how to do market research as a product manager

Market Research Techniques: A Comprehensive Guide for Product Managers

The Role of Market Research in Product Management

The goals of market research, identifying customer needs, assessing market opportunities, analyzing competitors, market research techniques and tools, surveys and questionnaires, focus groups, observational research, secondary research, analyzing and interpreting market research data, quantitative data analysis, qualitative data analysis, applying market research findings to product strategy, product development, pricing strategy, positioning and messaging, related courses.

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A guide to conducting market research

Assumptions only get you so far when it comes to developing a product and growing your business. Market research can provide you with crucial insights into what your audience and customers need from you. Armed with this data, you can differentiate your product from your competitors and work towards winning your market.

In this article, you will learn what market research is, the four approaches to it, and the steps you need to take to make more informed product decisions.

What is market research?

Market research is the process of gathering information about potential and current customers and your target audience. The data can reveal the viability of a new product idea based on customer needs and wants. Market research is an essential part of developing products and services that are desirable to consumers.

Market research is also used to:

• Evaluate customer attitude toward a newly released product or feature
• Discover customer pain points
• Understand brand perception
• Develop product differentiation
• Craft a marketing strategy that resonates with the target audience
• Find opportunities for product improvement
• Test your assumptions about your product or audience
• Create a competitive advantage

Market research is a critical part of research and development (R&D) . Bad market research can lead to making decisions based on assumptions, emotional reasoning, and other guesswork. Ultimately, market research is the only way to make informed decisions about what you need to develop for your product.

What are the 4 ways to do market research?

Market research falls into two categories: Primary and secondary. Primary research is gathered by the company, while secondary research comes from outside sources. Both of these options provide valuable information on your target audience.

For this article, let’s focus on primary research. There are four methods you can use to collect primary data for your market research:

Interviews are face-to-face meetings with an individual. This can be one of the most insightful market research methods since there is no interaction with outside influences that may affect the opinion of the interviewee. It allows an interviewer to ask deeper questions, while also providing a chance to observe body language.

Surveys are a useful method for collecting data quickly. Surveys can appear on the company website or app and ask questions directly to consumers. You can have multiple choice, scales, or yes and no questions to gain several types of data points. It’s also a relatively easy and cost-effective method to deploy.

Focus groups

Focus groups are a tricky method of market research. Participants of a focus group make up the company’s target audience. When done well, they can provide insights into a group’s perceptions of a company’s products, advertising, or competitors. However, it requires a trained moderator to ensure participation from all members of the focus group and prevent a minority party from leading the conversation.

Customer observation

Customer observation is a powerful way to gain an understanding of how customers are interacting with your product. You can learn a lot from how they react to the product, what obstacles they encounter, and what questions they have while using it.

While you can observe in person, you could also use tools like a heat map to conduct customer observation. Alternatively, you can also ask participants to test out a competitor’s product to see how they engage with the product.

While interviews, surveys, focus groups, and customer observations are the 4 most common types of market research, companies can also use these other methods to do their research, including:

• Buyer persona research
• Market segmentation research
• Competitive analysis
• SWOT analysis
• Pricing research
• Customer satisfaction and loyalty research
• Brand research
• Campaign results

A step-by-step guide to conducting market research

Market research can seem like a large and daunting project. To help you break it down into manageable tasks, here is a basic step-by-step guide to conducting market research.

1. Determine the market research goal

Begin by determining what you want to learn from the market research. You’ll get the best results when you can clearly define the problem or question. Once you have defined your market research goal, then you can choose which market research method would work best.

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Let’s explore this example throughout the guide: Your company wants to know if your product is satisfying the needs of your current customers

2. Identify what persona group to engage

If you don’t know who your customers are, then you should create buyer personas before you move further along in the market research process.

The next step is to identify which buyer persona or persona groups have the information you need to answer your market research goal. Choosing the right personas to participate is necessary to avoid wasting resources.

Example: You want to collect data from active users. You may also receive valuable insights from users who use your product infrequently or didn’t purchase the product

3. Prepare questions and collect data

At this stage, you can determine which research methods are best for collecting data. You’ll also form the right questions to ask. All questions should be open-ended to give participants the chance to share their opinions freely without feeling judged or influenced by the moderator.

Preparing questions in advance helps you stay focused on the market research. However, if you’re conducting interviews or focus groups, then it’s important to stay flexible and ask deeper questions based on how the conversation is going. You should consider these core principles while interviewing an individual or a group:

• Don’t ask leading questions — A leading question is when moderator bias appears and steers the participant toward a certain answer. For example, “Did you think the new product feature was great?” is leading. An objective question is “Did the new product feature solve your problem?”
• Don’t ask loaded questions — Loaded questions have a built-in assumption the participant may disagree with and limits replies. For example, “Why are we better than our competitor?” is loaded because it assumes the participant thinks your company is better than your competition. An objective question might be, “How do you feel about our competitor?”

Once the methods and questions are determined, you can start to collect your data.

Example: To collect data from current users, a pop-up survey will appear when a user logs into their account. It has a scale of 1-10 and asks “How satisfied are you with our product?” Once a user answers, they have the option to provide a short answer on what the product could do better

4. Analyze data

When analyzing data, you should look for themes or patterns in responses. You can also utilize data visualization tools to help detect any trends. Once you have analyzed your data, you can create a report based on the findings. It may include items like:

• What are the main problems participants faced while using a product
• What participants consider when choosing a product
• What feature was a deal breaker or clincher

Most importantly, your report should include an action plan on how to resolve issues discovered in the market research. This could involve creating more useful user guides, creating or modifying a new feature, or a more efficient onboarding process.

Example: Results from the survey showed that unhappy customers frequently didn’t know where to go to get help on using the product. An action plan is created to develop how-to tutorials

5. Implement changes

The market research report is presented to executives, and they need to decide on the best way to move forward. It may involve approving the action plan or finding alternative solutions. The good news is that they are going to make a data-based decision because they have accurate information on their customers and target audience.

Once a plan is approved, product managers or other departments can begin working on implementing changes.

Example: Executives approve an action plan to develop how-to tutorials. A knowledge base is created for users filled with written and video tutorials on how to use product features

6. Test results

Market research is not a one-time-only project. It should be continually conducted to provide insights into your product, industry, trends, and other factors that could affect your business. The market research process will help you maintain a competitive advantage while ensuring every iteration of your product is meeting the needs of your target audience.

Key takeaways

Market research is more than something you do to confirm if there is customer interest in your product idea. It’s there to support you for nearly every important pillar of your business, including product development, marketing, and business growth. Continuously conducting market research will help your company stay in touch with your customers and emerging trends.

Market research can be as simple as a one-question survey to 30-minute interviews with your target market. Regardless of the method, you stand to glean valuable insights that you can turn into a data-informed action plan.

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Product Management Skills: Market Research

Author: Ellen Merryweather

Updated: January 24, 2024 - 7 min read

Market research, for Product Managers, is an absolute necessity for success. Much of the time, you’ll find that your company has already outsourced your market research to a firm. But if you’re working on your own project or at a smaller startup, you might find this responsibility falling into your lap.

That’s why you need us! And we’re here to help.

Here, we’ll go over the different types of market research, whether or not you should outsource, and 4 methods for lean market research.

Different Types of Market Research

1. Exploratory research

If you’re a startup founder, or rather a wannabe startup founder, you at least have an inkling of the problem you want to solve. But rarely will you have a properly defined problem statement right off the bat, even if the problem is something you’ve experienced personally.

This is where exploratory research comes in. What you’re essentially doing here is finding out the nature of the problem, whilst also asking yourself if it’s extensive enough to be worth solving.

If the problem exists, but the pool of potential customers attached to it is incredibly small, it may not be worth pursuing a full-blown product development cycle to solve it!

2. Competitive Analysis

This stage is absolutely key before you decide how you’re going to approach development.

For example, let’s say you’re passionate about podcasts, but you haven’t found a podcast app that you really like. You have some great ideas and so you decide to build your own. Once you’ve spent a lot of time, money, and resources on getting an MVP of your app built…you realize that most of your target market listen to podcasts on Spotify, which also has music. You’ve got no way to compete, because you didn’t do enough competitive analysis to be able to come up with your USP (unique selling point.)

Not performing competitive analysis is like going to war with no understanding of enemy territory.

Find out what happens when products don’t achieve product-market fit.

3. User Insights

Before you can being to build for your customers, you need to know who they are. For established products, this is also a useful tool for understanding the current state of your user base.

User insights influence every part of product development, from engineering, to UX, to marketing. So it’s not a type of research that you get to perform once and then forget about, it’s an iterative process. You need to constantly be aware of what your users are thinking and feeling, what their problems are, and where their loyalties are.

4. Beta testing

If you follow the agile methodology, the first thing you manage to get into user’s hands is an MVP or a beta version of your product. User insights might have told you that customers are interesting in a product like yours, but an MVP will make sure that you’re building it in the right way.

It’s not only useful for whole products, as you can also use it to test out new features on established products, or to A/B test your homepage.

5. Segmentation

Once you have your user base, or at least a potential user base, you can begin segmentation research. The act of separating your users into specific segments isn’t only useful for marketing. It’s also an extra step into properly understanding your users.

They could be separated in a number of different ways, for example by geography, demographic, or behavior.

It allows you to test more effectively, and communicate with your users in more personalized ways. It’s another way of understanding why your users take certain actions. For example, people in Europe may use feature A more than feature B, whereas the reverse is true for users in Africa.

To Outsource, or Not to Outsource…

Outsourcing to a market research firm can take the pressure off of you and your teams. If you need insights but you lack the time, resources, or personnel to complete it, outsourcing is a fantastic option.

But does every single company need to outsource their research efforts?

If you work with experienced individuals who are adept at conducting research, and they can spare enough of their time to do it right, there’s no reason why you’d need to outsource. A firm doesn’t automatically produce more accurate research reports just because they’re outsourced.

So if you have money but a lack of time, outsourcing is an option.

If you have the resources and the time, you’re at no disadvantage if you conduct your own research.

4 Steps to Lean Market Research

If you’ve decided to conduct your own market research, chances are that you don’t have a bottomless budget to spend on your data collection methods. That’s where lean market research comes in, because it’s simple, cost-effective, and easy to replicate.

Most of the methods you’ll use are a form of primary market research, meaning that you’re conducting specific research for your product or target market.

User personas

User personas help you to put a face to your customers. It helps you to understand their motivations, their problems, what they enjoy, what their economic situations are, and basically what kind of product they want you to build for them.

