Episode 54: Answering Questions About Market Research Skills, Reactive Product Management, and Career Next Steps
In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about learning how to sharpen your market research skills, how to escape the Build Trap in highly commoditized B2B enterprise markets, and how to frame your early-stage startup experience as an asset when you’re looking to make your next career move.
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Q: Do you have any advice on how to improve market research skills? [2:05]
A: You don’t need an MBA for this… The best place to look is within your company. Who is doing the market research in your company? Who has a pulse on the market?... Spend some time with the people inside your companies who do these things, understand how they do their research, understand how they do their market sizing. Ask them about it; people love sharing how they do their work… You don’t necessarily have to do the research on your own; you should be hiring a team of analysts who can do that. You might not need to do everything yourself, but you need to know how to interpret those inputs in order to set strategy. [2:34]
Q: How do you escape the trap of a reactive product mindset in a highly commoditized enterprise market? [5:17]
A: I think you need to take a step back if you’re constantly responding to RFQs, creating a list of features per client, trying to deliver them… You've fallen into the trap where all of these enterprise clients are now dictating your product strategy instead of the other way around. If you are not building something that's able to be sold repeatedly and you constantly have to respond to these requests and alter things and do all this stuff, it’s not product; you’re a services company. Can you take a couple steps back and start testing your hypothesis that it is actually all about features? Can you try solving the problem in a better way or a new way that your competitors aren't doing it all? Can you do some user research to find out what the most frustrating thing is to your current enterprise clients?... [Dive] into where your product creates value in ways that your competitors don't. How do you double down? How do you differentiate? [6:06]
Q: What should I look for in a larger company to find a place where my early stage experience is an asset and not a liability? Any other advice on making the transition from early to growth stage companies? [10:18]
A: I think you're probably gonna want to do growth-stage if you're coming from a startup… In the growth stage, you usually have a very experienced CPO, so you're gonna learn a lot, and they have career ladders. The beauty of a growth stage company is that it's usually characterized by expanding their product portfolio. They usually have a very good product market fit in one product and now it's time to introduce a multi-product portfolio… that means that they need to bring in some scrappy product people who can help launch new products. That is where your asset is, because you know how to find product market fit and that's not [in] everybody's bag. So find a company that needs a product manager to help launch new products and maybe plug in there; play up the rapid experimentation, play up that you work in small teams, you go really fast and you're used to creating new stuff. [10:46]
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Transcript:
Melissa:
Hello, and welcome to another episode of dear Melissa today. We've got three great questions for you all about learning, how to do market research so that you can move up in your career as a product manager, learning how to create product in highly commoditized, B2B enterprise markets, which definitely is a tricky thing. And then lastly, for somebody moving from an early stage startup to a little bit more of an established company, working under somebody who's been more experienced, what should we do? What should we look for in a company? So let's dive in and start answering these first question.
Dear Melissa. I've been promoted to director of product and in order to keep growing, I believe that my main skill gap is defining strategy at a broader level understanding market movements. What other companies are doing, reading all these different inputs and translating them into a potential future we can prepare for is really challenging. And I'm no clue how to get better at it. I've been thinking about doing an MBA, but the time and investment may not worth it. Do you have any advice on how to improve this skill? I do have some advice on this skill and it is definitely needed. And I'm gonna tell you how right after this.
All right. We're back. And we're talking about how do we learn this market research skill? Um, you don't need an MBA for this. Uh, it can definitely help and is something you certainly will learn if you do an MBA. But we do need to start figuring out how to broaden our horizons. So I have a couple different ideas for you if you don't wanna do the MBA route because yes, huge commitment to go to school full-time for two years, uh, very expensive as well. So first this is where I would start. Best place to look is in your company who, who is doing the market research in your company, who has a pulse on the market? Do you have a whole product marketing team? Do you have a CMO? Do you have subject matter experts who are looking at the different trends?
Uh, what about sales? Sales is a great place where they're really looking at competition. They're hearing where competition is coming from. Spend some time with the people inside your companies, who do these things, understand how they do their research, understand how they do their market sizing. Um, if you have an analyst in your company for, uh, instance, if anybody is ever in your company, worked for bane or McKinsey as an analyst, they do this in their sleep. This is like all they do all day long. So go find those people and sit with them, ask them about it. People love sharing how, how they do their work. Especially if you're like a director of product coming over to ask people how they do their work. Um, especially if somebody might be a little bit more junior than you. They love that right? Figure out how you can leverage them, how you can understand that a little bit better.
