Frame Your Market Research Objectives as Questions
Understanding potential customers and their needs is one of the most important elements in developing a successful offering. Market research activities like customer interviews and observational research are great ways of understanding needs, problems and opportunities. Unfortunately, many product teams rush out to conduct research without thinking about what they’re trying to learn and why.

One technique that I’ve found to be very useful is to put together a simple research plan and frame your research objectives as questions. As I describe in this post on the SiriusDecisions blog, by listing out the questions you hope to answer, you can better clarify the reason for the research, verify that you do indeed need to conduct research to get the answers, and tailor the type and amount of research you need to get the answers.

Read the full post: Simplify Market Research by Framing Your Objectives as Questions

Incidentally, if you like this blog post, you might like some of my other recent posts on the SiriusDecisions blog:

• New Research on Innovation Investment Allocation
• If you’re in Product Management, You’re in Marketing
• Meet Minimum Buying Criteria Before Exceeding Them
• What b-to-b buyers really want
• Product Management: Should You Eat Your Own Cooking?

The Best Companies Combine Marketing and Strategy
One of the best pieces I’ve read lately comes from Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto in Canada. His blog post — The Best Companies Combine Marketing and Strategy — describes the disconnect which occurs in many companies between the organization’s “strategy” (and often a dedicated central strategy group) and marketing (or, more specifically, the marketing organization). As Roger puts it, “Good marketing and good strategy are both about making choices that build and maintain a particular set of capabilities that enables the company to outperform its competitors with a particular set of customers.”

What’s Hot on Twitter
Here are a few of my tweets which have generated the most interest over the past few weeks; to get these in real-time, follow me at @jefflash:

• Are businesses not doing #innovation b/c they’re too busy being efficient? Does focus & time mgmt hurt exploration? j.mp/11MFeUh (permalink)
• Commented on a great @cindyalvarez post “What Does It Replace?” j.mp/YlipHX #prodmgmt #ux #prodmktg (permalink)
• Good analysis of “Three flavors of freemium”- capacity-based, feature-based & use case j.mp/16jqKMl #prodmgmt (permalink)
• We at @siriusdecisions love models b/c they help reduce the amount of noise which clutters thinking j.mp/YSRXoQ (permalink)
• Scientific evidence that sometimes the best ideas do really come to you in the shower j.mp/Y1bTT3 #innovation (permalink)