post

Footer About

Footer Contribute

Footer Get Involved

Footer Links

Mind the Product

Product Management

WhatsApp runs ads and Amazon sees a GenAI future: this week’s news roundup

Podcast

How to build a product-led operating model that actually sticks – Jen Swanson

B2B product management

Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML)

Building Product Teams

Business Strategy

Data Driven Product Management

Digital Transformation

Diversity and Inclusion

Minimum Viable Product

OKRs

Prioritisation

Product Design

Product Research

Product Development Process

Product Ethics

Product Discovery

Product Leadership

Product Management Career

Product Strategy

Stakeholder Management

🌎 <a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/world-product-day/" style="color:#FFFFFF;text-decoration:underline;">Happy World Product Day!</a> Be sure to celebrate product, yourself, and your peers today! 🎉

Why is hiring product managers so hard?

What burnout taught me: Lessons from product managers

Meet the new AI CEO: Klarna’s bold customer feedback loop bet

What I learned from building products in Africa

What does it take to build world class products today? Ezinne & Oji Udezue (Co-Authors at ProductMind, ex-CPOs of Calendly, Typeform & WP Engine)

Product leader based in Los Angeles, California. Founder of Productfolio.com, PMA.LA, and. Author of the book, The Smarter Startup (Pearson).

Neal Cabage

<a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/product_opportunity.jpg"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-3196 alignright" alt="product_opportunity" src="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/product_opportunity-300x225.jpg" width="300" height="225" srcset="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/product_opportunity-300x225.jpg 300w, https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/product_opportunity-768x576.jpg 768w, https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/product_opportunity.jpg 1024w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /></a>How do you know whether a product idea is going to succeed if you build it and take it to market?  If you’ve ever been part of a startup, or if your organization has launched a new line of products, you know how precarious the effort can be.
Some would advocate using the &#8216;Lean&#8217; method to arrive at a product market fit.  The basic premise is to seek input from customers early in the process to ensure you are building a product people actually want. This allows you to challenge your assumptions and go see for yourself what the problems are you purport to solve.
While there is a lot of validity to this approach if you have identified a viable market and are merely seeking product-market fit, it may not be the best tool for discovering market opportunity. Lean is a great approach to optimization, but it does not help you determine risks or propensity for success when evaluating a brand new product or market concept.
One of the biggest challenges faced with new product innovation is the lack of heuristic models or best practices for discovering product opportunity. This is partly because the market is dynamic and it is difficult to pin down anything truly actionable before the opportunity has changed. But it is also because no heuristic models (set of best practices) has really been defined.
That is the challenge that led to the creation of the &#8216;product opportunity evaluation matrix&#8217; or POEM framework.  It is a conceptual framework that accounts for fundamental market dynamics in order to help startup entrepreneurs and product managers to think through the conditions of the market, to determine if an idea is likely to be successful or not.  It can be used to identify strengths and weaknesses for an individual idea or to compare overall strength of several ideas to determine which opportunities are most likely to bring success.  By taking this approach, one can take a more informed approach to determining whether to build a new product in the first place, rather than building it, hoping customers show up, and iterating and &#8216;pivoting&#8217; repeatedly until they do.
The framework is comprised of five forces that drive market opportunity:
<ul>
<li>Customer</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Product</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Timing</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Competition</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Finance</li>
</ul>
Five generally accepted truths are stated for each of the five forces and the practitioner is asked to grade their product concept (A-F) for each of the five truisms.  An averaged score is then derived for each of the five forces.  By going through this exercise, the practitioner is required to account for all of the significant dynamics that may determine the propensity of a product to succeed in the market.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="735" height="360" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-3186" style="border: 0px;" alt="poem-matrix" src="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/poem-matrix1.png" srcset="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/poem-matrix1.png 735w, https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/poem-matrix1-300x146.png 300w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 735px) 100vw, 735px" />
To illustrate how this is useful, consider the metaphor of how cell phone service providers detect location of a device.  Each cell tower can detect an approximate distance of a cellular device from the tower, but can only determine a radius around the tower. Adding a second toward provides directionality and by the time you add a third, you have the basis by which to triangulate a location with a fair degree of confidence.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-3171" style="border: 0px;" alt="poem-triangulation" src="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/poem-triangulation.png" width="268" height="199" align="right" srcset="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/poem-triangulation.png 352w, https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/poem-triangulation-300x223.png 300w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 268px) 100vw, 268px" />
It is a similar concept in that opportunities in a dynamic market are always moving and changing, and you need a few points from which to reaffirm where opportunities might currently be.  Doing a reasonable evaluation of externally facing factors such as customer, timing and competition will tell you where opportunities are.  And by looking at internally determined considerations such as what product you are proposing and your financial means to provide this product to the market (at this time in the maturity cycle), will give you a much stronger understanding of where the best opportunities are for you or your company to pursue.
The purpose and application of the POEM framework is similar to other open source conceptual frameworks such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWOT_analysis" target="_blank">SWOT </a>and The Business Model Canvas.  In the case of SWOT the practitioner loosely define the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats they face in their current market, relative to their competition. This is helpful for strategic planning within an organization. Alexander Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas, meanwhile, has become a popular tool for defining key elements of a business such as partners customer segments, and applicable channels.  With POEM, the purpose is similar, but its application is to provide structure and guidance to the discovery of new product opportunities in the market.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-3169" style="border: 0px;" alt="poem-infographic" src="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/poem-infographic.jpg" width="627" height="807" srcset="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/poem-infographic.jpg 627w, https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/poem-infographic-233x300.jpg 233w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 627px) 100vw, 627px" />
The POEM Framework is a free-to-use open source resource that has been published under the Creative Commons license.  To learn more, please visit <a title="POEM Framework for Product Market Discovery" href="http://PoemFramework.org" target="_blank">POEMFramework.org</a>.  There you will find a detailed explanation of each of the criteria and how to use them. You can also take an interactive quiz for an easy and fun way to try applying the framework for the first time.

