That Randy Brown

Market Segments and Feature Development

A while back, I wrote about tent poles and table stakes and how tent poles, over time, evolve into table stakes, and make entering into the market cumbersome at best. At the time, my general intuition about why this was the case was coarsely about competition and monopolizing markets.

Recently, I was reading about optimizing marketing channels to the application advantages based on a variety of factors[1]:

One of the things revealed in this article was a more fine-grained understanding of how adopting different features plays into market strategy. I'd heard of moving up and down market before, but the connection of these three ideas before helps understand how and why to prioritize or prune features, as well as how to safely pivot. From the article:

You can also start to use the natural advantages framework in your product growth strategy. Target acquisition channels by building features that target different advantages over time. This is what we mean when we say to build a product for distribution – it means that we’re fully considering how we’ll increase the viral potential of a product, whether it’s by adding native sharing flows in a collaborative B2B product, or creating social media export features to drive more traffic from social platforms.

That is to say that you can prioritize features that facilitate (or are currently facilitating competitors) success on a given distribution channel, and prune features that are geared toward a different distribution approach. This shift in features overtime can create a shift up or down market (from individuals to small groups, or groups to individuals) without a pivot in the overall product.

Footnotes #

  1. https://www.growthunhinged.com/p/user-acquisition-framework ↩︎