Product Management For Dummies

Chapter 6

Doing Your Homework: Evaluating Your Ideas

IN THIS CHAPTER

Checking out market research from a product management perspective

Completing competitive intelligence

Validating your ideas with customers

Taking the first steps in financial forecasting

For every idea that makes it to market, many others aren’t as worthy of pursuit as the one or two that you finally focus on. This chapter covers market research as it applies to product managers. For example, understanding what your competitors are doing — and not doing as well as they could — is important research as you find an opening for your product to be successful. Validating ideas is critical to avoiding the many possible pitfalls of customers not accepting your product. And some simple calculations can help you sell your idea into the company by showing that the product can be profitable. In fact, you’ll reuse these tools and techniques throughout your product’s life cycle as you need to make further validated decisions about product next steps.

Understanding the Importance of Market Research and Competitive Intelligence ...