Locating Market Data
I have been spending a bunch of time heads-down, analyzing market data. This is a key part in any PM’s life, and this magical data can really come from anywhere. Here are a few of my favorite sources:
- Sales pipeline
- Support
- Win / Loss
I thought I’d jot down some of my thoughts on each of these different areas that can lead a PM to helping create a better product. But first, I want to get something out of the way: gathering market data is NOT (I repeat) NOT, a one-time process, or something that happens once every six months. You should be devoting at least some fixed percentage of your time each week to doing market research.
Remember, a PM serves as the proxy between the company and its customers / market. No questions asked.
OK, with that out of the way, on to the post.
Sales Pipeline
The sales pipeline is filled with wonderful little tidbits you can pull out. Generally, dividing a pipeline into broad strokes (beginning, middle, end type stuff) is the easiest way to go. This should give a good picture of where many of the deals are - whe combined with win / loss, this should present some strong collective feedback.
Support
Within our organization, support and QA both work within product management. I did this very deliberately: 1) support gets ingrained into them how to turn support inquiries / client deployments into helpful defect reports and feature enhancements without really having to get services involved. The second (the QA part) - it’s easier to keep a tighter lock on release cycles.
Each week, support produces a quick report giving key metrics about what clients are looking for. However, a PM does not have to turn these into requirements - as mentioned already, support is trained to do that themselves.
Win / Loss
Another key element to getting PM involved in the sales cycle — gathering win / loss data. I usually do this by setting up a custom form on the opportunity / lead list within the CRM system in use. This type of thing should be kept short and sweet. You don’t want to get crap from Sales directors / VPs that you are wasting their reps time filling out forms.
There are other channels where market data is gathered that I’ll pick up in another post. These are the core areas I’m using now, along with your typical prospect interviews. It’s one of my favorite aspects of the job; especially when it starts being a tangible effort that has a positive effect on the product development lifecycle.
