Market Maps = Better Product Decision

Who doesn’t love a bird’s eye perspective?  Soaring high above the trees allows you to really see the landscape.  But how do you get that same bird’s eye view for your industry?  The answer, of course, is by constructing a market map.

The market map is a cornerstone of the tactical innovator’s tool kit and provides a structural view of the markets in which your products and services compete.  You will profile your competitors, catalog different products and platforms, segment buyers and users and evaluate channels, all in the name of supporting more informed product decisions.  A well-constructed market map helps you identify:

• Product segments that are ripe for expansion
• Emerging technologies that may pose a threat
• Capabilities and competencies that can be applied to other segments
• A broader view of competitive moves
• Existing business models (those that work, as well as those that do not)
• Market size and growth rates for each product segment
• Customer opportunities available now

There are many benefits to the detailed work that goes into the market map, not the least of which is that you now have a factual basis to make decisions about how and where to invest and what strategies to pursue to deliver near-term results.  The market map provides a way to assemble detailed information to support tactical decisions about how to respond to competitor’s moves.  In addition, the market map can serve as the starting point to identify the partner or acquisition targets that will help you enter or leverage a new opportunity segment.  The power of perspective as seen through a market map provides both a wider and more granular view of any industry in which you compete.  It’s a great way to ground your team – or your entire company – with an understanding of where you fit in the market and what your path forward should look like.

Stay tuned for my next tactical innovation post that expands on the powers of the market map and how this powerful tool can work hand-in-hand with your product road map.

Tactical Innovation Starts Here

Innovation sessions can be a daunting exercise for any company. It can take months of preparation and planning, takes employees out of the field and can often be very disappointing when the event concludes, leaving you with lots of ideas but no clear way forward. We see a new wave coming and it’s centered on little "i" innovation, tactically focused and market-driven, as opposed to big “I” innovation that looks to transform your entire business or disrupt markets. Tactical innovation is frequently "event driven" innovation; changing regulations, budget shortfalls, new entrants, or emerging technologies may drive the need for a tactical innovation workshop.

What’s Different about a Tactical Innovation Workshop?

While innovation workshops are engaging when they are in full-session, after they are over and everyone returns to their day jobs, often no one gets assigned to bring prioritized ideas to the opportunity state. Here’s how a tactical innovation workshop is different:

• You are focused on a real problem, often caused by an event, that's staring you square in the face and demanding an answer.
• You work with a cross-functional team. Basically, anyone who will touch the new product (developers, sales people, product managers, even customers and vendors) should be involved, not just for brainstorming reasons but also for resource prioritization.
• You leverage existing capabilities or establish partnerships to fill in the gaps in your organizational competencies. Development time is accelerated and new products are launched quickly. There's a difference in timeframe with tactical innovation - you're in a race to market.

Outside events are often the tipping point for creating something new. I would argue that event-driven innovation has spawned just as many new companies as has big “I” innovation, that looks to a paradigm shift for creating new business models. Get the right people in a room with a tactical innovation workshop and you’ll be on the right path to drive a consistent pipeline of new products and services.

What's Next?

When everyone is working pedal to the metal on today’s business, the operative question is “who’s working on tomorrow’s?”  All too frequently, there isn’t enough focus on “What’s Next?”  Businesses are structured to run the day-to-day business and the people focused on the day-to-day business are compensated to make sure things run right.

Whether you work in a large or small company, the “What’s Next?” conundrum confronts most business owners.  Who has the time to focus on adjacent market opportunities?  Will products for those segments really be a better bet than the core portfolio?

“What’s Next?” Adjacent products and services come as an extension of the collection of existing capabilities and competencies from “what you do today.”  By looking for opportunities to create value in accessible markets where your growth investment pays off, you can leverage capabilities and more importantly, extend competencies to new opportunities, thus increasing your return on growth investment.

So “What’s Next?” for your company when growth opportunities are limited in the core business?  I would argue that adjacent market opportunities await!