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

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!

Struggling with hiring top-tier product managers? It’s a challenge many of us face.

Struggling with hiring top-tier product managers? It’s a challenge many of us face.

Making the wrong hire isn’t just a hit to the budget and the calendar—it can shake the very foundation of your product, costing you users, customers, and that all-important product-market fit. But let’s be real, interviewing product managers is a whole different ball game compared to, say, hiring a good Customer Success Manager or a stellar engineer.

Why’s it so tough? Well, for starters, product managers are masters of storytelling. They can spin a yarn that’ll have you nodding along in agreement. But separating the talkers from the doers, especially when it comes to nailing down solid requirements, is a whole other story.

So, here’s a game-changer: a simple test that can weed out the real deal from the smooth talkers. 

The need for a reliable testing method

I stumbled upon this gem back in my days at an early-stage startup. We were on a hiring spree for product managers, sifting through five to ten candidates daily. Our interviews covered everything from culture fit to creativity, but we were missing a crucial piece: a way to put their hard skills to the test.

Think about it—would you hire an engineer based solely on their description of coding prowess? Heck no! You’d throw them a practical test to see if they could walk the walk. And that’s exactly what we needed for product management.

Despite the inherently subjective nature of product management, certain core skills—like creating user personas, delineating use cases, and documenting requirements—can be objectively assessed.

Enter the structured assessment framework. We crafted a concise scenario, handed it to candidates before their interview, and invited them to tackle it on a whiteboard during the session. Our focus wasn’t on the perfect solution, but rather on their approach. Could they distill complex requirements? Stay true to the scenario? Navigate the problem-solving journey with finesse?

A self-contained capsule scenario

Picture this: a bite-sized problem that anyone can understand, with multiple solutions that don’t require a PhD in our product space. We’d give this scenario out to candidates a week before their interview, no pre-work required. Then, during the interview, we’d slap it on a whiteboard and say, “Let’s tackle this together.”

Take a look! (Google Docs link) 

Given the concise scenario, a candidate should be able to tackle it live without any trouble. Importantly, our focus wasn’t on the perfect solution, but rather on their approach. Could they distill complex requirements? Stay true to the scenario? Navigate the problem-solving journey with finesse?  Or did they freeze like a deer in headlights? The key was to see if they could keep it simple, stick to the scenario, and get the job done efficiently.

Evaluating candidate results

This approach gave us invaluable insights. Candidates who breezed through the exercise demonstrated a deep understanding and practical application of product management principles. It wasn’t just about what they delivered, but how they got there.

As we put the test into practice, we noticed a few common candidate stumbling blocks. Surprisingly, quite a few were a bit green when it came to developing requirements—a more common issue than you might imagine! Others dove straight into the weeds, obsessing over intricate details like security and permissions from the get-go. Those candidates routinely ran out of time without making much headway, which was a red flag for us.

A savvy product manager could breeze through the task in under 10 minutes, including all the brainstorming and explaining. If it took them between 30 to 60 minutes, that was still within the ballpark, but it often signaled a hiccup along the way—either forgetting their own process or getting bogged down in a tangent. And those who hit a wall on time? Well, they typically either lacked familiarity with crafting solid requirements or veered way off course early on and never recovered.

The impact of a structured assessment framework for product management 

This test has become my touchstone for identifying strong product managers.  It gives me a clear-cut way to separate the wheat from the chaff.  By providing a reliable metric for assessing candidates’ suitability for the role, it removes one of the big risk factors in product hires, and lets me spend time on the strongest candidates. And its simplicity made it easy for interviewers across the team to adopt, fostering consistency and objectivity in candidate evaluation.

This test dramatically sped up our hiring process, and it enabled us to make same-day decisions on promising candidates.  So, if you’re grappling with hiring top-tier product managers, give this approach a shot. Trust me, you won’t be disappointed.

Six reasons your product team isn’t scaling (and how to fix it)

(this article is an archive post originally published in 2016)

I like product management – and I’m not alone. Many of us got into PM roles through a passion for problem solving and a real desire to see a project succeed in the hands of customers. That’s the fun part, and modern methodologies like Agile are continuously evolving to better support customer-driven products.

What hasn’t evolved nearly as much is how we manage and lead product teams – with over twenty five years of experience in tech, I’ve seen that the way we approach organizing product management is still holding us back.

This isn’t just a pet peeve of mine: recognizing this problem, Darrell Rigby, Jeff Sutherland, and Hirotaka Takeuchi published an article in the Harvard Business Review on the need for management organizations and non-technology functions to adopt agile methodologies.

I want to explore how we manage a collection of product teams operating at scale – because this is the critical topic for organizations that are growing from a single product effort into a diverse range of products, and because finding a better model will frankly restore some of the fun of product management! Continue reading “Six reasons your product team isn’t scaling (and how to fix it)” →

Part I – Structuring the product team

Part I – Structuring the product team

Recently, a young, successful tech company asked me to come up with a product planning model for them. I started out by listing off what was already working for them :

  • Internal entrepreneurialism
  • Building projects around small teams of motivated individuals
  • Dual-tracking : small teams for products and separate ones for shared, core components

Then I listed six key goals that are difficult to achieve when you’re newly successful and growing fast:

  1. Keeping leaders informed of everything that is going on
  2. Getting line-level product managers onto a consistent process
  3. Adjusting top-level strategy based on what is working
  4. Identifying what innovation to nurture among all the activity
  5. Discovering shared components that are in decline
  6. Investing mindfully across short, mid and long-term projects

If we want to add that second category of ideals to the mix, it will help to first take a step back and look at Product Management in general. Continue reading “Part I – Structuring the product team” →

Part II – Implementing a marketplace-style product lifecycle process

In Part I we looked at organization theory, determined that a classic hierarchy wasn’t what we wanted, and discussed what marketplace-style organization model could do for us. So what does this look like in practice? Let me introduce you to the Check-in Meeting.

The Check-in Meeting is a venue for reviewing and socializing relevant information about product development efforts. It takes the form of a recurring meeting on a fixed cadence with a queue of topics in three categories:

  • Product Plan Review : Present a new project plan or new phase/initiative of an existing project, to propose alignment with an existing strategy and prioritization
  • Progress to Plan : Measure a project against stated milestones and goals, in order to secure or retain allocated resources
  • Strategy Review : Periodic review and debate of top-level product strategy among CPO and directors, informed by data from recent PPR and PTP topics.

Continue reading “Part II – Implementing a marketplace-style product lifecycle process” →