They’re useful across all parts of development. The design team use them to inform important UX decisions, the marketing team use them to drive campaigns, and the sales team use them to strategize.

To find out more, check out our guide to user personas.

User surveys

Online surveys are one of the most popular ways of gathering information. There are a vast number of tools to suit all budgets, and they’re very easy to set up. So they’re a great choice for any stage of development, but especially in the beginning when your operations are more bootstrapped.

They’re not the best thing to use if you’re looking for a more in depth interview, but when you’re looking for a broad understanding of your users from as wide a pool as possible, surveys are a great option.

The main tip is to balance qualitative and quantitative data. There’s going to be some information that you want which requires a yes/no answer, but remember to also include some more open ended questions.

User interviews

Face to face interviews allow you to conduct more in depth research, and help you to understand on a more personal level the buying habits of your customers. It’ll also be helpful to put a face to your user personas.

The main downside of user interviews is that the information you get from them is deep, but not broad. This makes them time consuming to conduct, and not an efficient way of gathering information at scale.

Focus groups

Focus groups are especially useful when you have something for people to test. You get to observe your potential customer’s reaction to your product in real time, which will help you to find your product-market fit and give you an opportunity to pivot if it doesn’t get the reaction you were expecting.

Focus groups are more time-consuming and resource-heavy than surveys, but they shouldn’t be underestimated. There’s nothing quite as informative as being able to see your product in user’s hands, and get their authentic in-the-moment feedback.

What to Do With the Data

Qualitative vs Quantitative: Use these different types of data to complement each other, as this will lead you from data to insights. You need to know the difference between these two types of data in order to better know how to use it.

Democratize your data: Not everyone needs every kind of data, but almost everyone working in product development will need access to your market research at some point. Make sure the data is available and accessible to your teams. There’s no glory in hoarding insights!

Market segmentation: Narrowing down the target market for your product or service to a particular corner will help you when launching something new. You can’t be everything to everyone. But you can be everything to someone .

Data visualization: More than just a pretty picture, data visualizations help to break down your data and make it easier to digest. Even if you’re a data expert who can make sense of the messiest of spreadsheets, not everyone in your company will share that skill. Visualizations help you to communicate insights and make data easier to understand for everyone.

Updated: January 24, 2024

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How Digital Product Managers Can Perform Effective Market Research

Shehab Beram

Product Coalition

M arket research is the process of gathering information about your business's buyer personas, target audiences, and customers. Market research also helps to provide a deeper understanding of the varying market factors, such as the nature of the market, the problems of the users, and the value of what you are building.

Researching the market is one of the most important roles of a digital product manager. In order to produce a profitable and effective strategy for your product, research into the demands of your consumers is highly important in ensuring that you are successful as a digital product manager.

But in competitive markets, time is of the essence. Other businesses are constantly looking for a competitive advantage above your own, with new developments arising every second to put the success of your product firmly in jeopardy. This is why effective research is highly important to a business. Here are some techniques for how digital product managers can perform market research successfully.

What Problems Can Market Research Solve?

Market research informs your decisions as a product manager. Here are four categories of decisions product managers use market research for.

Identifying markets

• Identifying market needs and customer problems
• Segmenting markets
• Documenting the customer journey
• Evaluating new markets

Scoping products

• Defining or testing new product concepts
• Solidifying pricing
• Prioritizing features and releases

Investigating the best marketing options

• Creating or testing product messaging
• Measuring marketing programs and campaigns results

Analyzing business success

• Measuring customer satisfaction
• Learning about the competition

How to Get Started

Market research is a method of gaining information on the needs and wants of your market in order to appeal to them in greater or more novel ways. An example of market research is conducting an online search on a particular topic and making note of the most recent data published on that topic to help sell your services to a greater degree.

Market research is important for digital product managers to gain a competitive advantage against other businesses who are developing or launching similar products. By meeting consumer demands more closely than competitors, your business will be at a greater advantage within the market.

Now that the benefits of market research are known, here are the five steps you can take to research your market effectively as a digital product manager.

Define The Problem

In most cases, the problems that you need to identify within your market are silent problems. This could include existing inefficiencies, awkward workflows or non-optimal solutions.

To define these issues, you could utilise your role as a digital product manager by conducting online secondary research (such as observing competitors’ websites or relevant statistical data) into the issues. You could also use elements of primary research, such as focus groups, to understand the issues associated with your users and how you can solve them.

The importance of accurate and reliable secondary research specifically can be reflected in the recent 3D TV product failure. Manufacturers identified the success of Avatar as a brand within this market, and assumed that demand was there. But, the 3DTV became obsolete as it required glasses, eliminated second-screening, and gave some people headaches and neck strain. Their failure to use primary research also became an issue; this did not research what shows consumers could actually watch on the device, leading to discontinuation. Although the solution was identified, the problem was not accurately noted, leading to a failure to solve anything.

By defining the problem clearly, you have a stronger chance of solving the right problem and you can improve the user’s experience with your product or service to ensure an optimum method of improving these experiences is created.

Develop Your Strategy

Once you have identified the issue, you need to evaluate the most efficient solution to the problem. As a digital product manager, it is your responsibility to make sure the solution to the issue is optimal for both the company and their users.

You can effectively research what strategy may be best through the use of focus groups to gain an understanding of how clients would like the problem to be solved,

or through other elements of primary research like questionnaires or forms to collect qualitative data on the market you are trying to fill. This would enable you as a digital product manager to orient your strategy towards this data for the most effective results and solutions to the problem.

However, the execution of your strategy is also highly important, as seen through the failure of Ford Edsel. Initially released in the late 1950s as “the new American car for the New American family”, the finished product did not live up to the glorious marketing campaigns and quickly lost demand. Due to this lack of strategy, the product failed significantly.

By creating an effective strategy, you can organise your market research more effectively to gain a greater understanding of how customers would like their solutions met. This would help you as a digital product manager to provide the ideal solution to the market’s problems.

Collect Quantitative Data

Quantitative data will help you to produce an unbiased approach to the issue at hand, balancing out the qualitative data gathered in previous steps and allowing for a more rounded and conceptualised view of the situation.

The most beneficial and cost-effective ways for you to collect quantitative data are through longitudinal studies and face-to-face interviews. This would provide high-quality information with the opportunity for a range of question types, such as closed questions, to reaffirm the statistical data needed for you to proceed.

By collecting relevant data, you can fulfil your objective of improving the chances of success of your product or service. The information gathered may help you understand how best to tailor your services to your client to ensure that customer satisfaction and business efficiency is both guaranteed. As always, the accuracy of your market share will make your strategy more effective, so this is important to keep in mind.

Quantitative data collection is also beneficial in providing confidence to your team as you have a strong platform of concrete evidence to stand on before you begin building and marketing your product or service.

It is highly important for digital product managers to utilise the benefits of having a team. By gathering their team, digital product managers can discuss the data and the implications of the collected data on their strategy to determine the best course of action.

Analyse Quantitative Data

Once all of the relevant information has been collected, it is important to analyse it and find patterns in the data for the best results.

For your research to actually become effective, you must utilise methods such as scatter graphs to find positive correlations between data. This would enable you to direct your team towards the optimum path to meet consumer demands and needs, improving the overall success of your product management.

Effective development and identification of correlation is important for a business. Take Coke, for example; as the popularity of Coke began to decline in the early 1980s, the choice to rebrand into ‘New Coke’ was made, with taste tests and forecasts indicating that significant success was on the horizon. However, they failed to take into account the emotional impact of Coke’s branding and design, leading to catastrophic brand damage.

By ensuring that your data correlates to your projected results, it guarantees that your market research has been effective in creating your strategy and that your product or service development will be successful. As a digital product manager, this would be highly beneficial in reaffirming the success of the business and you as a product lead manager.

Moreover, it would be highly advantageous in directing your team to act upon the wishes of the market, as you would have a strong sense of direction regarding how to appeal to the market. As a digital product manager, this would help in providing a target to aim for and how best to achieve it.

Take Action

The key to effectively researching your market is to act on the research gathered. Without action, the planning and organisation of your research is pointless.

A clear example of this can be seen through Kodak’s product failure in the 1980s. After identifying changes in the market that favour digital photography, they chose not to act on it and to attempt to save money instead of listening to what the camera market research revealed. This resulted in a massive failure to gain market share and profit.

The importance of action is significant; without it, your market research cannot be effective as it is wasted. Examples such as Kodak outline how market research alone cannot impact a business, but instead, the effectiveness of the research is determined by whether or not relevant action is taken.

By formulating a good strategy driven by good market research, why it can work, and how you’ll communicate that strategy to your team and stakeholders — as a product manager you can help you establish a solid product strategy that will position your company to win in the market.

Special thanks to Tremis Skeete, Executive Editor at Product Coalition for the valuable input which contributed to the editing of this article.

Written by Shehab Beram

Product Manager | UX Design & Product Consultant | I also write essays that help you get smarter at your product management game. More at: shehabberam.com

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• How to research competitors

How product managers should research competitors

Competition is healthy. It motivates you to constantly find new ways to differentiate, meet customer needs, and ultimately deliver a better product. Researching and evaluating competitors is an essential skill for any product manager . And competitive research is not just about pricing structures and feature lists — it is about deeply understanding the market that you operate in and the unique value that you provide.

Competitive research is a key step in the strategic planning process. You need to know where your product fits in the market and what opportunities exist before you can set goals and prioritize what to build next.

Read on to learn more about:

What is a competitor analysis?

How to perform a competitive analysis

Direct vs. indirect competitors

Conduct competitor analysis in Aha! Roadmaps. Sign up for a trial .

What is competitor analysis.

Competitor analysis (also called competitive research) is the process of assessing the strengths and weaknesses of companies offering products similar to yours. This research can help you confirm your competitive differentiation — the unique value you offer and how your product stands out from others like it.

Before you get into the details of each competitor, spend time researching the market landscape. A thorough market analysis confirms customer needs, industry changes, and fiscal opportunity. It is this level of understanding that will allow you to act on your competitive research.

Questions to answer during the market research phase:

Who is your ideal customer?

What is the size of the market of ideal customers?

How has this market changed in recent years and where is it headed?

After defining the current market landscape, you can move on to examining your competitors. A thorough competitor analysis requires exploration of a wide range of sources for each competitor — everything from product reviews and sales collateral to press releases and revenue details. And you should also get firsthand experience in each product so you can see for yourself how they compare to your own.

