree on a plan. It starts when they're willing to be honest about what's difficult. The moment I stopped performing confidence and started sharing my actual problems, the collaboration became real.
A good GTM is really a good discovery. Most launch failures happen because someone assumed they understood the operational requirements of a new market. The investment in understanding the as-is — existing customers, pricing history, support workflows, legacy platforms — is never wasted.