post

Footer About

Footer Get Involved

Footer Links

Mind the Product

General

Product Unplugged Episode 3 with Pierce Healy

Product Unplugged Episode 2 with Lorilyn McCue

Product Strategy

Building Product Teams

Diversity and Inclusion

Digital Transformation

Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML)

Product Leadership

Product Management Career

Product Ethics

Minimum Viable Product

Enterprise Product Management

OKRs

Customer Research

Hypothesis and Testing

Business Strategy

User Research

👩‍🚀🚀   Live now for MTP members: <a href="https://mtp2017stg.wpengine.com/membership/#events" style="color:#FFFFFF;text-decoration:underline;">Driving Innovation AMA with Tendayi Viki</a>

Roadmaps: Break the rules without breaking the principles

Got questions about your product career?

Product roadmaps vs data – Jeremy Levy on The Product Experience

From engineering to product management at Google

Mind the Product joins Pendo

Christian Bonilla is the founder of UserMuse, which connects product and UX teams with hard-to-find subjects for user testing and product feedback. He writes regularly for UserMuse and Fast Company.

Christian Bonilla

<p>I recently had a call with the CEO of a company that I thought would be a great channel partner for my company. I&#8217;d been looking forward to the conversation; we&#8217;d convinced a few similar firms to partner with us recently and I was hungry for some momentum. When the call kicked off, I fully expected it would be another win.</p>
<p>But&#8230; nope. Zero interest on their end. Like not even a little. The call was over in less than 10 minutes.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s never fun when a business pitch tanks, but it happens. What made this one unsettling though was the feeling that I&#8217;d missed something important. It wasn&#8217;t like they already had a solution for what we do or didn&#8217;t have budget. We didn&#8217;t fit their business <em>at all</em>, and I wasn&#8217;t sure why.</p>
<p>Major elements of our sales and marketing plan, designed with companies like this one in mind, needed to be revisited at the least. Among other things, it was soon clear that we&#8217;d fallen into a common trap for startups and new products. We&#8217;d responded to market traction without properly understanding our users. It&#8217;s an easy mistake to make, but it&#8217;s also fortunately easy to avoid if you&#8217;re patient.</p>
<h2>Traction Reaction</h2>
<p>The odds are that you&#8217;ve never heard of Proscar, a prostate treatment patented by drug company Merck in the early 1990s. That&#8217;s because when Merck decided to market the exact same drug&#8217;s baldness-prevention properties too, they created a new campaign and brand. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finasteride">Propecia</a> was a blockbuster drug, earning billions in sales. Whatever your feelings about prescription drug marketing, Merck understood the need to reposition the product so it was tailored to the motivations of a different segment.</p>
<p>We launched UserMuse with what we believed to be a deep understanding of our primary market: product managers at B2B software companies. Our beliefs about them have mostly held up, except the big one of them being our primary customers. That distinction instead belongs to the UX designers and user researchers who&#8217;ve gobbled up product tester market research panels from us at a significantly higher rate than product managers so far.</p>
<p>Cool, we thought. The user researchers use our platform for pretty much the same reason product managers do. Let’s go with it.</p>
<p>Discovering adjacent market opportunities is a fun part of startup life, but it can be a tricky hand to play when you’re dealt it. In our case, our most engaged users were now not only a different persona than we anticipated, they worked in different kinds of businesses &#8211; mostly agencies and UX research firms rather than software companies. Given our limited resources, we shifted our business development focus to emphasize these companies.</p>
<h2>Don’t Abandon the Basics</h2>
<p>The logic of reinforcing success is appealing: Go to market, see where you get traction, and find more prospects like them. The problem for us was that when success came where we didn’t expect it, we didn&#8217;t think very hard about what made this new segment different from our initial targets. We didn&#8217;t really know how they got work done or what their pain points were. They were buying, and we just wanted to just sell, baby. I think we were a little &#8220;researched out&#8221; at that point too.</p>
<p>It was six months before I did business reviews with these clients &#8211; spurred by my confusion after the botched sales call I mentioned. If you&#8217;ve ever forgotten someone&#8217;s name but felt you were too far along to ask them their name again, that’s what it felt like.</p>
<p>For the first time, we looked hard at this segment to figure out what made a prospect a good versus a bad fit for us. We asked them questions we should have asked much earlier to tease out their pain points. Also for the first time, we got input from them to <a href="https://mtp2017stg.wpengine.com/bad-ideas-get-roadmap/">better prioritize our product roadmap</a>.</p>
<p>Reinforcing success isn&#8217;t just about how you allocate sales and marketing dollars; it&#8217;s about where you point all of the thinking and creativity your team can bring to bear. User discovery gives you the foundation for innovation. It&#8217;s tempting to skip that part when people are throwing business at you, because who cares? You&#8217;re making money! But you&#8217;ll get there faster if you invest in discovery upfront.</p>
<p>If you don’t, the odds are good that eventually you&#8217;ll get off a phone call, just like I did, wondering what the heck just happened and what else you’ve missed.</p>
<div class="g g-21"><div class="g-single a-73"><a class="gofollow" data-track="NzMsMjEsMSw2MA==" href="https://community.mindtheproduct.com/c/general/"><img decoding="async" src="https://mtp2017stg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Membership-Circle-banner-ad-scaled.jpg" /></a></div></div>

