Product Management 2019 Phase 1 : Finding your Target Market & Identifying Your Customers

What makes a product successful for “business”? The answer is straightforward. The amount of money it makes the business. And when does a product make money? When there is genuine need for the product and the right people are getting access to it.

That place where there is genuine need for your product is your “Target Market”. Simple.

You might make the best chicken out there, but if you are to offer that to vegetarians or vegans, will they eat it? A BIG NO! Large corporations like Amazon, Google started out with very niche objectives and customers in mind. For Google, it was people who wanted to search anything on the internet. Amazon started by selling books. Hence it is necessary to invest a bit of time in identifying your market.

Identifying the market demographics makes life easier for everyone involved too – The business knows what features to keep inside the product, developers know what they are building, marketing and sales teams know who they are selling too and can come up with appropriate strategies. Someone has rightly said, If you do not know your customers, you do not know your business.

Use the following 4 Phases Guide to have a clearer picture of your market. Ask yourself the following questions and try to answer the best you can.

The starting point. Create a statement that highlights what problem you are solving. The initial hypotheses is your product is able to solve the problem.
Create a mapping table of features your product offers and benefits they offer to the customers. This comes in handy when you have to validate the product.
Create a User Persona based on the above factors and you will get an idea who you are dealing with.
Validate the initial hypotheses that your product is solving the problems. Based on the results of the surveys, focus group interviews and other statistics you can now validate your initial hypotheses that product is indeed required.

One advantage that we have these days is, because of the explosion of data that has happened, there is always someone who has done similar work. You can build thereof.

Some resources you can use:

  1. Hubspot Persona Maker: A simple step by step tool that helps you create User Personas.
  2. Conducting Focus Group Interview: Conducting Focus Groups in itself is a different beast. This is a pretty concise guide on doing that.
  3. Mckinsey Insights: Insights you might want to keep an eye on coming straight from the Consulting giants. Do read the Mckinsey Quarterly.
  4. Statista: The membership price can be a bit steep, but this is one of the best investments you can make, whether you are an established company looking to launch products or starting up with some product idea. Search for other similar platforms and more often than not you can get the data you want.

Hope this gets you started in the right direction with launching your product. To infinity and beyond!

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