Competitor analysis can help answer these core questions:

Are there other companies offering a product that provides a solution similar to ours?

Are my potential customers getting a product or service at the level that they want or need?

How can we enhance the value of our product to help it stand out in the marketplace?

Related guides:

Competitor analysis templates

SWOT analysis templates

Before we get into the details, here are the basic steps you will follow to perform a competitive analysis. Consider collaborating with your product marketing team — they conduct similar research and will likely be able to share insights into customers that can help guide your efforts.

Follow these steps to conduct a thorough competitor analysis:

Establish a list of direct and indirect competitors.

Examine available research materials — such as the company's website, customer reviews, financial information, and press releases.

Test the products yourself, if possible.

Briefly document user experience (UX), functionality issues, and any information relevant to your target customer.

Identify product strengths and weaknesses based on customer reviews.

Create a competitive analysis report. These templates provide a good starting point.

Share your report with the product team and others in sales and marketing

As you go along, it can be helpful to use a competitive analysis template to organize your observations. This whiteboard template is great for getting started quickly — it highlights several areas of analysis in one streamlined, shareable view.

Start using this template now

Identifying direct vs. indirect competitors

Before you conduct competitor analysis, you need to identify who and what your product is up against in the market. It is wise to document both direct and indirect competitors.

A direct competitor is a company that offers (more or less) the same good or service within the same market. For example, Netflix and Hulu streaming services are direct competitors.

An indirect competitor is a company that offers a different type of product to serve the same need for the same customer segment. For example, YouTube is an indirect competitor to both Netflix and Hulu.

Here are two ways to build your list of competitors:

Customer feedback: Which other products do people mention during demos or support calls? If they are a prospective customer , which product do they currently use to meet similar needs as your product? If they no longer use your product, which competitor is now getting their business?

Keyword research: This can be as simple as entering your product category (ex. "online whiteboard") into a search engine and seeing which products show up in the search results. If you have the right tools (or collaborate with a marketing team), you can also go deeper — tracking organic search rankings and which companies are vying for similar online ad placements.

Evaluating both direct and indirect competitors is a valuable exercise. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your direct competitors can help you discover opportunities where you can stand out and gain a market advantage. And knowing how your potential customers are using indirect competitors can highlight problems that you could potentially solve more effectively.

How should I research competitors?

Once you have identified your direct and indirect competitors, you can start gathering key information about each one. You can find this information on company websites, third-party review sites, and within industry news coverage. Take notes on what you learn — to share with your team a bit later in this process.

Here are some useful sources to include in your competitive analysis:

With your list of competitors and source materials in hand, here are some of the categories you can examine for each competitor — including key questions to guide your research:

Identify each competitor's vision — where they are headed and what they aim to achieve in the market. Most companies offer this information in some form on their website. When reviewing, assess how they present themselves to both customers and prospects. Questions to answer:

Why do these products exist?

Which problems do they aim to solve?

Are there any problems that these products do not seem to solve?

Positioning

Assess where your competitors see themselves within the shared market. The best place to find this information is in your competitors' marketing messages — anything on their own websites as well as external sites such as social media networks or industry news outlets. Questions to answer:

How do your competitors market their products?

What language do they use to describe what they offer in market?

Which core problems do they believe they solve?

Learn about the target audience for your competitors' products. While researching competitors and using their products, try to envision their user personas — the profile of their ideal customer. And revisit customer reviews to look for patterns. Questions to answer:

What are the job titles of competitors' typical customers?

What industry do target customers work in?

What are their target customer's skills and interests?

How do their personas differ from yours?

Differentiators

Determine what distinguishes each competitor's product from yours and the rest of the market. When doing your research, focus on the factors that are most important to your customers, such as customer service, integrations, and price . Questions to answer:

What are the product's key benefits?

Is the look and feel of this product superior to mine and others on the market?

Is the price lower or higher than the rest of the competition?

Does the product work better than the rest?

Does the company offer superior customer service?

Aim to understand what drives your competitors to do what they do and where their products stand out. Take your competitors' product tours or even sign up for a free trial to understand all aspects of their offerings. Also look up the companies' founders on LinkedIn — many products are built out of deep, personal passion. Questions to answer:

What does the competition excel at?

What do they do better than you?

What unique insight and experience do the company's founders offer?

You can also spot weaknesses in product tours or while experimenting in a free trial. You can gain the customer perspective by searching relevant online forums for reviews and insights on these products. Quora, Product Hunt, and LinkedIn are three potential platforms that offer unbiased opinions on what customers and prospects think. Questions to answer:

What do competitors' users struggle with?

Which aspects of these products are lacking?

What customer needs are these products failing to meet?

Document your findings in a central location that your team — and other teams such as sales and marketing — can access. A competitive analysis template can help keep everything clearly organized. Excel spreadsheets or PowerPoint documents are a good start. But many product teams also use tools like Aha! Roadmaps to document competitive research as a part of strategic product planning. This ensures that your research informs your goals , initiatives, and tactical work.

While competitive analysis is a key component of any good product strategy , it is important that you treat it as just a guideline. You should never make decisions about your product based solely on a desire to get ahead of your competitors. Instead, use your research alongside what you know is best for your customers and company to inform your decisions. Staying focused on what your customers need and want will help you successfully create value for your business and your customers.

Plan today what you will achieve tomorrow. Aha! Roadmaps can help.

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Market Research in Product Management

Market Research is a crucial component of product management, encompassing a range of activities aimed at understanding the dynamics of a particular market. It involves gathering, interpreting, and analyzing information about potential customers, competitors, and the overall industry. In essence, It serves as the foundation for informed decision-making in product management. .

Table of Content

What is Market Research?

• Why is market research important?

Steps to Conduct Marketing Research:

Market research and competitive analysis:, components of market research:, market research methods:.

• How to do market research as a Product Manager:

What Problems Can Market Research Solve?

Conclusion: market research.

The practice of assessing a new service or product’s viability through in-person interviews with potential consumers is known as market research. It enables a business to identify its target market and gather consumer comments and other input regarding their interest in a given good or service.

Either internal research or research from a third party with expertise in market research can be done. Among other methods, surveys and focus groups can be used for it. Product samples or a small stipend are typically given to test subjects as payment for their time.

Why is Market Research important?

Understanding the market is an important part of developing your product strategy, as is defining your goals and how you intend to achieve them. Market research takes into account external factors. This is significant because market research is essential for determining product-market fit. If you want your product to succeed, you must first thoroughly understand your market position, target audience, and any alternative solutions. This is important whether you are introducing a new product, improving an existing offering, or entering a new market.

Furthermore, market research allows all members of the core product team to make better decisions. The following are just a few of many examples, but market research can help:

• Product management entails empathizing with customers and learning about their needs to better prioritize upcoming product work.
• UX design entails making design decisions that reflect how customers want to interact with modern products.
• Engineering — Stay current on competitors’ technologies.
• Product marketing entails updating product positioning to reflect what customers want to hear.
• Once the objectives are established, product managers need to choose appropriate research methods based on the nature of the information sought.
• Developing a detailed research plan and a well-thought-out sampling strategy ensures that the collected data is relevant and representative of the target market.
• This could involve administering surveys, conducting interviews, or employing observational techniques. The collected data then undergoes analysis and interpretation, turning raw information into actionable insights.
• This step is critical in extracting meaningful patterns and trends that can guide decision-making.
• Ensuring that decision-makers understand and can act upon the insights gained is crucial for the successful integrating of market research into the product management strategy.

Competitive analysis is an indispensable aspect of market research, focusing on a comprehensive understanding of competitors and the broader competitive landscape. This involves evaluating competitors’ products, market share, pricing strategies, and overall marketing can identify areas where their products can outperform competitors and formulate strategies to gain a competitive edge.

Here are the differences between Market Research and Competitive Analysis:

You’ll want to look into three key components of market research for product Management: the overall market landscape, competitive analysis, and customer research.

Market Landscape: An examination of the market as a whole is a good place to begin. This type of market research typically focuses on macro-level industry characteristics and customer behavior. The factors to consider when researching the market landscape are listed below.

Competitive Analysis: Investigating competitors entails looking at established market players as well as alternative solutions used by prospective customers. You can learn how to differentiate your product by analyzing your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.

Customer Research: Customer research drives product innovation by allowing you to gain direct insights from your target audience. This assists product teams in developing empathy for the problems that customers want to solve. It can also reveal the true feelings of your customers toward your product.

There are several methods employed in market research, each serving specific purposes.

• Surveys and questionnaires are common for gathering quantitative data on customer preferences.
• Interviews focuses groups offer qualitative insights into customer opinions and motivations.
• Observational research involves studying consumer behavior in real-world settings.
• Additionally, social media monitoring and web analytics provide valuable data on sentiment and online trends.

How to do Market Research as a Product Manager:

The complexity of the market research process will vary depending on the scope and extent of your plans. Launching a brand new offering frequently necessitates a thorough examination of the entire market; in other cases, such as improving existing products, a cursory examination of the current competition may suffice.

However, there are four critical steps to conducting successful market research:

• Establish your goals: To collect the appropriate data, you must first determine what you are attempting to learn. Clarify the scope of your market research by making a list of the questions you have about a problem or opportunity, then distilling this into a goal statement.
• Plan and carry out research: Identifying where to look for the information you require. You can use a combination of primary and secondary sources, with primary sources including interviews, surveys, and focus groups and secondary sources including industry publications, trade associations, and market reports.
• Analyze the data and share its results: Once you’ve gathered your data, go over it carefully to look for trends and other insights. Make your findings accessible to your team by summarizing them. You could even make a presentation to show off what you learned.
• Plan your next steps: Market research should be used to guide action. Use your newfound knowledge to create customer personas, develop a comprehensive product strategy, or prioritize product decisions that will add more value to the market.
• Market research is useful in addressing a variety of product management challenges.
• For starters, it aids in the understanding of customer preferences and needs, allowing the development of products that are appealing to the target audience.
• Market research also aids in identifying market gaps and opportunities, lowering the risk of product failure.
• It also aids in the optimization of pricing strategies, ensuring that products are competitively positioned in the market.
• Market research can also be used to assess the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, allowing for changes to improve customer engagement and brand perception.

To summarize, market research is a problem-solving tool that reduces uncertainty and provides a solid foundation for strategic decision-making.

