Kill Your Market Research

One of the things I have found this last week is that leaders are not sure where and how to get information to feed their product development processes. Traditional market research via surveys, focus groups and brand studies are wasted effort for product development. Why?  1) They were created for a different, slow moving packaged goods industry a long time ago  2) They are not suited to feed today’s iterative dev models (Agile and Lean)  3) They were created before Big Data – why ask when you can observe?  What IS the right kind of research? Well, at the beginning of the requirements/stories, you need customer conversations and competitive analysis specifically geared to unearth needs that users struggle to express. Then as you go, align split-testing to customer conversations that feed iterative sprints. This is the essence of customer-focused product development. #productdevelopment #Rigor #killyourmarketresearch