#59 How to do product marketing at Peloton

My latest guest is Shriya, PMM at Peloton, and she has one of the more interesting career paths I've come across. She started in film marketing in India, helped launch TikTok in a country of a billion people, moved to New York for grad school, and deliberately recruited into product marketing because she wanted a role where she'd never stop learning. She landed at Disney streaming, then Peloton.

We went deep on what it actually looks like to do product marketing at one of the most recognizable fitness brands in the world, using her experience launching Strength Plus, Peloton's standalone strength training app, as the through line.

A few things she said that stuck with me:

The work doesn't stop at launch. 
Shriya built a dedicated strength newsletter to connect the blog, member stories, instructor content, and new Strength Plus features in one place. She saw a gap between what the product could do and what members actually knew about it.

The best GTM plans are built with channel owners, not handed to them. 
Her approach isn't to show up with a fully baked plan and ask teams to execute. She brings channel owners in early, lets them define their baselines and success metrics, and builds from there. The plan ends up more grounded. It works in real life, not just on paper.

You can't make the user the problem. 
If people don't get your product, that's not a user failure. That's a positioning and messaging failure. It's your job to close that gap.

We also got into how Peloton measures launch success beyond downloads, why purpose-driven products require a different kind of internal storytelling, and how the rise of run clubs and strength training culture shaped the entire go-to-market for Strength Plus.

My main takeaway? Product marketers keep surprising me. Our job is so different from one industry to another, one company to another etc. It’s up to us to determine the focus of our role and deliver on specific metrics and KPIs.

Stay tuned for more episodes!