Product managers need to be market driven. When you're being driven by customers, problems, and competitors, you need a tool which brings all of your insights together to help drive holistic decision making. I use a Market Problem Matrix to create that view to develop insights and drive conversations.
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Market Problem Matrix A tool I use to be more market driven
Scott Sehlhorst Product management & strategy consultant 8 Years electromechanical design engineering IBM, Texas Instruments, Eaton 7 Years software development & requirements > 20 clients in Telecom, Computer HW, Heavy Eq., Consumer Durables 9 Years product management consulting >20 clients in B2B, B2C, B2B2C, ecommerce, global, mobile Agile since 2001 Started Tyner Blain in 2005 Helping companies Build the right thing, right tynerblain.com/blog/ @sehlhorst if youre into that sort of thing
Market Driven Product Management Building a strategy & planning a product based on To whom should we be selling What is important to them How good we are and how good we will be How good will the competition is and will be
Market Problem Matrix A tool which is the evolution of, and repurposing of the old Harvey ball charts weve seen for years.
Start with a Harvey Ball Chart Harvey balls are coarse I like a 1-10 Scale
Inform Decisions, Dont Keep Score Where we are today is mildly interesting Where we expect to be after the roadmap is executed is very interesting
Beauty, In The Beholders Eye Who are our target customers? And how much does each group care about each capability?
We Could Just Stop Here And be better than most teams Ive seen: Accountability in roadmap Plan based on future competitive landscape Acknowledge that all customers are different But lets keep going anyway
Important Customers Some markets are more important* than others *to successfully executing a particular strategy
Time To Choose Can you try and win for a single customer group? Or are you forced to try and focus on everyone because every customer has a champion? *Hint: you meet your sales forecast by closing one deal at a time
If You Are Fortunate You have a single customer group, and you are able to focus on what matters most to them
If You Are in a Typical Company You have to try and be all things to all people. You also have to bias towards the most important customers. Heres some fake math to help tell the story 1. Multiply the importance of customer value with the importance to customer values. 2. Add them up, to get a normalized importance of capability measure
1. Multiplying The math should bias towards investment in the capabilities of greatest interest to the most important customers
2. Normalizing Does the bulk of your investment (by capability) match the importance (by capability) to your market?
Market Problem Matrix We now are looking at the following things at the same time: Which customers are important What those customers care about Expected future competitive position