And that's another thing to consider as well as you grow in your career, you're gonna have to interpret a lot of these things, but you don't necessarily have to do the research on your own. You should be hiring a team of analysts who can do that. And that's one thing that we do actually solve for in our product operations model and how we set up those teams. So think about that as well. Like you might not need, do everything yourself, but you need to know how to interpret those inputs in order to set strategy. You don't need know how to gather them all yourself now. Um, also, if you do wanna learn how to do some of this yourself, uh, we did create a course called market research on Product Institute. It's a go at your own pace, deep dive course that we have. Uh, and we do teach people how to do market sizing, market research, all of this stuff that goes into exactly what you're talking about. And the reason I created it is because of this problem. Um, it is very hard for product people to learn how to do all this information. It is something that I had to learn along the way as well. Um, and I just found not really great resources out there. So if you wanna take a quick course on it, um, and learn how to do it yourself, you can go to productinstitute.com and look up our market research course. Um, but otherwise I really think one of the best places to look is inside your company. There's probably a lot of people doing this, how you leverage, what they're doing already, um, is gonna define you as a leader. So see if you could pull some really smart people together, understand what they're doing, seeing see if you pull them into your team to help you set strategy. That's where I would start first.
All right. Second question, dear Melissa. My question is about creating product and a highly commoditized B2B enterprise market. We have a strong product vision, and so many opportunities in our backlog to explore, but we are struggling to find space to execute that vision. We have six product teams, some are professional services teams. So they are paid by our clients to answer their needs with products that are not prioritized in our short term roadmap. Some are dedicated to updating product built with now obsolete technology. For example, flex the rest of the teams are overwhelmed by product requests from the new and existing clients who aren't willing to pay for a dedicated team, our market, in addition to be highly co our market. In addition to being highly commoditized is an enterprise market that works with tenders in RFQ S be honest, each tender is kind of a two year roadmap. The winning product is the one that's most feature.
The winning product is the one that's most feature rich and checks most boxes or the one with the most competitive pricing. How can we escape the build trap? So I think it's really easy to fall into the trap of a react product mindset. And it sounds like that's where you are. Um, even in B2B enterprise market, we don't need to be reactive. Sometimes it feels like that's just the way this works. But if you actually look at a lot of the B2B enterprise space, especially in the SaaS space, they're defining the products and going into the enterprises and saying, this is what you need. Um, so I think you need to take a step back if you're constantly responding to RFQ, creating a list of features per client, trying to deliver them like you are reactive. Okay. So we realize that now you're in an enterprise market.
There's always gonna be demand for more. And I think having a professional services team is definitely one way to deal with that demand, but you don't want that dictating your entire product strategy, right? You've fallen into the trap where all of these enterprise clients are now dictating your product strategy instead of the other way around. And that's why people buy software. Like they buy it so that they can buy something out of the box that it usually works for their needs. And that's the only way you can actually scale as well. So if you are not building something, that's repeatably being able to be sold, and you're constantly happening to respond to these quests and alter things and do all this stuff. It's not product, you're basically a services company. So here's what I would do. Can you take a couple steps back and maybe start with testing your hypothesis, that it is actually all about features.
You said the winning product is the one that's most feature rich and checks most boxes or the one with the most competitive pricing. Is it? Uh, can you try solving the problem in a better way or a new way that your competitors aren't doing it all? Uh, can you do some user research to find out with your current enterprise clients? What's the most frustrating thing? Can you put analytics on the stuff that you've already built for these enterprise clients and see if they're actually using it? If you arm yourself with data and you try to take the perspective of, Hey, we're the experts. And we looked across all these enterprises, and this is what we observed, and this is how you can do your job better. Uh, that's the position that you actually wanna be in. So I'd stop, you know, going down this rabbit hole, this build trap that you're in, uh, thinking that it's just because of your market RFQs and tenders like yep.
That happens every single day in the enterprise market. But that doesn't mean that you have to customize absolutely everything for that. Now, if we're talking about a deal, that's like, Hey, we need to prioritize something that wasn't on our short term roadmap. And if we're going to make like 50% more revenue this year by signing this client, and we just wanna bump it up, but we knew we were gonna build it. Totally different story. That is being pragmatic, right? That's saying we had a product vision, we have features, and we're just bumping something up faster to be able to close a deal. That's really gonna help us. If that's not the case for you though. And you feel like you're getting tons of feedback from all these enterprise clients that they need something different and all this stuff that's telling you that you might not actually have as much product market fit that you think you do.
Um, it seems the enterprise clients are trying to customize your products still to fit the needs. So I dig into are these the right customers, are these problems that we do actually solve? Like, can we solve these problems for them? Do we wanna solve these problems for them? Um, and can we stop maybe thinking about just responding to everything and start looking further ahead, how do we start looking at what the market is doing? How do we differentiate our product too, so that it's not just like, Hey, will company B over here that your competitor has, you know, all of these features, you need to build all those features to catch up. What if you don't need those features? How do they know that those features are needed? Right? Like what if you solve things in a different way, that's better than that list of features.
That's the type of stuff you have to drill into. And that's only gonna come from really good user research. So I'd kick off, maybe making a more firm strategy, um, maybe really diving into where does your product create value in ways that your competitors don't how do you double down? How do you differentiate? How do you approach problem solving in a different way and try to create a strategy from that, and then pressure test some of the assumptions that you have too. That's the only way you're gonna get out of that. Um, but if you keep going the way that you're going, my fear for you, and I don't know all the details obviously, but is that you become a services company and that I see a lot in software companies, you get stuck like you do. So that would be my advice. And I hope that helps.