Market research is a vital compass that helps product managers navigate the complexities of the business landscape. It is more than just data collection; it is a strategic initiative that enables decision-making. Product managers can navigate uncertainties and make informed decisions by understanding customer needs, identifying market opportunities, and conducting thorough competitive analysis. this components, which include both primary and secondary research, provide a comprehensive view of the market landscape.

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The Best Ways for Product Managers to Research their Competitors

Competition is healthy. If your product doesn’t have any competitors, it won’t have too many customers, either. An attractive market opportunity always entices many parties to take a crack at it. But how to product managers research competitors, how do they keep up?

Product managers view competitors as a double-edged sword. Yes, they are likely going to grab some of your potential market shares and make it harder to close as many deals. But, competition pushes your product to reach its potential. They inspire new features and enhancements you may not have thought of, and bring out the best in you and your colleagues.

Regardless of how much time and energy you spend tracking and analyzing the competition, they will continue to innovate. Their functionality, messaging, pricing, and product positioning will evolve constantly. Your customers and prospects will hear those pitches and entertain the pros and cons of each solution available to them. So it’s best to keep a close watch on what they’re all up to and figure out how to share and potentially act on what you’re seeing. Product Managers research competitors not only to keep up on the landscape but also as an inspiration to push their team forward.

How Product Managers Keep Tabs on Competitors

You can’t make informed strategic decisions on your product if you don’t know what’s happening. That’s why product managers researching competitors need a consistent approach to monitoring what everyone else is up to.

This begins by determining who should be considered a competitor at all. Sometimes it’s obvious. Especially in more mature markets where established providers of similar solutions exist.

For example, auto manufacturers know they’ve got to track what the likes of Toyota, Ford, Fiat, and Honda are up to. That club’s membership rarely changes much. However, upstarts do emerge. Such as Tesla establishing a new beachhead with luxury electric vehicles. Or Korean brands such as Hyundai and Kia entering the U.S. market 30 years ago.

There’s indirect competition from alternative solutions to the same problem. This includes motorcycles, scooters, on-demand rentals such as Zipcar, ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft, or even public transportation. They’ll all get you from Point A to Point B, which is the primary reason people buy cars.

For technology companies, understanding current markets requires customer research . Plenty of startups who found their problem-solving apps were no match for workarounds prospects had devised.

1. Keep Up on Competitive Product Research

After compiling your list of competitors, product teams must ensure they’re getting a steady stream of intelligence on what they’re up to. You could set a bunch of calendar reminders to check their websites once a week. However, a more automated, passive system is more prudent for a product manager researching competitors with other tasks on their plate.

To ensure you’re not missing out on what’s new and exciting, you’ll need to act like a superfan of these products:

• Subscribe to their newsletters
• Follow them on social media
• Read their blog posts
• Watch their webinars
• Set up Google Alerts for their products
• Follow relevant industry analysts
• Track product reviews

You might want to use alternative social media handles and email addresses. In order to not make it too obvious what you’re up to. Getting bombarded by their messaging will not only give you a heads up on what they’re working on, but you’ll also see how they position their offering. An added benefit can be seeing what their customers are saying when they comment on posts or “@” them on Twitter.

3 steps to keep track of product competitor research

All that information is great. But with no organized strategy for dealing with it all, it can become overwhelming and useless. Don’t think you can remember it all and come up with a plan to manage the inflow and do something useful with what you’re learning.

1. Divide and conquer.

Assuming you have the luxury of product team, product managers research competition by splitting up which companies you’re each going to track. This is a better approach than divvying things up based on channel. This way individuals will get a holistic view of what a given competitor is up to.

You can each become mini-subject matter experts on your assigned rivals. When a new alternative appears on the horizon, they can be assigned to someone specific for tracking.

2. Define what you’re tracking.

You don’t need to know everything about your competitors, only the important stuff. To create a consistent competitive analysis approach, figure out what key elements you should note and what to skip.

Your top topics might be:

• Major new features
• Third-party integrations and partnerships
• New marketing campaign themes
• Major new customer announcements
• Pricing and packaging changes
• Financial news (new funding announcements, earnings reports, sales figures, etc.)
• Key hires and departures

3. Organize your insights.

What is important for product managers researching competitors is consistency. It doesn’t matter if you opt for a competitive intelligence dashboard or a shared Google Doc. You need to find the relevant information you’ve gleaned from your research so if someone asks you what’s new with Company X or the value proposition of Product Y quickly.

Likewise, if you’ve taken the divide and conquer approach, you should each be using the same format and criteria.

2. Create a Comparison Matrix

With your competitors identified and your information collected, there’s no better way to see how everyone stacks up than via a matrix. At a glance, you should be able to make a comparison. This should include features, platform compatibility, integrations, industries, verticals, key customers, and pricing.

This isn’t going to include every detail and nuance. The ability to see a snapshot is a handy resource. Anyone trying to get a feel for the marketplace can see the key differences between solutions.

3. Build Out Your Battle Cards

Product managers researching competitors need a strategy on how to win . Battle cards are a tried-and-true tool for visualizing the competitive landscape. There are a few different versions. They’re all a take on one-pagers that creates a visual template for putting competitive intelligence into action.

Each competitor can have its own battle card. These should spell out everything from pricing to their strengths and weaknesses. It’s a quick reference for the latest take on what they have to offer.

You can also create comparison battle cards. Line up your current product offering and a competitor’s. This allows you to compare how you differ, where you overlap, and which variances are opportunities or weak points in the juxtaposition between the two.

Battle cards can play multiple roles for your organization. For the product team, it can serve as another tool to spot opportunities where you can shore up your product offering or areas where you’re currently leading and may want to build on.

But the sales and marketing teams can also benefit from them. They provide a concise reference for competitors. They can also be “played” during sales training and prep work to create a unique selling proposition .

For example, let’s say a salesperson is calling on a prospect that currently uses a competitor’s product. Using battle cards, they’ll be able to know in advance which areas your own offering is better at, as well as the things your competitor does better. This will allow the salesperson to better prepare their pitch and not be surprised when things come up during the meeting.

In some cases, marketing might even produce battle cards. These cards can highlight the areas where your product is superior to prospects. These can also be used defensively if a current customer is considering a switch to an alternative.

4. Share Competitive Intelligence Updates

It can be really tempting to fire off emails the second you find a juicy tidbit about your competitors. You want to be seen as someone who’s on top of the news and don’t want anyone else to steal your thunder.

Stakeholders aren’t looking to product management as a source of gossip or to be a news aggregator. They’re looking for actionable information, and that includes analysis and context beyond the headline. This is why it’s so important for product managers to research competition.

Come up with a manageable cadence for updating stakeholders on noteworthy news and stick to it. This could be daily, weekly, or monthly given how active your particular industry is, but less is often more in these cases.

When you do deliver these updates, be sure you’re providing more than just a bunch of links. Briefly describe what you’ve learned, why it’s important, and if there’s any recommended action, including how this may impact the cost of delay .

Competitors will launch new features, sign new customers, and create news about themselves all the time. That’s how they stay relevant and top-of-mind, and your marketing department is likely doing the same thing. So be sure you’re adding value by curating carefully and providing substantive analysis. This is a handy tool to go with what you do choose to share and to help avoid stakeholders succumbing to shiny object syndrome .

Of course, there may be exceptions to the rule. When Google acquires a competitor or Amazon announces they’re entering your market you shouldn’t wait for your scheduled update. But keep those “urgent alerts” to a minimum to preserve your credibility and make sure you’re not tuned out by busy executives.

Regular reviews and overviews

Beyond breaking news, it’s always a good idea to take a step back and holistically review your overall assessment of each major competitor. Whether it’s monthly or quarterly, go back and review their current messaging and offering compared to what’s in your matrix and battle cards.

This “forest versus trees” analysis might uncover a trend you’d missed. Plus it’s just a good exercise to renew your familiarity with whom your product is up against.

5. Turn Competitive Intelligence Into Action

Compiling, organizing, and sharing all this data is pointless if it’s not going to inform the actions of your team and your organization. Be sure a competitive analysis is always an initial part of any decision-making or prioritization activity. And while competition shouldn’t be the only driver for what makes it onto the roadmap, it can’t be ignored either .

Understanding what else is out there is crucial to figuring out what differentiates your product versus what it is sorely lacking. Addressing the latter will let buyers focus on the former instead of fixating on what your product doesn’t do.

Remember, just because your competitor is doing it doesn’t mean you necessarily need to do it as well and just turn into a feature factory . The secret to an effective product strategy is doing a few things well and becoming invaluable to some of the markets versus doing the bare minimum to keep a broader swath of prospects potentially interested .

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Market Research: A How-To Guide and Template

Discover the different types of market research, how to conduct your own market research, and use a free template to help you along the way.

MARKET RESEARCH KIT

5 Research and Planning Templates + a Free Guide on How to Use Them in Your Market Research

Updated: 02/21/24

Published: 02/21/24

Today's consumers have a lot of power. As a business, you must have a deep understanding of who your buyers are and what influences their purchase decisions.

Enter: Market Research.

Whether you're new to market research or not, I created this guide to help you conduct a thorough study of your market, target audience, competition, and more. Let’s dive in.

Table of Contents

What is market research?

Primary vs. secondary research, types of market research, how to do market research, market research report template, market research examples.

Market research is the process of gathering information about your target market and customers to verify the success of a new product, help your team iterate on an existing product, or understand brand perception to ensure your team is effectively communicating your company's value effectively.

Market research can answer various questions about the state of an industry. But if you ask me, it's hardly a crystal ball that marketers can rely on for insights on their customers.

Market researchers investigate several areas of the market, and it can take weeks or even months to paint an accurate picture of the business landscape.

However, researching just one of those areas can make you more intuitive to who your buyers are and how to deliver value that no other business is offering them right now.

How? Consider these two things:

• Your competitors also have experienced individuals in the industry and a customer base. It‘s very possible that your immediate resources are, in many ways, equal to those of your competition’s immediate resources. Seeking a larger sample size for answers can provide a better edge.
• Your customers don't represent the attitudes of an entire market. They represent the attitudes of the part of the market that is already drawn to your brand.

The market research services market is growing rapidly, which signifies a strong interest in market research as we enter 2024. The market is expected to grow from roughly $75 billion in 2021 to $90.79 billion in 2025 .

Free Market Research Kit

• SWOT Analysis Template
• Survey Template
• Focus Group Template

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

Why do market research?

Market research allows you to meet your buyer where they are.

As our world becomes louder and demands more of our attention, this proves invaluable.

