Assessing Product Opportunities
Recently I’ve written about reinventing the product spec, and the reasons to move from a heavy-weight PRD to a light-weight high-fidelity prototype as the basis for your product spec. But where do these ideas come from, and how do you decide if you even want to build a product in the first place?
Opportunities for new products exist all around us, in every market, even mature markets. This is because what is possible is always changing. New technologies are constantly emerging, new people with new talents join your company, and competitors come and go. The product manager must be able to quickly evaluate opportunities to decide which are promising and which are not, and for the ones that look appealing, which ones should be pursued, which are best left for others, and which ideas are not yet ready for productization.
In many companies, it just comes down from above that we really need to do this product. In other companies, the marketing organization determines what products are needed.
