Vipin Makhija

We’ve done TAM based on market research, our target market, population, demographics, %ages, etc. making assumptions based on how much of the addressable market you want to capture, which helps with financial projections and expected growth in your story, pitch deck. Many investors want to see the research done, your analytical thinking and explanation as to why and having these assumptions, estimates documented. Instead of a number out your you know what. This project is at that stage of getting your feet wet and visually seeing whats out there as a TAM and coming to an agreement with the logical way of thinking it all through and that things make sense on paper in number and visually to a 5 year old and grandma in a story, pitch deck. This project is at the stage of validating that this is a viable product, solution and there is an opportunity, need.

The algorithm, solution that will be what sells this, if and how it progresses based on what is all gathered after the upcoming exercises then yes, that will be the data that people will salivate over to make this attractive to investors and a bigger pool of users for traction, sales, potential strategic partners. Will this be IP? An API? Something that can be white labeled? This may pivot, may wound up reverse engineering, etc. Would love to see what can be put out here for demo so that we can see, as well as a beta test for users. I like the forward thinking.

Nice drafted post, Vipin.

TAM, in its most nascent form, is an estimate. And I have seen a general tendency among product owners to over-estimate this item. TAM is often the foundation for many revenue projections, so there is incentive in keeping it high. This tendency is so widespread among presenters (seeking funding) that I have seen an almost cynical rejection from (investment) evaluators. The evaluators usually begin their analysis by ripping apart the TAM figures.

However, good product owners take it as an opportunity. If TAM calculations are done properly and logically, then it can be an instant trust-binder with the evaluator.

Professionally done TAM analysis is a great indicator of product owner’s diligence (in my opinion).

@k4dwin Great points Kim. I’ve seen it done, understood, and calculated so incorrectly so many times. There may not be ONE right way to make this projection, but as you point out, it is the analysis and logical thinking behind it that is more crucial.

@vinayvd Great to hear from you Vinay. You hit the bull’s eye with the comment about the rejection from the investors. So easy to get carried away with bloated numbers.

Nice article. If we built IT, they will come — mantra has proven wrong for many startups, ideas and a fail. Lots of lost time, sunk costs, large expenses into making something ‘cool, shiny and new’ people ultimately won’t use. Have to think about processes and end goals (psyche, behavior, trends, research, target market, ideal customer, business model, etc.). Create things that solve a pain point, bring an opportunity – is something people would want to use and benefit them. Anytime you can make a process, situation easier, based off what can be done as a favorable outcome, can lead to success. We, as users of many things, don’t buy or use things without doing research, seeing how something meets our needs or makes our lives better (in personal and professional lives). (Most) People like efficiency, results, and more importantly, an engaging and customized user experience. This can happen with lead gen.

JTBD is powerful in that it focuses on the user (the essence of user-centered design) rather than the capability of the seller. The user doesn’t know what will solve their problem and neither does the team trying to find a solution. There is value in solving pain-points for users rather than showing off the latest shiny-app that you created using a recently developed framework. JTBD can help discover these pain-points – which can act as input for brainstorming solutions.

Well written article Vipin. Completely agree with the benefits of JTBD framework.

Very well written article Vipin as usual. opens with a hook with facts & figures & proves the point of knowing the users is vital. Though you are covering needs & wants, ‘Jobs To Be Done’ could also have been included explicitly in the template. Best example of JTBD was in your prev blog post abut McD innovating on milkshakes based on JTBD.

This article comes at an interesting time, Vipin – especially when there is a new school of thought being floated in the UX community about the ineffectiveness of personas. The premise of that argument is that the ‘why’ behind creating a persona is not understood by stakeholders. It just becomes an exercise/compliance check to create a persona with oftentimes irrelevant information like ‘Hobbies’ and ‘Proficiency with computers’ (although these may be relevant for some use cases) – which people blindly use as its part of a template.

When we created personas for our Capstone project, the next day onwards, in all the project meetings we used to refer to the name of the persona to make our point – like “Jack would love this feature because it caters to his need for faster checkout” OR “Jane may find this helpful too considering her need for assistance during checkout”. As a team, we truly related to the persona and I found it helpful.

Very helpful article! Recently I came across some personas definition very narrowed down and more oriented to be built as a real person rather than focusing on the interesting habits of interest for the purpose of the product development or improvement.

More often I hear talking about a specific category of personas, “buyers” personas, mainly developed by marketing people. Is there an actual difference or just another way to name personas?

Perhaps you can try a focus group, small roundtable of agents. Ask a few targeted questions and offer a gift card or giveaway or something.

Nice thoughts on quant survey. Just wanted to know how it should be used in product research if it is not the sole determinant

If you’re starting out to build your first survey – then my recommendation will be to test it with a few people to see the ‘quality’ of your questions. The responses to your survey questions will force you to rethink your questions to get the data you need. Qualtrics provides a tool that allows you to insert dummy data into your form which can help you do a quick analysis of your questions.

What I’ve also found is that it’s easy to blur the lines between wanting qualitative information from a quantitative survey – the point of the survey is to see ‘how many people said X instead of Y’ and not to get individual subjective comments from all survey respondents.

I’ve also found it useful to build multiple hypotheses based on the qualitative research that you want to validate in the survey.

Good points overall and well-structured @vipinmakhijaipin. The link to test statistical significance was really cool. Thanks!

The definition of a quantitive research gave me an important learning point: defining questions that allow to collect additional insight or trends rather than validate the data and information available with the market research already available.
I am willing to see how to actually handle with the data received, how to cross them with the other data available for the following step of the process