By understanding your buyer's problems, pain points, and desired solutions, you can aptly craft your product or service to naturally appeal to them.

Market research also provides insight into the following:

• Where your target audience and current customers conduct their product or service research
• Which of your competitors your target audience looks to for information, options, or purchases
• What's trending in your industry and in the eyes of your buyer
• Who makes up your market and what their challenges are
• What influences purchases and conversions among your target audience
• Consumer attitudes about a particular topic, pain, product, or brand
• Whether there‘s demand for the business initiatives you’re investing in
• Unaddressed or underserved customer needs that can be flipped into selling opportunity
• Attitudes about pricing for a particular product or service

Ultimately, market research allows you to get information from a larger sample size of your target audience, eliminating bias and assumptions so that you can get to the heart of consumer attitudes.

As a result, you can make better business decisions.

To give you an idea of how extensive market research can get , consider that it can either be qualitative or quantitative in nature — depending on the studies you conduct and what you're trying to learn about your industry.

Qualitative research is concerned with public opinion, and explores how the market feels about the products currently available in that market.

Quantitative research is concerned with data, and looks for relevant trends in the information that's gathered from public records.

That said, there are two main types of market research that your business can conduct to collect actionable information on your products: primary research and secondary research.

Primary Research

Primary research is the pursuit of first-hand information about your market and the customers within your market.

It's useful when segmenting your market and establishing your buyer personas.

Primary market research tends to fall into one of two buckets:

• Exploratory Primary Research: This kind of primary market research normally takes place as a first step — before any specific research has been performed — and may involve open-ended interviews or surveys with small numbers of people.
• Specific Primary Research: This type of research often follows exploratory research. In specific research, you take a smaller or more precise segment of your audience and ask questions aimed at solving a suspected problem.

Secondary Research

Secondary research is all the data and public records you have at your disposal to draw conclusions from (e.g. trend reports, market statistics, industry content, and sales data you already have on your business).

Secondary research is particularly useful for analyzing your competitors . The main buckets your secondary market research will fall into include:

• Public Sources: These sources are your first and most-accessible layer of material when conducting secondary market research. They're often free to find and review — like government statistics (e.g., from the U.S. Census Bureau ).
• Commercial Sources: These sources often come in the form of pay-to-access market reports, consisting of industry insight compiled by a research agency like Pew , Gartner , or Forrester .
• Internal Sources: This is the market data your organization already has like average revenue per sale, customer retention rates, and other historical data that can help you draw conclusions on buyer needs.
• Focus Groups
• Product/ Service Use Research
• Observation-Based Research
• Buyer Persona Research
• Market Segmentation Research
• Pricing Research
• Competitive Analysis Research
• Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Research
• Brand Awareness Research
• Campaign Research

1. Interviews

Interviews allow for face-to-face discussions so you can allow for a natural flow of conversation. Your interviewees can answer questions about themselves to help you design your buyer personas and shape your entire marketing strategy.

2. Focus Groups

Focus groups provide you with a handful of carefully-selected people that can test out your product and provide feedback. This type of market research can give you ideas for product differentiation.

3. Product/Service Use Research

Product or service use research offers insight into how and why your audience uses your product or service. This type of market research also gives you an idea of the product or service's usability for your target audience.

4. Observation-Based Research

Observation-based research allows you to sit back and watch the ways in which your target audience members go about using your product or service, what works well in terms of UX , and which aspects of it could be improved.

5. Buyer Persona Research

Buyer persona research gives you a realistic look at who makes up your target audience, what their challenges are, why they want your product or service, and what they need from your business or brand.

6. Market Segmentation Research

Market segmentation research allows you to categorize your target audience into different groups (or segments) based on specific and defining characteristics. This way, you can determine effective ways to meet their needs.

7. Pricing Research

Pricing research helps you define your pricing strategy . It gives you an idea of what similar products or services in your market sell for and what your target audience is willing to pay.

8. Competitive Analysis

Competitive analyses give you a deep understanding of the competition in your market and industry. You can learn about what's doing well in your industry and how you can separate yourself from the competition .

9. Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Research

Customer satisfaction and loyalty research gives you a look into how you can get current customers to return for more business and what will motivate them to do so (e.g., loyalty programs , rewards, remarkable customer service).

10. Brand Awareness Research

Brand awareness research tells you what your target audience knows about and recognizes from your brand. It tells you about the associations people make when they think about your business.

11. Campaign Research

Campaign research entails looking into your past campaigns and analyzing their success among your target audience and current customers. The goal is to use these learnings to inform future campaigns.

• Define your buyer persona.
• Identify a persona group to engage.
• Prepare research questions for your market research participants.
• List your primary competitors.
• Summarize your findings.

1. Define your buyer persona.

You have to understand who your customers are and how customers in your industry make buying decisions.

This is where your buyer personas come in handy. Buyer personas — sometimes referred to as marketing personas — are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers.

Use a free tool to create a buyer persona that your entire company can use to market, sell, and serve better.

Don't forget to share this post!

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Product Management

How should Product Managers do Competitor Research?

Product Marketer at Zeda.io

Jacob Koshy

May 2, 2023

11 min read

Transform Insights into Impact

Build Products That Drive Revenue and Delight Customers!

Competitions are an inevitable part of the business world. While there is every possible chance to get intimidated, you can also navigate your way through success by mounting on healthy competition. And to plan your way to success, you have to first know what your competitors are doing. This is where competitive product research comes in. Stay tuned to know all about it.

What is a Competitor Analysis?

Competitor analysis or competitor research is the process of evaluating the position of your competitors in the market. This can mean analyzing their strengths, weaknesses, and marketing tactics to help you develop your products in a unique and effective way that stands out from the rest. 

Competitor in this scenario means all the companies that offer products or services similar to yours. Doing a competitor analysis means checking on their features, the integrations they offer, the demo or trial period and its effectiveness, the price, the marketing channels they are using to promote their products, and all relatable information.

Before directly jumping into competitive product research, it is essential to understand the market landscape. Market research and analysis will help to identify customer needs,  potential scope, challenges, and risks. Once you have a comprehensive understanding of the market factors you can focus on developing strategies to act on competitive research. 

Why should you do competitor research?

Suppose you have 5 competitors in the market. All of you sell the same product, use similar marketing channels, and have more or less the same pricing structure. Why do you think consumers will choose you over the others? They will not pick you unless you are compelling them to. That is how competitor research helps to start with. It helps you to stand out from the rest.  Let's find out some more reasons.  

1. To identify reference point

Competitive product research is a great tool for identifying important references to guide your movements in the market. It will enable you to understand your competitor's journey and identify important benchmarks to measure your growth against them.

2. To differentiate your value proposition

Generally, all the similar products in the market have to offer the same features unless there is a huge price difference. The competitive product research will help you identify and build the unique “why” of your product. Why should they choose your product over your competitors? What unique value proposition are you providing?

3. To Identify and fill the gaps in your system

By closely observing and comparing your competitors, and their relationship with their clients, you can easily identify the gaps in your system and work towards filling them.

Types of competitors

The most crucial part of competitor analysis is identifying competitors. There are typically 3 types of competitions that you need to pay attention to. Let's discuss.

1. Direct competitors

The one name that directly comes to your mind when you think of competition can be referred to as direct competition. These types of competitions are generally evident as they provide identical products and services at similar prices to the same customer base. Some examples of direct competitors are Netflix vs Amazon prime, Apple vs Android, and Amazon vs Flipkart.

2. Indirect competitors

These types of competitors can offer different solutions to solve the same problem. Their product and services are not the same, but they cater to the same target audience. For example, youtube is an indirect competitor to both Netflix and Amazon Prime.

3. Replacement competitors

Replacement competitors are those that offer an alternative product or service that you offer. These types of products and services are different from what you offer but customers may choose to spend their money on them instead of you. For example, video game companies can be a replacement competitor for Netflix.

7 simple steps for product managers to do competitor research

Step 1: identify your competitors.

The first step to performing competitor analysis is to identify competitors. We have already spoken about the different types of competitors that you might have. All you need to do is spot them. Let’s get directly into the point of how you can do it. 

1. Google search

The easiest way to get started is to head straight to Google. Type in a few related keywords related to your product and there you have your list of competitors. You will probably find a lot of search results. Don’t get overwhelmed and focus on the first page of Google as it shows the most relevant results. Here are some ways how you can do it-

i) Let’s say you sell CRM software. To find out your competitors, you can simply type “CRM tools” or “CRM tools in (your country name)” if you want to be more specific and find local competitors.

ii) You can also use the word “alternatives” along with the brand name to get a list of competitors. Let’s take the example of Netflix- a video streaming app. To find its competitors, you can simply type “Netflix alternatives” and you will have a list of companies that offer the same product and features.

2. B2B review sites

Software listing sites like G2 and Capterra can serve as a great tool for identifying your competitors. You can type in your product type and you will get all the listings of competitors. It allows you to easily check reviews, compare your products and filter your searches to identify your closest competitors. You can view all the products together or in categories.

Here is a glimpse of how it will look if you search for CRMs on Capterra and G2.

CRM tools results in Capterra:

CRM tools results in G2:

3. Speak with your customers

Prospects already do their set of research before picking their vendor. They can be a great source for your research too. Ask them why they chose you and whom they were planning to consider. Also, try to interrogate the different aspects that attract them to your competitors. This way you will have an idea about what features or aspect of a product attracts them the most. Using competitive analysis tools-  Business intelligence tools will help you to collect, organize and analyze data. This step is desirable to make sure that all your findings and facts are data-driven and not just merely based on arbitrary assumptions.. 

Step 2: Research your competitions

Now that you have a list of competitors, take your time to carefully go through their product list. Analyze what features they are offering and at what cost. What is the price difference between your products? Is there a significant difference between your pricing and feature structure? What are the things that make them better than you? What are the things that make you better than them? 

Where to research?

There are multiple platforms available to find compelling information about your competition. Let us learn about a few.

• Competitor website - Websites will reflect all the important information about a product. By going through a website you will get access to knowing product features, pricing, details, product messaging, reviews, pain points, and value propositions.
• Social Media - You can monitor conversations on social media and other forums. Since social media are public platforms, you will get raw and real information from the users about competitor products without any possible censorship.
• Review sites - These are again great tools to identify customers’ overall sentiment toward a product reflecting their frustrations, recommendations, and acceptance.
• Press releases - Keeping a tab on press releases from your competitors will keep you updated on new product launches, revenue milestones, company performance, etc.
• Trials and demo - Signing up for their trial and demo will give you an opportunity to actually test their product and identify all the strengths and weaknesses.