core/freeform

Guest Post

Building Consumer-Grade Experiences for the Enterprise By Ciara Peter

What Makes a Great Product Manager by Graham Siener

The GIST Framework by Itamar Gilad

Scaling the Product and the Team by Rachael Shah

Decisions, Debt, and Other Dilemmas by Janna Bastow

Hacking Your Product Career by Gibson Biddle

How Medicine and Research Translates to Patients by Shree Patel

The Future of Product Management by Richard Harrison

Data Science and Digital Businesses by Ali Gulez

You Need A Product Strategy by Sam Odio

A Framework For Evaluating Market Opportunity

ProductTank Ljubljana

ProductTank Valencia

ProductTank Tbilisi

ProductTank Luxembourg

Product Management Foundations BST

Product Management Foundations ET

ProductTank Amsterdam

ProductTank Edinburgh

ProductTank Casablanca

ProductTank Des Moines

ProductTank Auckland

ProductTank Birmingham

ProductTank London

ProductTank Philadelphia

ProductTank Washington

ProductTank Reston

ProductTank Sydney

ProductTank Dubai

ProductTank Prague

ProductTank Reading

ProductTank Jacksonville

ProductTank Raleigh

ProductTank Rio de Janeiro

ProductTank Buenos Aires

ProductTank Atlanta

ProductTank Orlando

ProductTank Los Angeles

ProductTank Palo Alto

ProductTank Pune

ProductTank Bielefeld

ProductTank Köln

Communication & Alignment BST

Communication & Alignment ET

ProductTank Vilnius

ProductTank Paris

ProductTank Dallas

ProductTank Frankfurt

ProductTank Milton Keynes

ProductTank Tokyo

ProductTank Norwich

ProductTank Pittsburgh

ProductTank Hamburg

ProductTank Leeds

ProductTank Manchester

ProductTank Bristol

ProductTank Exeter

ProductTank Würzburg

ProductTank Columbus

ProductTank Malmö

ProductTank Chicago

A Framework For Evaluating Market Opportunity

Neal Cabage

Read more