The Many Hats of a Technical Program Manager - The Researcher

This one is a role I never thought I’d get into but over the past few years it has become part of my daily life. The researcher is akin to an oracle insomuch that they attempt to shed light on what is important now while simultaneously illuminating the future. How many times have you seen someone start a company with a great idea, build a product or service, take it to market, only to find themselves selling to an empty room. They failed to do their research. If they had, they would know that ideas don’t sell, painkillers do. It doesn’t mean that their idea wasn’t a good one. Maybe it was just a bit off. Maybe they were selling to the wrong audience. Maybe the pain wasn’t great enough, or customers found a way to alleviate the pain it at a lower price point. Sometimes they run out of money because they misjudged the funding required for their solution. All of these situations can be avoided with the proper amount of research up front. One of my first acts when I am presented with an idea for a product or service is to try and kill it. I use research to do that.

This is part 2 of a series based on the various hats a TPM will wear.

You can read part 1 here: The Many Hats of a Technical Program Manager - The Engineer (drjoeshepherd.com)

The Hat

The researcher isn’t someone who buries themselves in academic papers pouring over theoretical frameworks and models of some far off maybe. I like to think of them as someone who is heads down trying to make sense of all the chaos in a way that helps inform the direction the product or solution should take. They often answer the question “where should we be heading?” but they first answer the more important question which is “should we even do this?”. Another big question that comes up a lot from customers is: “what are others like me doing?”. The ability to answer this from, not only a fresh set of eyes, but a multi-industry/multi-vertical, perspective adds a lot of value. Helping our customers see around corners and avoid land mines is a big part of what they pay us for. The below list of functions is not exhaustive, but they shed light on a few of the more critical things the researcher does.

Customer Signals

Will anyone buy my idea? How do I know for sure? These are two of the scariest questions anyone who has ever thought about bringing an idea to market has ever had. Hopefully your customers have asked these questions. Most do but most don’t really answer them. They brush over them just like most startup founders with big ideas do. As an agent of your customer, you need to be asking these questions as well regardless of what your customer tells you. I’ve captured my entire process for doing this in my book, What’s my Idea Worth?. You can download it for free here: What's My Idea Worth?

Note that this is just as important for internal projects. Just because your customer may not be selling to outside parties doesn’t mean we don’t have to worry about adoption. In this case, customer usage signals are what we are looking for. They carry just as much weight but are often more difficult to measure.

A customer signal can be any number of events across many categories. The more customer events you have across these categories from a single customer the better. These include things like filling out a form, repeatedly visiting your website, interacting with social media, comparing processes or features, reading reviews and hopefully requesting a quote. The point is understanding these buying signals will let you know if you just have a cute idea or a pain killing product.

Market Research

Market research is the act of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting information about the customer group you are planning to sell too. This could be an industry, a subsection of an industry, it could be a geographic area, and it could be based on behaviors or beliefs. They key here is to learn about your target market and the customers within it.

There are a number of ways to conduct market research, but I always like to start with the Internet and search engines. After all, they’re free. Now it’s common to want to go big with your market but be careful, your actual target market is usually much smaller than you think. That’s actually good thing in the early days. If I wanted to target defense industry vendors, I wouldn’t go after the entire market. I’d start by segmenting by say U.S. only. Then I’d refine that to look at a subsegment of that market. Let’s say those vendors who focus on space. Now I’d have names like Raytheon and SpaceX to some degree but those may be too big. It depends on what I am selling and how those vendors buy. Research would tell me that most defense vendors buy through a very competitive government procurement process that may be looking 1-2 years out. This means if I want to have an inkling of a chance, I need to hitch a ride with one of the procurement offers at one of these vendors who is working on an RFP. Better yet, maybe I need to target the role at the DOD who is just now considering the need and have them bake my solution into the requirements. All of this takes research to uncover.

Market Sizing

We’ve all watched Shark Tank and seen the entrepreneurs pitch their ideas. Every one of them make some sort of statement that goes something like this. “This is a hundred-billion-dollar market and if we can capture 1% of the customers, we will make blah blah blah”. Nothing says you don’t know your market like lazy math. Don’t even try this with guys like Mark Cuban.

When I built may last company ZenLeap, it would have been easy for me to size my market as the $400+B requiting and staffing market and run some calculation to try and impress some investor. Bad idea. I told investors about the billion-dollar market but I drilled down and showed them what that market was in Dallas where I was headquartered. Then I segmented it by technology recruiting because I have a network in the tech space. Lastly, I focused only on very hard to fill role like data science and machine learning because I could command high commissions. This final number ended up being something in the multiple millions a year. Not as sexy as the $400+B but once I figure out how to win in Dallas then I could scale that to Houston and Austin. After that it becomes a simple equation. How much does it cost to launch in a given city and how much funding is needed until that city is profitable. Then simply add water and watch it grow.

Market sizing adds credibility and, when done correctly, can help you avoid focusing in the wrong areas. It's also one of the ways I try to kill my ideas early one. If the market doesn’t have the growth capacity, then you’ll always be fighting for table scraps. One last thing, even if you have a really well thought calculation and you’ve done your homework, you still need to do a gut check and ask yourself can you really capture that much revenue in that amount of time. You can bet your idea that the investors will be checking with their gut.

Feasibility

As I’ve said before I spend a lot of time in the early days of product ideation thinking about feasibility. I want to know my odds of success and my potential return on investment before I start building anything. There are opportunity costs at play here, not to mention the cost of everyone’s time and the resources (costs of goods sold or COGS) needed to bring a product or service to market. Feasibility really takes into account market research and market sizing to help answer two critical questions. First, “is this opportunity worth pursuing?”, and second, “can we get paying customers at a reasonable price point?”.

Horizon Scanning

What does the future hold? How should we advance our products and services and from which direction will the competition attack? These questions are answered by horizon scanning. Another way to think of this is the answer to the old Wayne Gretzky saying. It’s about figuring out where the puck will be so you can skate to it.

Horizon scanning is a systematic process through which potential threats, opportunities, and likely future opportunities can be identified before they come to fruition or reach mass adoption. It involves detecting and assessing emerging technologies or threats and providing valuable insights for policy makers and decision-makers across various domains.

I used to recommend the old McKinsey Horizon Modal where each horizon was aligned to a timeline representing short-term (1-12 months), medium-term (1-3 years), and long-term (more than 3 years) horizons. Recently McKinsey has updated their horizon model by doing away with the time scale. I like to think about horizon scanning in a similar fashion. I break this effort down as follows.

Horizon 1 is about optimizing existing capabilities for existing markets. These are most likely small pivots that bring improved capabilities to existing customers. They typically take advantage of incremental improvements to existing technologies.

Horizon 2 is where we start to infuse new capabilities into existing markets. Here customers take advantage of disruptions or significant developments that influence their strategies and product direction. This is what we saw when Microsoft purchased OpenAI.

Horizon 3 is about transforming entirely new capabilities into new business lines. It's about those transformation shifts, technological advancements, or systemic changes that could shape your organization’s trajectory well into its next stage of life. While uncertainty increases with each horizon, understanding these potential scenarios is crucial for strategic planning.

Conclusion

Research may not sound like a ton of fun but the ability to don this hat is an important part of being a well-rounded TPM. AS you progress throughout your career you will be called upon more and more to make product decisions based on research. This skill is one that sets senior TPMs apart from their more junior peers.