You’re not as Market-Driven as You Think.

As product leaders, we prioritize research when planning strategies and building roadmaps. But if you’re like most of us, you may not realize how heavily you’re relying on pure customer input—qualitative data from interviews, quantitative usage stats, prioritization by account value or support tickets. Your product managers continually demonstrate how data-informed they are – and customer data is by far the richest and most accessible source of insight.

But here’s the kicker: it’s not always the best way to grow our products.

The Real Role of Product Management

We often think that our job is to be the voice of the customer, but that’s actually the domain of the customer success team. As product managers, we need to represent the voice of the market—the needs and priorities of potential users, not just our current customers. Our strategies, roadmaps, and release plans should aim to attract new populations while still keeping our existing base happy.

Having solid market intelligence is like wielding a magic wand. You can see opportunities clearly, build compelling business cases, and practically design features on the spot. Product-market fit feels almost within reach!

The Reality Check: Data Sources

However, if you scratch the glossy surface of most roadmaps, you’ll find a lot of data about current users and a lot of guesses about potential ones. Why aren’t we using more hard market data? Simple: getting insights from people who don’t already know us is tough.

Your marketing team spends huge sums to find new leads, which then require significant effort from sales or through your product-led growth (PLG) process to convert. Product managers don’t have the same resources for finding new voices. Instead, we often turn to two familiar sources: the customer success team and the sales team.

Customer Success: The Easy Path

Customer Success loves helping the product team because it helps keep accounts renewing and expanding. When we ask for customer meetings, they happily set us up with the easy ones to arrange—usually the happiest customers and biggest champions. While this can provide a good number of meetings, it rarely offers new insights.

Sales: A Tricky Resource

Sales teams are in constant contact with prospects, so they seem like a great source of market data. But their main goal is to close deals, and they’re unlikely to jeopardize a deal by asking for favors. Even if your product managers are on sales calls, they’re often pitching the vision or demoing, not gathering market data. If your roadmap relies heavily on sales call data, you might be refining your fit with your ideal customer profile (ICP) at best, or at worst, using cherry-picked data from freshly-won deals.

A Practical Solution

So, do we just give up on getting market intelligence? Absolutely not! Here’s a practical exercise you can implement this week with minimal resources. Reach out to your demand generation team and get a list of well-qualified prospects who didn’t convert into real opportunities. These are golden—your marketing team thought they were viable, but your sales team couldn’t get any traction. Why?

Send a brief outreach message as a product manager, offering a $25 gift card for a 15-minute call. Ask questions like: What were you looking for? Why didn’t we fit? What did you choose instead? These conversations can reveal the boundaries of your market – and suggest meaningful new adjacencies. (Plus, it will help you understand if your ICP needs adjustment.)

By reaching out to these market voices, you’ll gather valuable insights that can shape your product strategy and drive growth in a way that purely customer-driven data might miss. Give it a try and watch the magic happen!