What to research?

Here are some important points you should ensure to find about while conducting your research.

1. Product and features

Make the effort to learn thoroughly about the product, its use cases, its value proposition, and its features. You can head to their website and evaluate how are they presenting their product.  What is their USP?  How is it different from your product?  Are there any shortcomings you notice? The product development team can use this information to improve their own product capabilities.

2. Customers and User persona

Who is the target audience? Are they focussing on any special geographical location? Competitors’ blogs and resources can serve as useful references for identifying their customer base and the type of messaging they want to convey. You can also check out their reviews on their site and other public sites and forums to understand the consumer sentiment for their product and brand.

3. Marketing Strategy

What are their marketing channels? What is their content strategy? Are they using any collaborations to promote their products? How are they utilizing ads on different platforms? At what frequency do they publish blogs and newsletters? Do they use any video promotions? Pay attention to their taglines, product proof points, category names etc. that highlight their product messaging and language.

4. Pricing Structure

Pricing analysis of competitors plays a crucial role in understanding your competitor’s market strategy. Do they offer free trials?  What features are available for free?  Is there any implementation or setup cost?  Here is a pricing structure comparison of 4 full-stack marketing automation products to help you understand better. 

5. Technology stack

Learning about competitors' technological infrastructure and data ecosystem is important to gain insight into their internal solutions and level of expertise. This will include analyzing their operating systems and programming languages, servers, data storage, and querying, backend frameworks, APIs, etc.

Step 3: Perform SWOT Analysis of competitors

There are many strategies to perform competitor analysis but the most common one is SWOT. It stands for Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats. This will help you to understand how your competitors are performing.  The key to identifying SWOT for competitors is to keep a tab on all of their activities. Follow them on social media, subscribe to their newsletters, frequently visit their websites, and keep yourself updated about their next possible moves.

• Strengths- Competitors' strengths can pose a risk to your own business. It is something that they are doing better than you. You can try to identify competitors’ strengths by analyzing their strategies, and relationships with customers. It can come in the form of unique content marketing, brand awareness, expertise in a certain area, skilled leadership, good internal communication, and team members.
• Weakness - Finding out competitors' weaknesses will help identify the areas you are doing better than them. They can show up in a lot of areas like outdated technology stack, high employee turnover, lack of expertise and resources, and limited product features.
• Opportunities- Monitoring competitor opportunities is essential as they keep you alert and prepared for any potential changes in your market position. Competitors’ opportunities can show in the form of strategic partnerships, new business relationships, new marketing, and promotion channels.
• Threats- Threats are possible challenges that your competitors face which can significantly impact their performance . Small market size, changes in consumer perspectives, increased competition, and security concerns are some examples of possible threats.

Step 4: Develop a comparison matrix

After you have collected all the relevant information, it is time to lay them out on the table and prepare a comparison matrix. The matrix should include every detail and nuance of all the crucial data including key features, integrations, industries, customers, pricing, etc. The comparison matrix will serve as a handy resource that should be easily accessible to you at any given point in time. A comparison matrix can help you in the following ways-

• Analyse competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.
• Identify your uniqueness.
• Find gaps in your product strategy.
• Discover market opportunities and threats.
• Upgrade your product and marketing content. 
• Develop a farsighted growth plan.

Step 5:  Prepare battle cards

Battle cards are visual tools for picturing the competitive landscape. Each competitor must have their own battle cards mentioning their strengths and weaknesses. It will act as a quick reference point when you are making important decisions. Apart from these, you can also create comparison battle cards. This will help you to identify critical differences, similarities, and overlaps.

Battle cards offer a different value to the different departments of your team. For example, the development team can take references from their technology stack, the marketing team can use cards to develop their own unique marketing strategy.

Step 6: Share the research with your team

After you have gathered all the insights from your research, it is time to communicate the result with your team. This will allow you to visualize these data from different perspectives. The design team will have their input, the sales team will have their own input. By gathering opinions and perspectives from all the team members, you can start working on your product strategy .

Step 7: Follow through with action and execution

The final step is to put all the plans into action and implement your strategy to present the most compelling product in the market. From structuring your pricing to sorting out the features to developing marketing content you have a long way to go.

Product competitor research does not necessarily mean it helps you build a unique product, instead, it will empower you to make evidence-based decisions and prioritize activities on the roadmap. It not only presents critical reference points but also helps Product Managers visualise their goals and objectives. This will help you to cement a strong position in the market.

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User research techniques for product managers: what should I be looking for?

User research is the driving force behind product experience insights and UX improvements. But where do you start?

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If you don't know what you’re looking for—or where to look for it—user research turns into an overwhelming game of “find the conversion needle in the data haystack.”

So let’s talk about  how to find the right data the first time.

Decide on a goal before you start (3 questions to ask yourself)

If you tune into a movie halfway through, you might get the gist of the story, but you'll miss some critical details. User research is the same, which is why you should  resist the urge to jump into testing too quickly.

Deciding on a goal in advance and laying out a clear plan sets you up to:

Work smarter instead of harder:

you know what info you need so you can get in, and get out.

Get buy-in from the team and stakeholders:

you can convey where you’re going, how you’ll get there, and why the team should care.

Easily find insights:

narrowing your approach means you have less rogue data to sort through at the end of the project.

Aly Abel from Moonpig put it best when she said, “the consequence of [not defining the research process is] research requests come in last minute, questions aren't properly defined, answers are needed now, which means work is rushed.”

“Great, great,” you say, “ but how do I plan user research? ”

Here are three key questions to ask yourself before starting any project.

1. What's the topic?

Prioritizing the research process starts with  deciding what to look at.  You might have a list of research ideas that include finding out:

Why users make certain choices or take certain actions

Which pricing and packaging performs best

How to drive upgrades and increase retention

Why users behave a certain way on your website

Who your different users are

All of these are worthy endeavors, but you can’t do them all at once—you need to rank their importance and tackle one at a time.

It can be tempting to only focus on the big roadmap items, but  spending too much time on long-view projects  puts you at risk of missing out on ways to help your customers  right now . On the flipside, tackling a lot of small goals and changes could make the user experience (UX) feel scattered.

The solution?  Fill your schedule with mostly intermediate goals  that balance catering to the company’s current strategy and user’s needs  today .

If you’re still stumped over which project deserves your attention, try running a  cost of delay analysis , which considers how much potential revenue you lose by waiting. This comparison between timelines and impact can help you identify which projects have the most potential payoff.

No matter which user research topic you pursue, simplify the question you hope the research will answer.

Josh Morales, Lead Product Researcher here at Hotjar, says, “Normally the first research question is too generic, packed with topics to research and not too well informed with the information available. The first thing is to bulletproof the research question by simplifying it, break it into pieces, and then prioritize the right question.”

2. Why is it important?

Clarifying your user research project’s  why  helps you:

Communicate the importance of the task at hand:

set yourself up to win team and stakeholder buy-in by clearly explaining the purpose of your user research project. Include expected outcomes, potential impact, and the results of your cost of delay analysis. Oh, and… skip the jargon.

Decide which testing methods to use and what metrics to focus on:

when you know the purpose of your user research and have identified potential impact and expected outcomes, you'll have a better idea of how to measure success, and which key results to share with your team.

3. When will it happen?

In a perfect world, your research projects would fit nicely within your company’s sprints. You could even create an annual research roadmap like the one  Aly Abel shares here :

Laying out all of your research projects this way makes it easier to ensure you have a mix of topics and project sizes, and helps you align with company-wide goals or OKRs.

Reality isn’t always so cut and dry, though.

If you can't align your research with sprints, you may have to  rethink what it means to be   done —instead of reporting on a final research project, share new findings like early conclusions or further questions you want to explore.

Learn from the people who matter most: your customers

Hotjar gives you product experience insights to help you empathize with and understand your users.

Choose user research techniques to match your goal

Now you have a user research goal in mind, you need to decide how to reach it and which  user testing tools  will get you there.

Here's how to choose the right technique based on your goal:

Quantitative and qualitative research: the perfect pair

The best research method for your project could be a blend of approaches. Quantitative research uses numerical data to let you know  what  is happening, while non-numerical insights like user feedback from qualitative research tell you  why  it happens.

To get a well-rounded picture of what’s happening on your site and in your product,  use quantitative and qualitative data together .

💡 Pro tip:  to get more comprehensive user and  product experience  (PX) insights, combine research tools like  Google Analytics and Hotjar .

Different research methods and tools each bring something unique to the table, and  combining different types of data broadens your view  so you don’t miss the context of any UX or PX issues.

Here are three ways quantitative and qualitative data work well for user research projects:

1. Learn how users make decisions

By learning  why  users behave a certain way in your product, you can  understand what’s working—or what could be improved  by your  product management  team.

For example, imagine you want to figure out what’s holding people back from starting a free trial. You can look at  scroll heatmaps  of your landing page to find out what information most people are seeing—or missing.

Then, you can use an  open-ended question  survey to ask users whether they have questions before starting a free trial. Their responses can help you decide where clarity, customer education, or different positioning is needed.

2. Find out why users leave

Let’s say  web analytics  data tells you the session duration for a particular page is low, and at the same time you've noticed more incomplete signups than usual from the same page. You could  assume  those two metrics are connected… but  how can you be sure?

Start your research by watching  session recording s to see how users interact with and experience the page and at what point they exit. Recordings can reveal broken elements or other  UX issues  that are driving people away, which you can use as the basis for  customer interviews  to dig deeper into product and user experience.

3. Understand how different user segments behave

To truly understand user segments, you have to  go beyond demographics  to learn their preferences and motivations.

To kick off user segment research, you can conduct a  heatmap analysis  to compare what catches different users' attention. When you see that certain elements are getting more attention than others, use an  Incoming Feedback  widget to let users share their opinions and comments—in their own words—on the elements in question.

🤔 How well do you know your users?  Customer personas used to be rooted in demographics like age and ethnicity. We know that humans are much more complex than that, though.

To really understand why your customers choose you, consider these psychographic factors during your user research:

👉  Read more:  learn how to use  psychographics and personas  to get to the truth about why people buy.

Consider your constraints

When you’re planning research,  start with your ideal scenario . What tests would you like to conduct, and what questions do you have? Then, consider your constraints. You may have limited:

After you know your constraints, you can work backward from the ideal scenario to find a feasible middle ground.

