[chrisgoodrich]

Market research is imperative to success, but it may not always look like you'd expect. Note that I come from a B2B software product management background. Market research is a major part of my job, but I don't think I have ever called it market research.

Big companies often place a lot of value in more formalized research studies to drive corporate strategy. This is very top-down.

I prefer, and often drive, more lean research initiatives. Working in startups, there isn't budget or time for formalized research studies. Instead I have often used more scrappy methods of customer development to test ideas with prototypes.

A one hour conversation with 10 people in your target market will likely give you enough information to form a hypothesis about what problems people are willing to pay to have solved.

[tixocloud]

Thanks for the great insight and a really good point on the wording "market research". Would there be another specific term that you use to describe your task?

For your leaner research initiatives, do you ever leverage high-level customer or country profiles?

[chrisgoodrich]

Steve Blank calls it Customer Development in his book The Four Steps to the Epiphany. I highly recommend reading his book.