Wonderfully said and yeah, thanks for the email that you sent me last month. Certainly helped as a newbie in this Product Management area.

-Mayank Raj

When you get your clients for the bowling ally, you can consider them to the be address of the market, so you can do qantitative research on the niche market that that client represents.

When you go horizontal, the horizontal is the address of the market, aso you can do quantitative research on that horizontal.

When you go into the late market, you can consider it to be the remaining horizontal. You will have several problems in this market that require you to change your platform to SaaS, which provides you with a lot of quantitative, and you will need to move to 1:1, mass customization–or programming down to the individual–, value dispursement and offer bundling, new interfaces focused on moments, and fitness to meaning–all of these opportunities for quantitative, and qualitative research.

Quant is forecast is strategy. Qual is vision. So anytime that you need a vision, when the linear will not get you there, you need qualitative. It will happen. The problem with vision opportunities is that they are not recognized early enough. You have to be on the rocks before you see that you need to change your vision. To avoid the rocks, preprogram the vision cycle, which in turn preprograms your qualitative research cycle.

When you bring discontinous technologies to the market, you cannot use market research, because the market does not exist yet, so what is to research. Once you have an early adopter willing to fund their productization of your technology, you can use market research to size the vertical that the early adopter participates in. Once you deliver the early adopter’s productization, your market is the vertical market, so you do market research.

All of that said, normal segmentation practices are suboptimal in all cases where you are selling in a B2B market.

thanks for the great article.

If you are doing quantitative research, there are times when you can average your market, and other times when you must deaverage your market.

In the technology adoption lifecycle, the custom app is a market of one, another one, another one, … eight totally separate markets, but only a single buyer in each of those markets. You still need to gate on the population of that client’s vertical, and the dollars you will find there as well.

The vertical and early market horizontal (IT) can be averaged. But, late market is where you either average and live with commoditization or move to 1-to-1, and deaverage.

Qualitative trends tell you where the product can go, and where it shouldn’t. Why enter a market that is contracting and undergoing a lot of mergers? Why enter a market that already has more than five entrants? Where is the space where no one has gone yet? Who will your competitors be? These are not addressed via quantitative research.

Good question. You need both qualitative and quantitative data; you can’t ignore either. Different products/markets/situations lend themselves more to one than the other. Customers often tell (or show) you things the numbers do not. But, if you ignore the numbers it’s at your own peril.

One of the things I love about product management is you have to keep up on both (Q & Q), not to mention a bunch of other things. Keeps me hoppin’.
Michael

Too big analysis, too few production…!

If you analyze so much of these kind of things you loose the sence and the goal you started for!

I’m with Jeff here. I agree many insights come from first hand observation and detailed discussions with customers. But how do you know whether these insights are unique to the set of customers you’ve spoken to personally or representative of the market as a whole? You have to follow up the qualitative with quantitative research.

I’ve written some about how they can work together on my blog as well.

http://www.userdriven.org/blog/2008/4/13/qualitative-before-quantitative-research.html

In my experience some of the best ideas and innovations have come from sitting on-site with customers and observing them using my products to do their job. It sometimes comes down to a gut feel that cannot be quantified with numbers. Taking the jump from observation to requirements can be scary, but if it’s right you do it.

Great post!
Michael