Market Research

I was discussing Agile development with a fantastic coach, Dave Hussman at DevJam , the other day.

Our conversation turned to the simple fact that if you focus all your attention on the act of building and delivering software and not on understanding if what you’re building will make you tons of money, well, Agile will just make sure you go out of business more quickly than you would have on waterfall.

To me, this means Product Managers, Product Owners, and lots of market research, something I wrote about recently here.

The form of market research that Dave suggested to me is much simpler and, from what he tells me, is quite effective: If you’re considering building a brand new product, or an add-on to an existing product, identify the keywords associated with it (what will you market on once you’ve built it?), set up a landing page, and buy the keywords. Then look at Google Analytics on the landing page and see what happens.

If you get lots of high quality traffic, that’s probably a good sign you should build it.

If you’re not getting much high quality traffic, that means you should probably change the keywords or reconsider building it.

This is especially ideally for expansion stage software companies, like the ones in our venture capital portfolio, since this method is fast and cheap.

I would recommend senior management teams apply this idea to their content marketing strategy as well, since creating great content can be resource intensive, and you may want to make sure there’s high demand for it first before you create it.