Product managers need to be market driven. When you're being driven by customers, problems, and competitors, you need a tool which brings all of your insights together to help drive holistic decision making. I use a Market Problem Matrix to create that view to develop insights and drive conversations.

1. Market Problem Matrix
A tool I use to be more market driven

3. Scott Sehlhorst
Product management & strategy consultant
8 Years electromechanical design engineering
IBM, Texas Instruments, Eaton
7 Years software development & requirements
> 20 clients in Telecom, Computer HW, Heavy Eq., Consumer Durables
9 Years product management consulting
>20 clients in B2B, B2C, B2B2C, ecommerce, global, mobile
Agile since 2001
Started Tyner Blain in 2005
Helping companies
Build the right thing, right
tynerblain.com/blog/
@sehlhorst
if you’re into that sort of thing

4. Failure Mode Risk Map
http://www.slideshare.net/ssehlhorst
/20130322why-do-products-fail-isa

5. Market Driven Product Management
Building a strategy & planning a product based on…
To whom should we be selling
What is important to them
How good we are and how good we will be
How good will the competition is and will be

6. Market Problem Matrix
A tool which is the evolution of, and repurposing
of the old Harvey ball charts we’ve seen for
years.

7. Start with a Harvey Ball Chart
Harvey balls are coarse
I like a 1-10 Scale

8. Inform Decisions, Don’t Keep Score
Where we are today is mildly interesting
Where we expect to be after the roadmap is
executed is very interesting

9. Beauty, In The Beholder’s Eye
Who are our target customers?
And how much does each group care about each
capability?

10. We Could Just Stop Here
And be better than most teams I’ve seen:
 Accountability in roadmap
 Plan based on future competitive landscape
 Acknowledge that all customers are different
But let’s keep going anyway…

11. Important Customers
Some markets are more important* than others
*to successfully executing a particular strategy

12. Time To Choose
Can you try and “win” for
a single customer group?
Or are you forced to try
and “focus on everyone”
because every customer
has a champion?
*Hint: you meet your sales forecast by closing one deal at a time

13. If You Are Fortunate
You have a single customer group, and you are
able to focus on what matters most to them

14. If You Are in a Typical Company
You have to try and be all things to all people.
You also have to bias towards the most
important customers.
Here’s some “fake math” to help tell the story
1. Multiply the “importance of customer” value
with the “importance to customer” values.
2. Add them up, to get a normalized
“importance of capability” measure

15. 1. Multiplying
The “math” should bias towards investment in
the capabilities of greatest interest to the most
important customers

16. 2. Normalizing
Does the bulk of your investment (by capability)
match the importance (by capability) to your
market?

17. Market Problem Matrix
We now are looking at the following things at
the same time:
 Which customers are important
 What those customers care about
 Expected future competitive position

18. Thanks very much! @sehlhorst