How can you use market research to identify potential product roadblocks?

1 Product roadblocks

Product roadblocks are any factors that prevent your product from reaching its full potential in the market. They can be internal, such as technical limitations, resource constraints, or team conflicts, or external, such as competitive threats, regulatory changes, or customer feedback. Product roadblocks can affect your product development, launch, growth, and retention stages, and can have serious consequences for your return on investment.

2 Market research methods

Market research is the process of gathering and analyzing data about your target market, customers, competitors, and industry trends. Depending on your goals, budget, and timeline, there are many methods you can use to identify product roadblocks. Surveys are online or offline questionnaires that ask customers or potential customers about their needs and preferences. Interviews are one-on-one conversations that explore customer pain points, motivations, and expectations. Focus groups are moderated discussions with a small group of customers or potential customers to generate insights and ideas. Observation involves watching how customers or potential customers use your product in their natural environment. Lastly, experiments test different versions of your product or its elements to measure their impact on customer behavior and outcomes.

3 Product development roadblocks

Product development roadblocks can hinder your ability to create a product that meets customer needs and delivers value. Market research can help you identify and avoid these roadblocks, such as building the wrong product due to assumptions without validation, building the product wrong without usability or design testing, and building the product too late by spending too much time perfecting it. To prevent these issues, use market research to conduct customer discovery and validation, test the product's usability, functionality, and design with customers, and validate the minimum viable product (MVP). Doing so will ensure that you have a product that works well, looks good, and is easy to use.

5 Product growth roadblocks

Product growth roadblocks can limit a product's ability to acquire, retain, and monetize customers. Market research can help identify and avoid these roadblocks, such as having a low customer acquisition rate, a high customer churn rate, or a low customer lifetime value. To avoid a low customer acquisition rate, you should optimize your customer acquisition funnel by improving product awareness, consideration, conversion, and activation rates. For a high customer churn rate, you should measure and improve customer retention by increasing product usage, engagement, value, and satisfaction rates. To increase the customer lifetime value, you should calculate and maximize product revenue, retention, and referral rates.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?