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.
3. 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 you’re into that sort of thing
5. 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
6. Market Problem Matrix
A tool which is the evolution of, and repurposing
of the old Harvey ball charts we’ve seen for
years.
7. Start with a Harvey Ball Chart
Harvey balls are coarse
I like a 1-10 Scale
8. Inform Decisions, Don’t Keep Score
Where we are today is mildly interesting
Where we expect to be after the roadmap is
executed is very interesting
9. Beauty, In The Beholder’s Eye
Who are our target customers?
And how much does each group care about each
capability?
10. We Could Just Stop Here
And be better than most teams I’ve seen:
Accountability in roadmap
Plan based on future competitive landscape
Acknowledge that all customers are different
But let’s keep going anyway…
12. 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
13. If You Are Fortunate
You have a single customer group, and you are
able to focus on what matters most to them
14. 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.
Here’s 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
15. 1. Multiplying
The “math” should bias towards investment in
the capabilities of greatest interest to the most
important customers
16. 2. Normalizing
Does the bulk of your investment (by capability)
match the importance (by capability) to your
market?
17. 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
Been slowly building a map of “why products fail” for a few years
Market problem matrix helps with minimizing / mitigating a few key risks
Some of which are a function of not being aligned with your market
Could be size of market, alignment with other portfolio products, barriers to entry, convenience of geography, product-market fit, commercial viability ….
And no one cares if your product is also “pretty good” for someone else – it needs to be their best choice, or they won’t take it.
We would win customer group C -> our strategic goal
Competitor 3 would win customer group A
Competitor 2 would win with customer group B
Competitor 1 would lose everywhere – they invested in capability III which didn’t matter to anyone