For example, if you need to work out a conversion issue before a fast-approaching launch date, the impact of the research and resulting  technical debt  could warrant a higher budget and an all-hands-on-deck effort.

If, on the other hand, you want to monitor how user preferences change over time, you can conduct smaller research projects over the entire year to gain perspective.

Involve stakeholders

How much are people going to care about information they weren't expecting or didn't ask for? If you wait to involve stakeholders until you've already finished your user research, you risk misalignment and low adoption of the outcome.

Let your team and stakeholders know early on in the process  what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and where the data is coming from.

💡  Remember:  you can set yourself up to win stakeholder buy-in by  clearly explaining the purpose of your user research project.  Include:

Expected outcomes

Potential impact

Cost of delay analysis results

Keep your eye on the insights

The point of user research is to  answer questions and challenge assumptions about your users’ preferences, goals, and experiences.

So, now what? Uncovering user insights is one thing;  actually putting them to use  is where the real work (and payoff!) comes in.

Here are three quick tips to help you keep your eye on the insights, and make use of your user research:

1. Evaluate results in phases

Rather than conducting a ton of user research and evaluating everything at the end, take a phased approach:  review data as you go , so you can decide whether a question is worth further exploration. You may find that you have enough information already to make a decision, or that research has brought up ten  more  questions.

2. Align metrics with OKRs

What should you measure once you have research data?

It pays to  align your metrics with team or department OKRs . For example, if your company wants to increase account upgrades, focus on ROI in your research. If you’re trying to build the case that a site redesign is in order, basing your  usability testing metrics  on things like error rate at a specific stage of the user journey can help.

3. Translate findings into challenges

After you’ve done the hard work of researching and analyzing user behavior through UX and PX insights, you have to  translate your findings into an actionable report .

A mere write-up won't do. Turn your results into challenges to be solved, and involve the right people to work together on a solution. Showing how others can get involved generates awareness and gets the issue in front of the decision-makers.

The right tools can improve your research

User research is a mix of art and science, but one thing remains constant: the  right tools  will give you the in-depth  insights you need .

Behavior analytics  and  product experience insights tools like Hotjar  give you ways to discover, consolidate, and communicate user needs—and then make the changes that matter most.

The 6 Stages of an Effective Product Development Process

What exactly should the product development process include? We’ll walk you through the six key stages and how to implement them.

Read more posts by this author.

Product development is one of those terms that seems straightforward, but ends up getting used in a lot of different ways. 

• Is it just the actual build of your product? 
• Is it the entire product development life cycle? 
• Is it the same as product management? 
• Does it come into play before or after product strategy? 

In short: Product development goes beyond the straightforward “building it” phase of your product. However, it’s not so broad as to encompass everything related to your product (i.e. product or marketing strategy). 

That said, understanding the actual product development process is crucial for making sure you can develop and launch your product efficiently and scale effectively. 

In this article, we’ll walk you through: 

• What exactly is product development? 
• How it compares to product management 
• The product development stages 
• Product development process examples  

What is product development?

Product development includes the product’s entire journey — everything from ideation to strategy and planning, building and launching, and more. In short: Product development is the process by which you plan, build, and launch your product into the world. 

Generally, when people talk about product development, they’re referring to the actual software development phases. Keep in mind that there are a lot of tangential steps that lead up to and follow from the actual build. Those can be part of the product development process, too. 

Product development vs. product management 

A key distinction to make right away: Product development is not the same as product management, although these two terms are often used interchangeably. They cover two overlapping, but distinct aspects of your product. 

Product development and product management also often involve different teams. As the name suggests, product managers oversee the product management process. The product development process is usually most closely managed by development or engineering teams. 

Think of them as concentric circles, where product development sits inside of the larger functions and goals of product strategy and product management. 

To clarify: 

Product management entails all of the product lifecycle stages and encompasses all aspects of managing that product. This includes product strategy and roadmap creation , development and launch, marketing and sales, user retention, and so on. 

Product strategy and product roadmapping involve big-picture planning for your product’s lifecycle. They tend to focus on what you’re planning to do and create with your product and why. 

Product development is narrower in scope and usually focuses on the how . That is, how are we going to develop the features and components needed to meet our goals and achieve our product vision? 

The six stages of the product development process

Although the product development process is narrower in scope, that’s not to say it’s as simple as picking some features and then building them. 

Product development has six primary development stages: 

• Research 
• Ideation 
• Validation 
• Development and launch

Let’s break down what goes into each of those. 

1. Research 

An effective product development process begins with market research. 

Hopefully, this isn’t the first time you’ve done some research for your product. Market research can be helpful in developing both big-picture ideas as well as solutions for specific features or product components. 

Before you embark on the actual development, it’s important to understand exactly who you’re building for, what the problem is, and how your target audience wants to solve that problem. 

Market research for the product development phase can look like: 

• Surveying your target market to understand exactly what they need or want from your product
• Doing market analysis to understand how competitors are solving the problem, or what gaps exist in the target market
• Asking existing customers or potential customers to rank potential features or solutions 
• Understanding your target audience. Who are they? What do they want? What are their big goals or tasks they want to accomplish? Who are your biggest potential customers and what solutions are they currently using? 
• Testing your value proposition to understand if it resonates with your target audience. You want to validate that you’re solving the right problems in the best ways. 

2. Ideation 

Ideation is an important phase of the product development process both before you build your minimum viable product (MVP) and after you launch. After all, hopefully you’ll continue to iterate and grow your product beyond V1. To do so, you’ll need to have a clear process in place for idea generation and creating new product features. 

During the strategy phase, you’ve already created a vision for what your product could become and the problems it could solve for your target market. Now, you need to boil down that vision into concrete product ideas and features that can solve those problems, based on your research. 

The ideation phase can include tasks like: 

• Defining a unique value proposition (UVP): Based on your research and your product vision, what’s the unique value that your solution will provide compared to other solutions available? This can be high-level — as in, your entire product concept and strategy — or it can be narrower, focused on a single problem or function within your product. 
• Wireframing design: How do you want your product to look and feel? How can design support your functionality and solutions? Creating some design wireframes or mockups at this stage can help you with concept development and communicating essential features. 
• Feasibility analysis: A feasibility analysis helps make sure your current and prioritized product ideas are‌ possible with your given resources, time, and budget. You may have a grand vision for your product, but what are you able to actually accomplish? Do you need to reduce the scope or bring on a larger team to make it possible? 

 3. Validation

The next stage in the product development process is validation. It’s a crucial development stage, but one that can be easily overlooked. 

After all, you’ve already done your research, now you know what you need to do — you should just do it, right? 

Almost. Before you jump into the actual development — which can be costly and time-consuming, especially if you’re building with traditional code as opposed to faster, more lightweight no-code tools — you want to validate the product ideas you landed on with your target audience.

Validation can be a humbling step, but ultimately, it’s the old measure twice, cut once principle. As Maria Posa, Bubble Developer, says, 

“Your idea (which can feel like your baby) is wrong, at least to some extent. Be open to feedback and criticism because that’s how you learn and improve your idea. Not only that, but make sure your users know that you’re open to feedback and criticism, so they feel comfortable delivering it to you.” 

So, how do you validate your ideas? 

• Ask customers for implicit or explicit validation. You can ask your users directly, “Is [x] a good solution to [y] problem? Why?” But sometimes it’s more helpful to let them go first to make sure they aren’t just going along with whatever you present. Try asking, “I assume it’d make things easier if you had [alternate solution to your actual idea], right?” Let them tell you no and explain why. Both can validate your ideas or give you a stronger direction to head in. 
• Build a prototype or MVP. A prototype or MVP can be a valuable tool in the development process for customer feedback and testing. Creating something with basic but limited functionality lets you do moderated testing to see how users would interact with the design and functionality. Want to move faster? Read our guide to ditching MVPs and launching your V1 with Bubble. 
• Concept testing. Validate your overall feature or product concepts through user surveys and early feedback from beta testing or mockups. This can give you valuable insights into your bigger ideas, and how you’re planning on executing them. 

Sometimes your assumptions aren’t going to be accurate. Validate before the core build, let your target audience guide your discovery process, and be willing to pivot as needed. 

4. Planning

The planning stage is another one that’s easy to skip over when you’re trying to move fast. You’ve settled on and validated your ideas, but skipping straight to building them can muddy the waters later. 

Instead, first map out a product development roadmap . Having a development roadmap in place can make the development and launch process so much smoother, and can save time and money in the long run.  

You may already have a product roadmap , but a product development roadmap is different. It goes into more granular detail about the actual work to be done, who owns it, what the timeline is, and so on. Your product development roadmap helps streamline communication and collaboration and organize complicated processes to support your product’s success. 

Here’s what you might want to include in your development roadmap: 

• Product goals and metrics: What is the end goal for your product, or for this phase of development? How will you measure success? 
• Product features: What specific features or functionality will be built in this phase of the development process? 
• Tech specifications: What are the technical requirements and needs for your product at this time? 
• Release plan: What critical tasks, testing, and development needs to happen prior to launch? 
• Timeline: When will major releases and key features be launched? What is the timeline for work that needs to be completed to meet those goals? 
• Budget and resources: What are your current resources and budget limitations, and how do they fit within your plans? 
• Potential risks: What challenges and known risks need to be accounted for, and how are you planning to manage them? 

5. Development and launch

Finally, it’s time to get your product built and out in the world! 

You’ll notice that we didn’t really include prototyping or building and launching an MVP as one of the phases of development. That’s because here at Bubble, we find that MVPs are outdated for modern technology and modern startup needs. 

You need to move faster, more efficiently, and meet customer needs quickly in order to stake your claim in the market. Jumping straight to launching your V1 with no-code tools like Bubble speeds up development, gets you to a real launch faster, and avoids wasting time on work that’s just going to be thrown out. 

With Bubble, ‌you can cut development timelines down from months or years to just weeks. This is true even if you have a super small team, or are doing the development work yourself. Plus: Bubble lets you use no-code to scale your product as you build and iterate, easily growing with you long past the first launch. 

Here’s some key things to keep in mind at this stage: 

• Launch before you're ready. You may never really feel ready, but to grow and iterate on your product, you need to launch it for real users. The faster you can launch and get real people using your product, the faster you can learn, grow, and continue the development process. 
• Make it imperfect. It’s so easy to get bogged down in trying to make your initial version of a new product or feature perfect before sending it out to customers. While there’s something to be said for quality, doing something imperfectly is usually better than never doing it at all. Launch it imperfectly and get ready to learn and iterate. 
• No-code makes development and launching so much faster. You can move quickly, building and launching your product in a matter of weeks or months to real users, and at a fraction of the cost of traditional development. Need more support? Turn to a Certified Bubble agency or developer to help you build your product exactly the way you envision it. 