core/freeform

Prioritised Fireside Chat: Make better product decisions with JTBD

Connecting to your customers in a remote world by Anna Lee Anda

MTP Panel: Using discovery and research to influence key product decisions

Capturing Customer Context for Cross-Channel Experiences by Cheryl Platz

Here Be Dragons – Product and Discovery, by Randy Silver

Iterating Your Voice Product, by Lisa Vigar

Qualitative Intelligence by Mitchell Gillespie

Building Consumer-Grade Experiences for the Enterprise By Ciara Peter

Imaginary Research – How to Design More Human Stuff by Kate Nightingale

Using Research in Material Design by Elizabeth Churchill

What Happens When you do User Discovery After Market Traction

ProductTank Columbus

ProductTank Tauranga

ProductTank Edinburgh

Prioritised Member AMA - Perfecting product roadmaps

ProductTank San Diego

Navigating difficult relationships panel

ProductTank Philadelphia

ProductTank Bucharest

ProductTank NoVa

Remote Training Workshops

ProductTank London

ProductTank Birmingham

ProductTank Oslo

ProductTank Astana

ProductTank NoVA

ProductTank Tokyo

ProductTank Belgrade

ProductTank Madrid

ProductTank Leeds

ProductTank Zürich

ProductTank Perth

ProductTank Chicago

ProductTank Auckland

ProductTank Richmond

ProductTank Charlotte

ProductTank Reston

ProductTank Washington

ProductTank Sofia

ProductTank Raleigh

ProductTank Ljubljana

ProductTank Kraków

ProductTank Athens

ProductTank Barcelona

ProductTank Dublin

ProductTank Montréal

ProductTank Bogotá

ProductTank Seattle

ProductTank Madison

ProductTank Singapore

ProductTank Portland

ProductTank Budapest

ProductTank Valencia

ProductTank Porto

ProductTank Austin

ProductTank Los Angeles

ProductTank Norwich

ProductTank Des Moines

ProductTank San Francisco

ProductTank Helsinki

ProductTank Reading

ProductTank Brighton

ProductTank Bielefeld

ProductTank Malmö

ProductTank Canberra

ProductTank Paris

ProductTank Manchester

#mtpcon SF+Americas 2022 Conference

#mtpEngage Hamburg 2022 Leadership Forum

#mtpEngage Hamburg 2022 Workshops

#mtpEngage Hamburg 2022 Conference

#mtpcon London+EMEA 2022 Conference

What Happens When you do User Discovery After Market Traction

Christian Bonilla

Read more

Comments