A great product manager is market driven. Part of being market driven is understanding that not everyone in your market cares about the same things, even when apparently solving the same problems. This insight is useful in any product management, but check out the power of market segmentation when applied […]
How Do You Manage Market Data?
Great product management starts with an insightful understanding of your market. Not just understanding a customer, and not even understanding all of your customers, but understanding your target market. What works for you?
Fast Follower Product Strategy: Microsoft Zune
Microsoft has a product called Zune that is a competitor to the Apple iPod. They just recently announced their second release – the new version of the Zune. Since Apple already dominates that market, Microsoft qualifies as a follower – how are they approaching the introduction of a new product […]
How To Apply Market Research Better
Mike Mace provides us with some great insight about market research – helping us to avoid ‘the blender’ and ‘the gap’. The gap is a reflection of the inability of most customers to innovate. The blender is the loss of useful market information into a homogenized input that pushes only the lowest common denominator – again stifling innovation. We have to avoid the blender and the gap to get useful data from our research.
Market Segmentation or Senseless Mistake?
A grass roots campaign has been started by Peter Provost to get Microsoft to include unit testing support included with all versions of Visual Studio 2005 (VS). Currently, Microsoft is only including it with Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) versions of VS. This looks to be a great example of a killer feature in a product providing so much surprise and delight that people are demanding that it be universally available. This is also a great example of market segmentation by Microsoft. The irony is that there is an open source alternative that makes the opportunity cost very low, and yet people are still clamoring. Let’s see why.