Before the product development stage, how do you present market and buyer insights to product? What documents does the PMM own at this stage?

Question

John Hurley · Accepted Answer

I like to create what I call an Opportunity Assessment. Here is the general table of content for the presentation:

- Problem Hypothesis
- Target Market
- Market Opportunity
- Business Metrics / Revenue Strategy
- Competitive Landscape
- Our Differentiated Solution
- Basic Solution Requirements
- Go-to-Market Overview (Timing and Concept)

If it's an existing market, include
- Competitive Feature Comparison
- SWOT Analysis for top competitor

Looks like the formatting is a bit off, but attached you can find the template.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/17WP6mzinluezqh1AF0HMcOFe_ucL7LDApQQJG1HZlno/edit?usp=sharing Opportunity Assessment

Vanessa Thompson · Answer

If you think about what goal you want to achieve, that will help you decide what documents to produce and own. A good goal at this stage is to be a strategic partner to your product team, and be part of the product strategy development.

Based on this goal, you could produce a few things. One would be a TAM/SAM (the data). The other would be a document that unpacks details based on the TAM data.

TAM - Getting your hands on real TAM data if your market is new or you are a small company with a tight budget can be a little tricky. If you’re in this situation, you can scrape the web for data to piece together a high level set of data for the model.

Discussion document - You should treat the discussion doc as a detailed analysis exercise and think about breaking down the data by use case or industry (whichever is more important to your business). Think about answering some of these questions: Do we know how much revenue opportunity is out there in the key use cases/industry? What are the top ten use cases based on revenue opportunity? Do we already have customer concentrations in some of these use cases? What are the natural product-market fit type use cases?

Patti Lew · Answer

1. There are a number of foundational research reports and insights you can provide to your product partners before they delve into the development process. These include:
     1. A broader overview of the competitive landscape and market landscape
     2. As well as a closer look at the health of your brand and how it fares against it competitors over time through brand trackers and CSAT (consumer satisfaction) surveys
     3. In terms of users and target audience, they can draw on segmentation and persona research
     4. And I find that my product partners greatly appreciate and rely on value proposition research to frame their design decisions and utilize messaging insights to better frame the end product to our users.

2. In terms of how we present these insights, we find it helps to give a preview to Product leaders first to clear up questions or reframe as needed given their feedback so they can become early supporters and proponents of the research. Also, when sharing out more widely to the product org, as calendars can be hard to manage, I find it easier to be added on as an agenda item on a recurring Product team meeting, as most of the team will be in attendance. Another way we are currently experimenting with having Product partners ingest and internalize insights at Glassdoor are through immersion workshops. This allows them to digest insights we currently have before developing new hypotheses, like incorporating new segmentation research. In this case, we can develop a shared understanding of the unmet user needs, break down the jobs to be done and identify user pain points of our target audience.

Katie Levinson · Answer

First, it’s important to understand what the product team’s goals (and really the company level goals) are, to help you 1) focus in on the insights you need to gather and 2) package those up in a way that is meaningful to the organization. As a PMM, you would own any competitive landscape and market research, and foundational research with your target audience.

The main components that you’d want to present include:

* Target audience(s) and opportunity size(s), including any qualitative data you might have
 * Problem that you’re trying to solve
 * Value propositions/differentiated solution, and why they matter to your audience
 * Use cases (bring to life how your solution will be used by your audience)
 * Business goals/outcomes that might be achieved through the launch

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