It’s impossible to get our exec team to focus on one segment. How do I balance prioritizing my roadmap while building for different segments?

This is often the case for companies in a hyper-growth state, especially as they look to find a clear fit in the market. Where I've found success with leadership is by helping them understand the trade-offs in our teams focus. For example, when planning out our team's work, we lean heavily on research and a few key metrics to prioritize. When faced with requests from leadership that may not align, we try to create an apples to apples comparison (though not always perfect) to help bring clarity t ...Read More

I think executives in all shape and form need guidance from domain experts. They are looking for product leaders to have confidence in their conviction and share the same confidence with executives. I usually form my opinions based on data and experience with the help of my team and then present to executives, reiterate multiple times with the help of visuals and then share broadly with teams after alignment. Sometimes, I'd use competitive (e.g. a market is already saturated in a particular segm ...Read More

That is a hard situation to be in. Here are some options to try Communicate your roadmap to the executive team organized by segments, showcase what you can prioritize for a segment and what you cant with the latter focusing on multiple priorities across various segments being the primary reason why you can't create focus for your team Create a focus segment for a given planning cycle, eg: Q1 on Segment 1, Q2, Segment 2, etc Identifying common use cases across segments Identifying platform featur ...Read More

It is natural for leaders to be ambitious and get enticed by potential growth segments. To avoid confusion and inefficiencies with the organization’s limited resources, leaders need to identify a primary customer segment that the product truly solves for, while exploring other segments for long-term opportunities.  Start by using data to identify a primary segment that aligns with company strategy and vision, and get executive buy-in to focus primarily on that segment. Clarify that you plan on e ...Read More

This can happen because your product growth potential is sufficiently broad across multiple customer segments or you may be operating a complex product surface that serves different segments (eg: multi-sided marketplace).  Turn this impossible situation around, instead of asking your execs to pick one segment (which seems limiting), focus on prioritization.  Align with your exec on the primary customer segment or priority order of customer segments. This will unblock roadmap prioritization for y ...Read More

I deal with this a fair emount in my current role - Delivery at ezCater to some degree touches all possible users of our multi-sided marketplace (customers, supply & fulfillment partners, internal staff), and each of those major user buckets contains multiple segments. Here are some things I've found useful in dealing with all these different user segments at once: First, acknowledging to yourself, your team and your stakeholders that there are A LOT of potential problems to solve, and compl ...Read More

Executives that can't provide focus for your team can be a common situation when there's early stage market uncertainty and pressure to do customer discovery and find PMF. Top company leadership feels an intense time pressure (I've heard it described as a holding both a compass and a stopwatch), and so is reluctant to reduce potential segments that could become winners. More than anything here, they're hoping for some signal/data/customer success that could then increase the certainty of focusin ...Read More