6. Analysis 

Spoiler alert: The product development process never really ends. 

It’s more of a continuous loop that allows you to learn from what you’ve launched. Then you can incorporate your learnings and iterate for the next development phase. 

At this phase of development, you have a real product out in the world. Now you want to set up ongoing feedback loops of learning and analyzing, then iterating and developing, then launching again, and then back to the learning phase. 

Ongoing user testing and analysis is a key part of iterating and scaling your product. 

When you build on Bubble, you can see how users interact with your real product from day 1, making it so much easier to gather user feedback. Not only can you integrate user feedback tools directly into your product with Bubble plugins and APIs, but you can iterate directly from V1 of your product for faster development and innovation. 

To keep the product development process in motion, consider: 

• How you’ll integrate user testing into your workflow. User tests like A/B testing, “fake door” tests, heatmap testing, session recordings, card sorting, and more help you continue to learn what users love (and don’t) with your product and iterate to improve product-market fit . 
• What type of user testing you need at the current stage. Different types of testing result in different data and serve different goals. Understand what you need to test and when, and then find the right test to fit that purpose. 
• Create feedback loops to integrate user feedback into future development. Testing and learning doesn’t do much good if you don’t have a process to integrate it into future iterations and development. Find ways to put the customer feedback you’ve gathered to good work. 

Product development process examples

Traditionally, this product development process took months or even years. Building prototypes or MVPs alone is often a months-long project. 

But with newer technology, software companies are moving faster than ever. 

Just take Much as an example. Much founder Carmen Perez built her budgeting and debt coaching app single-handedly in just a few months using Bubble’s no-code tools. After estimating that it would take a small development team a full year to build the first version of her app, she discovered Bubble as an alternate solution. 

With no-code, she learned, built, and launched the beta version of Much in just two months, allowing her to get user feedback immediately. With Bubble, she could continue iterating and developing new features just as quickly, which has allowed her to scale fast and “supercharge” product development. 

Blubinder has a similar story. After raising funding for her app, Liesl Leach realized that it was going to take hundreds of thousands of dollars — and more than six months — for a development team to build even the first version of her product. 

She turned to Bubble for a faster, more cost-effective solution. With a single Bubble-Certified Developer on her team, Blubinder was live in just a few weeks, with plenty of time and runway ahead of them. Now, they’ve been able to scale and grow dramatically in the span of time where they still would have been developing if they had gone the traditional route.  

Start executing your product development plan for free

Today’s founders want and need to move fast. 

Speed up your product development process, not by skipping steps, but by working with a faster development tool. 

Bubble’s full-stack, no-code development tools allow you to speed up the development process from ideation to planning, building, launching, iterating and more. At every stage of the process, Bubble is here to make your product life cycle more streamlined and effortless. 

When you’re ready to execute your product development plan, move fast, and scale quickly, start with Bubble. 

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5 ways to become a product manager when making a career change

Product managers play a crucial role in software and product development. They enforce collaboration and cohesion between engineering and design teams, keep the customer’s needs at the forefront of progress, and act as the spokesperson for decision making and product vision. Without them, organizations risk silos emerging, systems collapsing, and perhaps most importantly, creating products and services that don’t appeal to their target audience.

Beyond commanding an impressive salary— Glassdoor , for example, currently lists the income range for a product manager in the United States between $121,000 and $204,000 a year—the job offers ample opportunities to lead, innovate, and get involved in revolutionary tech.

UNC Kenan-Flagler’s top-ranked online MBA

If that sounds exciting to you, here’s how to break into product management—with or without previous experience.

1. Identify your transferable skills

Like many types of career pivots, the switch to product management doesn’t require starting from scratch. In fact, your unique background and expertise can be an asset for tech teams.

“When I was a fundraiser, I was the person that was looking at ZIP codes, seeing which of them best performed,” says Tami Reiss , a coach for product managers who’s worked in the field of product management for almost 20 years. “I was the one who was AB testing, calling scripts for cold calling to see how we could have a better conversion rate, and things like that. I didn’t know that was product management or related to product management, but it was.”

Another example of seemingly unrelated experience being relevant to product management is customer service. “You understand the customer, you understand their problems, you know how to advocate for the customer,” she adds.

Even roles completely out of left field come with transferable skills that appeal to hiring managers. Andrew Breen , a professor of technology product management at NYU Stern School of Business, loves to see anthropologists move into product management because they’re highly attuned to human behavior and how it can be influenced through products.

The point is, rather than scrap what you know, find ways to market it in your job search. Breen is a fan of the objective or summary statement at the top of your resume to draw recruiters to your sales pitch. “Tell me who you are and what you are,” he says. “Because that’s at least a good early leading indicator of, can you communicate effectively and convince me of something in two to three sentences?” 

Both Reiss and Breen also emphasized the importance of using action verbs on your resume to showcase not just what you did but the business impact you had.

Consider, too, how your management skills can be of value and also supercharge your climb up the product management ladder. “If you’re a head nurse of a ward, that’s management skills and project management skills that will be helpful for a group PM or a director of product,” Reiss says. “You might still have to start at the individual contributor level, but you don’t necessarily have to stay there for five years the way somebody fresh out of college would.”

2. Fill in skills gaps with courses, bootcamps, or certifications  

Of course, just because you bring diverse skills to the table doesn’t mean you can become a product manager without any training. While knowing how to code isn’t a requirement for many product management jobs, Reiss says you do have to be “technically literate,” which means you understand how technology is built, functions, and is used.

If you can’t afford the time and money to go back to school full-time for a program, bootcamps or online courses are great options for getting exposure to key skills and systems in product management, as well as building a portfolio to showcase to employers.

While an advanced degree in product management isn’t a prerequisite for the job for those who are making a significant career change, upskilling through a bootcamp or similar program helps. “Having one of these certifications is an objective way of saying, ‘I invested my time and energy in learning the core fundamentals of product management, which means I’m not starting at zero,’” Reiss says.

Reiss recommends exploring LinkedIn Learning or Cole Mercer ’s product management classes. Alternatively, you can check out Fortune’s list of best product management bootcamps for all types of learners.

3. Teach yourself with books or projects

Some people prefer to learn on their own to save on startup costs or dip their toes into product management before making a bigger investment. Both Breen and Reiss have seen aspiring product managers find success in this route, particularly if they start their own app or website. “Get yourself a side project,” Breen says. “It’s really important that you can go and act as the product manager on your own.”

And when you interview for jobs, Reiss adds, “It’s a way of showing that you’re really invested in this being your new career path.”

Books, too, can be a valuable resource. Breen and Reiss recommend checking out the following reads:

• Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value by Melissa Perri
• The Product Mindset: Succeed in the Digital Economy by Changing the Way Your Organization Thinks by David H. DeWolf and Jessica S. Hall
• Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice by Clayton M. Christensen, Karen Dillon, Taddy Hall, and David S. Duncan
• The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone
• Cracking the PM Interview: How to Land a Product Manager Job in Technology by Gayle Laakmann McDowell and Jackie Bavaro
• The work of Marty Cagan and The Product Guy

Self-teaching isn’t for everyone, and for some, it could be a time-suck or hindrance to their job search. Ultimately, Reiss says, “know how you learn best.”

4. Consider a rotational program or internship  

Some companies offer temporary gigs where beginner product managers can get real-world experience in the craft—and possibly a more permanent job if they perform well. The benefits go both ways: Through these training programs, organizations such as Walmart , Google , and Meta can mold their talent to best suit their needs and invest in future leaders. 

However, Reiss warns, expect to face a decent amount of competition for these positions.

5. Apply to adjacent roles

Landing a product management job isn’t the only way in, and waiting for one to fall into your lap may take a while. Reiss suggests instead getting your foot in the door with another tech or tech-related job and working your way toward an internal transfer.

For example, if you’re currently a nurse, apply to roles in healthcare tech where you can leverage your medical background to serve as a customer service representative or account manager. “If you’re already an employee, you can raise your hand and talk to your manager and say, ‘I’m interested in product management. Can I volunteer for certain additional work projects?’” Reiss says.

Once inside a company, build relationships with the product team as soon as possible to find mentors and advocates. “I’ve been lucky enough to do that for certain people, and they become fantastic product managers often because they’re really passionate about the craft,” Reiss says.

If you join a startup with limited budget or available hands, leaders might be grateful to have someone outside the team assist with product management. “A marketer might say, ‘Hey, we’re not doing a lot of customer interviews, that’s probably something we should do,” Breen says. “If you’re an engineer, it might be like, ‘Hey, we’re designing architectures, writing code, and everything, but the last couple things we’ve released, no one really liked them. No one really used them. So can I do some usability testing on our next UI?’”

Skills you’ll need to be a product manager

Product and software development is fast-paced and complex. For this reason, product managers need these skills:

• Comfort with ambiguity: Product managers need to be good at making decisions quickly and efficiently. “And if you are not good at making decisions when you don’t have all the information, that is also not going to make you a good product person,” Reiss says.
• Problem solving: Breen says analytical thinking is key for product managers to break down big problems into smaller pieces so they can more easily solve them—a skill many engineers already have experience in, he adds.
• Time and project management: Reiss says PMs who know what to focus on at any given time and can prioritize on a dime will succeed.
• Communication: Product managers are good listeners—to internal stakeholders and customers—as well as able to communicate their vision clearly and convincingly to various parties to get buy-in.
• Collaboration: PMs love and thrive in team environments—in other words, you can’t be a “lone cowboy,” as Reiss puts it: “As a product manager, you cannot do anything on your own and you cannot produce features and products without the help of lots of other people,” she says.

The takeaway  

To become a product manager, find ways to further hone and market the transferable skills in your career toolbelt while also getting training in the hard and soft skills needed to do the job—whether you take a course, sign up for a bootcamp or internship, or read books and blogs. 

Another option is to take on projects within your current company where you’re able to exercise your product management expertise, with the goal of setting yourself up for a new job down the line.

More than anything—be it natural ability, formal training, or a fancy certification—product management requires grit and dedication. “There’s a lot of pressure, stress, time you need to put in, things like that,” Breen says. “So if you don’t have that extra level of commitment, it’s going to be hard and frustrating.”

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