Imperative 1 : Determine which markets to address

 

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, time, attention, dollars)
• Which markets are no longer worth incremental effort
• Which businesses should be defended, even if they aren't exciting anymore
• And how uneven those investments should be

These are not roadmap questions. They are conviction questions.

Early in my career, I thought these decisions lived somewhere "above" product. Over time, I realized that while top management formally owns them, product leaders heavily influence how they get made, often without realizing it.

The Part of the Job No One Explicitly Teaches You

Another hard-earned lesson: the most important product work is outside the walls.

Someone in the company has to be explicitly focused outside the walls (watching how customers are changing, how workflows are shifting, and where new demand is forming before the metrics light up). Increasingly, that responsibility lands with product leaders.

And someone has to inject customer and market reality into strategic conversations that don't come labeled as "product": acquisitions, partnerships, platform bets, distribution changes. If product leaders aren't in those rooms, decisions still get made (just without the benefit of ground truth).

I learned that staying close only to the roadmap is comfortable, but dangerous. The real leverage is in shaping which bets even make sense.

The Example That Finally Made This Real for Me: Figma vs. Adobe

The Figma versus Adobe story made this lesson tangible.

For years, Adobe dominated design software. Photoshop and Illustrator were incredibly powerful tools, optimized for professional designers working primarily in desktop environments. Adobe wasn't asleep at the wheel. They had world-class talent, resources, and technology.

What Figma did differently wasn't about features. It was about commitment.

Figma made a clear, almost stubborn choice: optimize for real-time, cloud-based collaboration as the core design workflow. Not as an add-on. Not as a secondary mode. As the center of the product.

Once that choice was made, everything else followed naturally (browser-first architecture, multiplayer editing, effortless sharing, fast feedback loops). The product felt coherent because it was serving a very specific market exceptionally well.

Adobe, on the other hand, was managing a much broader portfolio of markets. Fully pivoting to a Figma-like model would have meant disrupting successful products, revenue streams, and long-standing user expectations. They could add collaboration, but they couldn't reorganize the company around it overnight.

That's when it clicked for me: this wasn't about speed or talent. It was about where each company was willing (and able) to place its biggest bet.

What I Wish I'd Understood Earlier

Most product failures I've seen weren't failures of execution.

They were failures of market choice.

Teams built the wrong thing extremely well. Roadmaps were crisp. Delivery was strong. But the underlying bet (who the product was really for and why) was never sharp enough.

The hardest part of being a product leader isn't prioritization. It's conviction. It's saying yes to a market before it's obvious, and saying no to others even when they look attractive.

That's the lesson I learned the slow way.

Choosing the market isn't just a strategy decision. It is the product decision.

Everything else comes after.

Up Next : Imperative 2 : Identify and Target Market Segments (sounds similar but is not the same as Imperative 1 more on it in the next entry).