The importance of Market driven Product Management

Recently I realized a belief I have so deeply ingrained that I forget to talk about it outloud. Market driven product management. not just Product management but Market driven product management. 

What is it you ask?

Product Management is not just building features and putting them into the market. It's not just working with developers and "talking their language", it's not just launching releases properly with marketing and sales support. It's not just executing on a vision. 

It starts earlier...way earlier. 

It starts with understanding your customers/market.  I like to think of this in a few ways:

What are their problems? Not just the things they say, but the challenges they have every day. The things that keep them up at night. It starts with understanding who they are, and what their problems are.

Who are they? Who are your customers? and prospects...what customers do you want to have? You need to know who you're building for, and who you are NOT building for. 

What are their options? How are they solving their products today? What are their alternatives?

How do they respond to your proposed solution? Pragmatic marketing taught me that "you are not your target market",  Without testing, validating, and testing again...you may think you have a great solution, but your customer may not feel the same way. 

"We've always done it this way", or "I talked to them this one time" is not market driven, it doesn't push your product forward. Our job as market driven product managers is to lay aside all of our assumptions and ego about "how things should work", and listen to what the market is telling us. What can we do to solve that problem differently. 

Being market driven is as natural to me as breathing, so much so that it would be hard to teach someone to breathe. But sometimes you need to hold your breathe and explain it. 

Oh, and another thing...read this article too