Market Research

Researching the market entails a systematic investigation into customer needs, preferences, behaviours, and trends to inform the ecosystem strategy. This process involves both high-level market research and direct engagement with customers through interviews, ensuring a comprehensive understanding of the market and its participants.

Purpose

The purpose of market research is to ground the ecosystem strategy and objectives in actual customer needs and market demands, thereby increasing the likelihood of success. It helps to align product features with customer expectations, identify new market opportunities, and inform strategic decision-making.

• Inform Ecosystem Strategy: Insights from research help guide strategic decisions and ensure the ecosystem strategy aligns with customer needs.
• Prioritise Teams: Research helps identify areas of highest customer value, informing the funding prioritisation of products, internal products and enabling teams.
• Validate Assumptions: Research helps validate or challenge assumptions about customer needs and behaviours.

Context

Industry Context

Most products fail to deliver the expected customer value because people make assumptions about what customers want without actually validating their assumptions. This leads to wasted time and resources building features that customers don't need or want. By conducting customer research, Ecosystem Teams can ensure that their suite of products are aligned with customer needs and preferences, increasing the likelihood of success.

ZeroBlockers Context

Ecosystem teams are responsible for the overall ecosystem performance. But they are not the ones building the products. In order to influence the product teams, they need to have a deep understanding of the market and customer needs. By conducting market research, Ecosystem Teams can provide valuable insights to the product teams, helping them make informed decisions about what to build and how to prioritise their work.

Methods

Anti-patterns

• Limited Research Scope: Focusing solely on internal data or neglecting to gather external customer insights.
• Assumption-Driven Development: Making decisions based on assumptions about customer needs without validating them through research.
• Siloed Research Efforts: Failing to share customer insights across teams, leading to disjointed strategies and duplicated efforts.