PMScratchpad

  Most companies fail at growth not because they don’t understand customers — but because they try to serve too many different customers with one answer . Marketing Imperative 2 forces a hard, uncomfortable question: Which customers are we actually building for? And just as importantly: Which customers are we explicitly not building for? This is not a tactical exercise. It’s a strategic one. The Illusion of “The Market” In any B2B or B2C market, customers do not have uniform needs. Yet many teams talk about “the market” as if it were a single entity: What does the market want? What will the market pay for? How do we win the market? This framing is dangerously misleading. A single offer aimed at the overall market may delight some customers — but it will usually underserve many others . Marketing Imperative 2 starts by rejecting the idea of a monolithic market and replacing it with something more precise: Market segments = groups of customers with sim...

  The Hardest Truth I Learned as a Product Leader: Market Choice Comes First It took me a long time to internalize this, and I didn't learn it from a framework or a book. The hardest truth I've learned as a product leader is this: The most important decision isn't what you build. It's where you choose to play. I used to believe that strong execution could compensate for almost anything. That if the team moved fast, shipped well, and built high-quality features, things would work out. Over time, I learned that execution only amplifies the choice you've already made. If the market choice is wrong, great execution just helps you get to the wrong place faster. I Thought Product Was About Building. It's Really About Choosing. What finally clicked for me was realizing that every company is quietly running a portfolio of bets, whether it admits it or not. At any point in time, the organization is implicitly deciding: Which new markets deserve real investment (people, t...

AI feels like magic for PMs. Everyone can build now. You can prototype an idea, vibecode your way and have something live quickly. But that doesn't mean we've created value. When tools get democratized, output explodes. Value doesn't. This brings us to the actual job of the PM: create value for customers and the business. The focus, as always, should be building something that solves a problem, gets adopted, and makes money. As a PM, you still have to have insights on the market, customers, and other alternatives. Your imperatives continue to remain the same: 1) Determine and recommend which markets to address, 2) Market segmentation and targeting, 3) Set strategic direction and positioning, 4) Design the marketing offer (Product, Price, Distribution, Promotion, Service), 5) Secure support from other functions, 6) Monitor and control execution and performance. As a PM, we ought to use AI to sharpen our decisions, not replace them.   In the series, I want to cover the fi...