All right, last question. Hi Melissa. I've been a product manager for the last decade, usually in very early stage startups, where I'm the only product person while I love the scrappy early stages of product discovery and delivery. I feel I've missed out on a lot of growth opportunities by not working with more senior product leaders. I'd like to join a more established company with a mature product team, staff, coach, and career ladders, all that stuff. What should I look for in a larger company to find a place where my early stage experience is an asset and not a liability? Any other advice on making the transition from early to growth stage companies? Well, congratulations. It's really exciting to hear that you wanna go into a slightly larger company and see what it's like. I think getting that type of experience is really valuable and Hey, you may get in there and be like, no, this is not my stage, but either you're gonna learn something along the way.
Now you're gonna be an asset to anybody who's starting a new product line, whether you wanna go enterprise or growth stage. Um, I think you're probably gonna wanna do growth stage. If you're coming from a startup, it tends to move faster, which is good if you like the startup stage in the early stage stage. Um, you'll probably like the growth stage, cuz it is characterized by going really fast. Enterprises a little bit slower, you might get really bored. So I'd go like smaller company that moves quickly. Um, but in the growth stage as well, you usually have a very experienced chief product officer. So you're gonna learn a lot and they have career ladders. They have all that stuff. So the beauty of a growth stage company too, is that it's usually characterized by, um, expanding their product portfolio, right? Like that is their product strategy.
They usually have a very good product market fit in one product. And now it's time to introduce multi-product portfolio and really look into that. And that means that they need to bring in some scrappy product people who can help launch new products. That is where your asset is. You're not a liability in that case, you're an asset because you know how to find product market fit and that's not everybody's bag, right? Like that's not what everybody's good at. So find a company that's launching new products that needs a product manager to help launch new products and maybe plug in there, um, you know, play up the rapid experimentation, play up that you work in small teams, you go really fast and you're used to like creating new stuff. That's, that's gonna be really important there when you're thinking of transitioning from early to grow stage companies as well.
Um, couple things to know. Early stage company is usually a mess as you've probably figured out, uh, you're scrappy. You don't have career letters. You don't have ways of working, uh, that are completely standardized. Growth stage is a little bit more figured out. Uh, you won't have full control over everything. I know when I work get super early stage startups as a product manager and sometimes the only product manager kind of do a little bit of everything. Uh, in this case in growth stage, your role's gonna be a little bit more specialized. You may not be doing UX design for example. Um, and you did UX design in the startup cuz you were the only person there, right? That's a, you know, one example, but this is probably going to be similar to what you can experience across the board. Maybe for analytics, maybe for some other, uh, disciplines as well.
So you have to learn to work well with others, right? Like you have to learn to work in a team and let go of some of this stuff because it's really nice when you can just concentrate on product and you don't really have to concentrate on the other stuff, but it can feel really scary to let it all go. Cuz that was your stuff, right? Like that's what you owned. So be aware of that. Um, also decision making is probably going to be more of a team sport rather than you, right? If you're the only product person, I'm sure it was up to you forever, but now you gotta get buy-in. Now you gotta go to your chief product officer and get buy-in from them. You gotta go to your other team members. You have to think about cross-functional teams. You have to think about, um, cross portfolio initiatives.
What do I do as a product manager launching this new product? If it relies on some stuff from the old product, how do I get on their roadmaps? All of those things come into play when you're thinking about early to growth stage product management. So all stuff that you can anticipate and work through, but it's something that I would really look at, um, when you get into a growth stage company and you're starting to look for opportunities, I would also look for a product leader who has done it before. Right. Look, go to their LinkedIn. I do this with everybody, go to their LinkedIn, find out where they worked. Do you like those places? Does it sound good? Do they have good exits? Did they have, um, good outcomes for those companies? That's what you wanna look for so that you make sure that you are optimizing your learning experiences.
Um, it also depends like what you feel passionate about or what types of companies you wanna work for. If you have subject matter expertise, uh, play that up. When you're going to interview at these companies, like try to find something in the similar vein. I think that will help as well. Um, but I would definitely look for experience in your CPO, play up your subject matter expertise, assets, play up and try to find some place that's like launching a new product. That's gonna be really, really beneficial. And then just remember to let go, it's gonna be a different experience. You're there to learn. So don't feel like you have to hold onto all the things that you used to do. Learn to be a really specialized product manager, cuz that's gonna get you really far.
Well that's it for Dear Melissa this week. Thank you so much for submitting your questions. If you have a question for me, go to dear Melissa dot, uh, you can put all your questions in there. We go through them every week, choose some random questions and I love answering them. So make sure you put those in there. Um, can't wait to hear from you about what you're thinking about and don't feel bad about getting deep, right? This is all anonymous. It's all fun to learn. Also. We have a new episode out every Wednesday. So next week we'll have a guest and there will be a dear Melissa in two weeks from here. Um, please hit that subscribe button on apple podcast, Spotify, wherever you're listening to us. And if you do enjoy this podcast, please leave us a review that helps everybody find us and keeps us trending. So we'll see you next time.