You should build what the customer needs, right? Simple, just determine who they are and what they need. Except both of those elements change, over time and across different parts of the market.
There’s a problem from all my companies ever… a little ditty we call Crossing The Chasm. After whatever time it takes to incubate tech and team, you achieve product market fit by building for your first wave of customers, who are experts and early adopters and technologists. They’re looking for a tool that doesn’t exist to solve a problem they really have, and they know that because they’ve tried nearly everything in the market. They’re so desperate for a solution that they’ll risk their job to buy and support your half-baked stuff. Notably… this isn’t the place to use Empowered Product Management theory. At an enterprise startup trying to land a technology-driven solution, every customer is precious and “sales-led organization” is not a dirty term. If you can solve a problem and make a profit, or at least break even, everyone’s happy, let’s celebrate.
Then your second wave of customers comes along, and you’ve got to change your product to meet them. The second wave might be new people in the same companies along with new customers… your champion got promoted, or given the next impossible problem to solve. Yesterday’s reference is tomorrow’s churn if you don’t keep up. The second wave champion is picking you from a more crowded field, and suddenly cares about a lot of other stuff beyond the core problem. Compliance with known and unknown standards, RBAC (role based access control), audit-ability and reporting, design, internationalization and localization, quality documentation. They want more explanation and ease-of-use.. This is also where your product starts to appear in analyst quadrants, probably under Honorable Mention or Challenger or something.
That’s a tough transition, but not without rewards. Surfing the wave of the mainstream market is exciting. It’s also where the product management training and toolset start to come into play, because you’re able to talk with a built-in set of prospects every time that you come up with an idea. Throw-away MVPs? Yeah baby! Statistically valid A/B testing? Cool! Engineering-led culture? Maybe it’s time, because if you look under the hood of how you got to here… there’s a lot of sin. Technical debt and quality shortfall accrue at a more rapid rate while finding product market fit.
Growing from mainstream to a leader brings the next wave…and that third wave doesn’t care at all. At this point the analysts are recommending your solution, you’re putting billboards in airports and along highways, you’ve attracted startup competitors that are promising to solve the problems you’ve decided to defer. There’s a new type of customer role becoming more dominant now: people who don’t have time for the product. “Just identify problems and solve ’em without bugging me”. This type of customer is looking for automation, integration, and low-cost services, and grudgingly falls back to doing the hands-on work that your first wave customer loved to do. A product that can guide new users to doing the job well is the star at this stage. It’s also a point at which a product manager’s ability to hear unstated pains and translate spoken wants to unspoken needs becomes a superpower, because your customer base contains opposing forces that need to be balanced.
Always meet the actual customer where they are today, and don’t be surprised if that drives changes in your own company.
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