The market leader for a category is not in the same competitive situation as the other vendors in that category.

One problem is that market leadership is usually a marketing claim that has no real basis. If their marcom says “A market leader,” then they are not “The market leader.”

All of that said, a market leader will still have to listen to customers do detect critical situations like when that customer is over served.

I wouldn’t build the application without a client at the core of the product visualization. I wouldn’t become the market leader without listening to my bowling ally vertical markets. So yes, you will have to listen. But, it is not as linear and continuous as it seems.

On top of that, if you do not become “The market leader,” you certainly do have to listen to the customer. There is no certainty to becoming the market leader. Market leadership just gives you some slack.

If you go directly to the SaaS market, you will never be “The market leader,” so you will always have to listen to your customers.

Did you mean that listening to your customer does not provide value? I believe that listening to your customers, gaining insights about what would make your product more valuable to them, and incorporating that into your strategy improves your ability to compete (relative to not doing those things). Your ability to compete impacts the profit you can make, either by improving your share or your pricing.

I agree that treating your market segments as a homogeneous market is the wrong way to go when those segments have unique problems.

Once I launch into the vertical, I’m left to wonder how long my commitment will be to that vertical, and how committed I want to be. I need to exit with customers, but I don’t have the resources to do a lot. I have other clients, other verticals, and a technology roadmap that must be executed beyond the productizations. And, I have to put the marketure in place for the move to the horizontal market a few or fewer years down the road. This might take a decade or not. But, yes, I still have to listen to the customer.

If I decide to be the market leader in a vertical, and that turns out to be the case, I can, but don’t have to listen to the customer. I might be nice and listen anyway, but no, I don’t have to.

Since I do want to be the market leader in the horizontal, I face the same situation, but facing the late market with the mass customization strategy, I’ll be listening, but in a way that moves me away from average functionality and back to a culture focus. I also have to face moving my customers to SaaS. These things don’t happen because the customer asks for them. In some sense, my company and my category become the customer.

In the late market, we are SaaS. We have to listen to the customer, but this customer is different from those we served in the early market. I’m not going into the info applicance or embedded markets, so all that’s left to do is listen to the customer, and keep up with our external functionality providers.

I do have to move from tasks to work, and from work to management. This one is tricky, because managers peform tasks, and do work. Management here addresses the meta-management issues pointed out in the “Hype Cycle.” These issues foster long-term adoption by pragmatists and are really category issues that reach beyond the lifecycle of any one product in the category. Here the customer is really the economic buyer, rather than the user.

There is litte linearity behind the notion of listening to the customer. Which ones, when, and for how long have to drive the listening. Combining feedback will result in average functionality. It might be necessary, but at some point the functionality will have to be deaveraged, so the functionality is tuned to smaller partitions of the using and stakeholding communities.

Many execs (such as at my last company!) read a book or HBR article that says “Your customers should design your product”. Then they take it too literally and have all the customers directly talk to developers.

What ends up is a “Frankenstein” product — i.e. it stitches together what 30 different customers wanted, and looks horrendous! :)

This is where I believe PMs can add lots of value, by combining the different feedback, identifying common themes and “inspirations”.

- Raj
Accompa – Affordable Product Management Tool for Managing Requirements

You’ve definitely given us something to ponder on, thanks. -Michael