There are a few like Henry Ford and Steve Jobs who, instead of seeking out what the market wanted, successfully innovated and changed our lives (Ford's famous statement 'If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses' is a testament to this). For most of us, however, not aligning our products and strategy to what the market is telling us would be a recipe for disaster.

CB Insights found that 42% of startups fail due to lack of market demand1. This is not a unique challenge for startups alone, in fact Clayton Christensen,a Harvard Business School professor, estimates that 95% of new products fail2! Other sources state much lower failure rates of 40% (and no, I am not sure if their definitions of failure are equivalent).

In either case, the challenge is obvious - you need to make sure you have a good understanding of what your customer needs and how to successfully navigate large trends in the near future, otherwise you risk wasting lots of time, money and cannot remain competitive.

So how do you even start to consider the impact of all of these factors?

Key Considerations for your Strategy and Roadmap

While the actual strategy and product leadership required for different markets can vary significantly, the mechanics of approaching the critical factors do not. Using a structured approach can help those responsible for strategy make the right calls. At a minimum, five key considerations should be taken into account: Macroeconomic events, technology trends, industry trends, customer pain points and end-user needs.

1. Macroeconomic Events

Macroeconomic trends—such as conflicts, economic downturns, inflation, new tariff policies or shifts in global trade—can have a significant impact on your customer's behavior, purchasing power, and overall demand. It can change the dynamics of your own supply chain, eroding your profit margin or making it challenging to deliver your product altogether. Your product strategy needs to at a minimum predict what could unfold in the coming years and consider ways to mitigate the negative effects, and ride the wave of the positive effects. Understanding how these broad economic forces affect your customers, partners, competitors and your supply chain allows you to make data-driven decisions and maintain resilience during unpredictable times.

2. Technology Trends

The rapid evolution of technology presents both challenges and opportunities for product development. Staying on top of emerging technologies—like AI/ML, autonomy, edge processing, blockchain, or automation—can not only help improve or enhance your product line, but can lead to new ways to address customer pain points by combining these in clever new ways to solve a problem. Considering how new technology can be leveraged and incorporated into your product roadmap also provides insight into what your direct competitors may be planning and ensures your offering doesn’t become outdated.

3. Industry-Specific Trends

Every industry is shaped by unique trends, regulations, and shifts. These can be trends formed by how macroeconomic events and technology trends specifically impact a particular industry or they can be completely decoupled, driven by new regulations and compliance standards, consolidation or other effects internal to the industry. These trends become are typically more relevant to your strategy and roadmap, particularly in a shorter time frame, and should be weighed heavier when formulating your product strategy over the next few years. By anticipating industry changes, you ensure your product stays relevant and can seize new growth opportunities before competitors.

4. Customer Concerns

We consider the customer here to be the entity or person who is actually signing the check to purchase your goods or services, not necessarily the end user. Customer concerns refer to anything that is inhibiting a customer from purchasing your product. Are you improving whatever aspect they are purchasing your product for? Are you a new possible brand or supplier and there are switching costs or concerns about going with a new brand/supplier? Is there an ROI that is expected from this purchase and what is that?

On top of this come concerns about factors like data privacy, sustainability, and ethical practices. Your product strategy must address these concerns head-on by aligning with customer expectations for transparency, security, and responsible business practices. Ignoring customer concerns can hurt your brand reputation and undermine trust, so continuously assess and incorporate customer feedback to stay in tune with their needs and values.

5. End User Needs

We prefer to split end user needs from the concerns of the actual purchaser. Sometimes these are one and the same entity and sometimes they are not, but a concerted effort to view them individually helps to uncover the nuances and differences between them.

While ensuring your product strategy and roadmap have considered macroeconomic factors and trends is important for the long term, it’s the end users who will ultimately determine your product’s success. If you don't meet their needs in terms of performance and quality, they simply won't buy from you. Even if they are not the purchaser, they will likely influence that entity, so being spot on with understanding what the end user needs is critical. Listening closely to their feedback, understanding their pain points, and adapting your product to meet their evolving needs is crucial. A roadmap that reflects end-user requirements ensures that the product is not only useful but also delivers real value, driving adoption and long-term loyalty.

Start Big, End Small

Successfully defining the factors for these 5 considerations requires domain knowledge and takes time to properly lay out, but then what? How do we properly weigh these different factors? How do we translate them into the requirements we need? One approach is to 'start big, end small'. This approach means we start with the macroeconomic events and work our way all the way down to user needs. The caveat is to make sure that we treat each of these individually and properly weigh their influence.

When we look at the macroeconomic events we typically like to consider 3-5 key events or drivers on a national or global scale. At the time of this writing, the war in Ukraine is still ongoing and the prolific use of drones has made the entire world pay attention. Combining that with political tensions globally, and defense contractors may consider having a drone strategy as part of their 5-10 year guidance. Macroeconomic events should generally be considered as guidance for longer term strategies and roadmaps that our product roadmaps need to fulfill.

Both technology trends and industry-specific trends should be considered next. These could be linked to macroeconomic trends or very specific, such as ongoing consolidation or the use of AI for an industry-specific application. These trends may influence decisions over the next 1-3 years or be much longer term. Their influence should be weighted higher than the macroeconomic trends.

Both the customer and end-user, providing they are separate entities, are critical for immediate and near-term planning in particular. These are the people you have to convince to buy your product, love it and hopefully buy more. They are the most important aspects to consider and therefore deserve the heaviest influence. Gartner emphasizes that aligning roadmaps with customer insights improves product success rates by 35%3.

The good thing about the 'start big, end small' approach is that you can iterate this flow and make sure that you have aligned your short and long term roadmaps to the overall strategy. If there are any contradictions, such as between what end users want and what industry trends are, this needs to be carefully analyzed.

Conclusion

Ensuring your product roadmap aligns with market demands is crucial for staying competitive, effectively deploying capital and successfully delivering sustainable growth. Leveraging a 'start big, end small' approach to thinking through major influencing factors including macroeconomic events, technology and industry trends, customer concerns and end user needs provides a structured thought process. Aligning your product roadmap to consider these factors is the first step to setting your organization up for success.

    1    https://www.cbinsights.com/research/startup-failure-reasons

    2    https://hbr.org/2011/04/why-most-product-launches-fail#

    3    https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom