IPM Anticipate Market Problems

Market Sensing
Anticipating market direction enables Product Managers to strategically align product development and roadmap. Perceiving market needs of the future increases probability of successful product launch. Market sensing is the process of monitoring the market place in an effort to understand trends and needs. This is done by capturing information from the market such as, enhancement requests, win/loss data, incident reports, market research, analyst reports, and competitive analysis. This evidence should be grouped into related categories. When market sensing is used the product management communities will decrease their investment risks and increase the sustainability and client endorsement of products.

Select Market Inputs
By funneling down the amount of market input product managers deal with, they will be able to be more effective in identifying solutions to fulfill customer needs. Weed out bad, weak, or distracting requests based on the information gathered. Identify those requests that make sense, are complete, and might possibly fit into the long-term strategy. Usually this is a triaging exercise release, or not planned. These inputs will be used to define problem statements. Selecting market inputs will increase the efficiency of the defining problem statements process and decrease overall costs by having less input to go through.

Define Problem Statements
By defining problem statements, organizations stay focused on the future needs of the market place instead of trying to implement all of the individual requests for each customer. Taking the evidence gathered in from market sensing and input selection, begin to identify trends and problems in the market place. Clearly articulate market and customer needs. Assign the market evidence to the problem statements through relationships. Using problem statements to group related requests and other market evidence allows enterprises to increase their efficiency. This increased focus allows the correct resources to be applied to resolve customer needs.

Validate Problem Statements
Anytime you filter down a lot of information into a subset it is important to validate that you are using the correct criteria to get the correct subset of data. You need to make sure you are focusing on the problem statements that are most important to the market place. Based on the market evidence, prioritize the list of problem statements. Taking the top 10-20 problems and send them to a broader audience for validation ensures that you on the right problems. By allowing end users and customers to validate the problem statements you can increase client endorsement and your product sustainability.

Define Market Opportunities
Identifying market opportunities is a key step to making investment decisions. You need to identify what is the business case that makes the resolution of a problem become a market opportunity. Defining market opportunities is the process of establishing the business constraints that problem resolution must meet in order to become a viable business solution. Potential revenue from the problem resolution must be determined, in order to identify the most that can be invested in this opportunity and still maintain profitability. This is the potential business case for solving each market problem regardless of any internal constraints. Defining market opportunities helps your organization to identify ways to increase revenue, while increasing sustainability.