New Digital product management - Market research and persona creation

The aim of the course is to help participants become more strategic Product Managers, who have a significant impact on the organisation and its future product portfolio.

The course focuses on the preparatory work part of the extensive toolbox of product managers: first of all, participants will get to know the market and their competitors in depth. The first step on the road to a successful product strategy is to know how to place your own product in this context.

Be it a start-up or a large company, many times a product manager will find himself in a situation where the targeted market segmentation model needs to be updated or even modified without access to comprehensive market research. The course provides the participant with a confident toolkit for this.

The persona template is an often overlooked tool that can help in such situations. The course will identify who the customers will be, what their pain points are and what they need. By looking at this, it is easier to see if the product concept is on the right track. During the course, participants will gain insights into building "buyer personas" optimised for the B2B (business to business) market.

At the end of the course, all the building blocks of business model design will be plotted on a summary canvas.

• For team leaders, project managers or IT project sponsors
• Company managers, project managers who buy IT development or services from agile companies
• Senior developers, operations or line managers working closely with IT software development teams
• Product manager or internal customer working closely with IT software development team
• IT software project managers and IT project portfolio managers
• Managers who will be working with an agile IT development team

Exploring the market

• How to analyse the market?
• What methods can be used to profile each segment of the market?
• How can each market segment be sized?
• What methods can you use to analyse customers?
• Toolkit for interviewing customers
• Using the Kano model to identify customer needs
• Comparative analysis of direct competitors, based on market shares and trends
• Researching competitors' strategy and go-to-market strategy
• Tips for continuous monitoring of competitors

B2B buyer persona

• What are the problems of not having a developed buyer persona?
• What is a persona?
• Examples of good personas
• How can you recognise when your personas are not good?

How to get started?

• Pinpoint your business and marketing goals
• Map your market and needs
• Involve people in the right roles

What else do you need?

• Demographics, or who are they?
• Find out in depth about the companies they work for, what do they have in common?
• Psychology, or how do they behave? Understand them
• Examples for each step

How to use it?

• Check the correctness of the persona, you'll need a few reviews
• How to use it in product development?
• How to use it in your go-to-market strategy?

Creating a Business Model Canvas

• Product positioning and communication
• Defining a value proposition
• Identify customer/client segments based on previous research
• Identify channels to reach customers
• Maintaining contact with customers
• Defining revenue streams
• Description of key activities
• Summary of key resources
• Identify key partners
• Consolidation of expenditure structure

To successfully and efficiently complete the course, you need to have a basic knowledge of technology and business. For more experienced Product Managers, we recommend that you complete our Digital Product Management - Getting Started training prior to the course.