Looking Outward

This article is the second in a series about building world-class product management teams. The first installment about becoming a more customer-oriented organization can be found here.

A defining characteristic of strong product managers is a really strong antenna for what happens outside their walls. They are obsessed with customers and their needs, competitors and their actions, and the evolution of the overall market. In our team, we ask product managers to hone their ‘market orientation’ antenna as part of our overall talent management framework.

Understanding the market and competitive dynamics

Strong product managers have a deep and sophisticated understanding of the players in their current market, as well as adjacent markets that may serve as supplements or complements for their product. They go beyond the superficial knowledge of who the players are and develop deeper insight into why customers choose alternatives and how that might evolve in the future.

Teams sharpen this understanding through the obvious means (e.g., attending conferences, reading industry newsletters, commissioning market research) but also some ways that may not be immediately obvious, like interviewing their customer’s customer, running war-games, conducting foresight exercises, and hiring people from adjacent industries to bring an outside perspective.

In our team, product managers have to build a deeper understanding of competitors, trends, and policy in online K-12 learning in addition to adjacent sectors like online higher education, traditional K-12 education, and education technology, more broadly. The forces that affect all of those sectors are important predictors of what our customers will need and what our competitors are likely to do next.

Insight-driven decision making

One of the greatest joys of being a product manager is being at the nexus of a lot of different parts of the company — sales, marketing, finance, engineering, etc. — and being accountable for making really critical decisions about the product (e.g., overall value proposition, feature prioritization, user experience improvements).

A finely-tuned market-oriented antenna comes in handy to help product managers make the right decision every time. If a PM has true empathy for the customer and a sophisticated understanding of the market, then those decisions will lead the team down the right path on their product roadmap.

In a post-COVID-19 world, our teams are thinking seriously about how the field of online learning will evolve and particularly how our customers’ needs will change. When you pair that with anticipation of competitor actions, we start to have a roadmap for our strategic priorities.

Building market orientation

Many times, for critical decisions, we will ask our product managers what insights from the market led them to make the decision. Strong PMs will have the information at their fingertips and be able to point to customer data, market research, or competitor statements that informed their recommendations. The more we ask the question, the more PMs start to anticipate it.

There are lots of ways to build an external orientation, but the simplest is to (figuratively) get out of the building. Talk to customers. Talk to experts. Meet your competitors. Attend conferences.

Time spent outside the building is never wasted for product managers. The best ones spend 25–30% of their time looking outward, rather than inward. In the midst of internal meetings, sprint planning, or roadmapping, it can be hard to find the time, but the payoff is a product that works better for customers and wins in the market.