Our product does something completely different than another product in the market, but we often get grouped together? Is this a product problem? Marketing problem?

Start by analyzing why this might be happening. It’s a key signal that shouldn’t be ignored, and needs further digging to understand what’s behind it.

Is there a misperception of your brand? Is there a misunderstanding of the product offering? Are you missing features? Is there a lack of awareness of the company / offering?

Consider conducting interviews with users and salespeople to get a better understanding of the misperception.

If you can diagnose what exactly is behind this miscategorization, then you can start identifying who to work with and what to do to resolve it. It will almost likely require a collaboration between product marketing and product to resolve.

When I worked on a 0 → 1 product at Salesforce for small business, the challenge we faced was the market not seeing us as a viable solution for small business. This is something we needed to shift – across research firms, users, prospective users, etc. In order to make this shift we needed to have the right product that served this group's needs, and the right marketing to pair with it to get our message out.

At the end of the day, what matters most is what your users and prospective users think of you – if they’re finding your product, using it and sticking around.

This can be a very frustrating situation to be as a product manager. This situation tells me you work in a market that hasn't matured to the point of clear nuance. The culprit could be either a product problem OR a marketing problem. The reason this can be frustrating is your product is being held to a set of standards it shouldn't be, and therefore customers get disappointed - its own form of death spiral if something doesn't change.

It sounds like one or more things could be happening here: 

1. Customers haven't started to view the market in subsegments yet - they still view their problems in one way, while you are framing their problems in a different way. If other folks don't understand the difference - and your product *truly* (this part is important) both does and delivers something completely different, I recommend doubling down on the differentiation through specificity. Call out what makes your target customers underserved (their titles, their industry, their organization size, how cloud native their apps and infrastructure are, etc.) and how your solution is tailored specifically for them. I think it even helps to differentiate your product within the broader market category. 

I'm going to use a sports analogy because nearly all business metaphors are conveyed this way, so why change now? For example, let's say you sell baseball bats. You make smaller, lighter bats for Little Leagues, but Pro Athletes are evaluating your bats for use in the MLB. Pretty big problem, right? Instead, I suggest calling your product not as "Baseball Bats" but as "Little League Baseball Bats for Kids." See the difference? Now, the SF Giants won't try to order any because they understand your product is not targeted to them.

2. Misalignment of how you view yourselves (positioning) vs how customers view your product (messaging). When you say "our product does something completely different than another product in the market" - is the value delivered also completely different? Or are they two approaches to achieve the same outcome? This is more dangerous because **the call is coming from inside the building** ...in this case, the differentiation is in the OUTCOMES and VALUE derived by the customer within the same market. Why is your approach better? Go back to those customer stories and push the heck out of them.

It's a company problem and will likely need a cross-functional team effort to troubleshoot and solve the issue.

In the diagnosis phase, I can't stress this enough - it's important to spend sufficient time understanding the problem before moving to solutions. Sometimes as product leaders, this is the hardest thing to do, which is to sit with the problem before jumping into fix-it mode.

• Start with where this problem occurs; is the misalignment happening with your clients, industry press, analysts or more broadly across all of the above
• Find the source and rate severity of the misalignment. Is this a perception issue created by your competitors that when your Company Sales and Marketing folks engage with your potential customer, it is easily fixed? Or is this misalignment causing a larger business impact

Once you have adequately identified the misalignment areas, source and severity of impact, treat the solutioning process very similar to your roadmap prioritization exercise. What should be fixed, in what order, by when and what cross-functional steps are needed to execute.