Why your Product Strategy needs to be based on deep market insight
As a Product Manager does market insight simply involve letting your existing customers dictate what they would like to see in the product? Sometimes, more influential customers (those with a strong contribution to overall revenue) can drive product strategy. However, because one large company asks for something does not mean that there are lots of customers with this same need. Individual customers generally have little concern for the needs of other customers.
It is easy to lose sight of market demand if you are too focused on your own product. If your product strategy requires that you deliver a broad-based market-driven offering then focusing on individual customer demands may not help you to achieve this. It is more likely to drive you down a services route.
Customers can provide lots of useful insights related to their use of the product and what they would like to see in our product. However, there are steps you can follow to proactively capture deeper customer insight, enabling you to focus on the broader market.
5 Step Insight2Value Process – As a Product Manager:
- Step 1: Capture Insights – Research and articulate data on your current business context, future market opportunities, buyer behaviours and competitive landscape
- Step 2: Focus – Apply a methodology to help you to identify and prioritise key market opportunities that will drive revenue and enable you to clearly articulate your service/product/solution offering for these markets
- Step 3: Position – Create a positioning statement that enables you to differentiate in a competitive landscape
- Step 4: Validate – Apply Voice of the Customer (VoTC) techniques to enable you to validate your market hypothesis through qualitative and quantitative research
- Step 5: Communicate – Create a compelling message that can be used in a targeted marketing campaign. Supporting you to create a Marketing Plan that will drive engagement with your target markets
My approach is consultative and collaborate. Therefore, I strongly believe in approaches that help your business to align the disciplines of product management, engineering, sales and marketing. I have the foundations and understanding of how products are designed and engineered. I know the importance of an aligned approach across the organisation.
For those of you in the Technology Sector, everything I do will help you to create relevant business requirements (Business Epics) for the product or solution development backlog – aligning product management/strategic marketing and solution development (engineering).
Remember: “The customer rarely buys what the company thinks it is selling him. Companies need to take a customer-first perspective to succeed…”
Peter Druker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Checkout the Insights2Value approach to support your business to drive insights that will add real value.