How can you use product knowledge to identify gaps in the market?

1 What are market gaps?

Market gaps are unmet or underserved needs or desires of a specific customer segment or niche. They can be caused by changing customer expectations, emerging trends, competitive advantages, or technological innovations. Finding market gaps can help your company create value, differentiate from competitors, and increase customer loyalty.

2 How to use product knowledge to find market gaps?

Gleaning valuable product knowledge from your customers is a great way to identify market gaps. Asking open-ended questions during support interactions can help you learn more about what customers are trying to achieve with your product and the biggest challenges they face. Collecting and analyzing customer feedback from surveys, reviews, testimonials, or social media can also provide insights. Segmenting customers based on their demographics, behaviors, goals, or pain points and comparing your product's features with those of your competitors can help you identify areas for improvement and innovation.

3 How to validate market gaps?

Once you have some ideas for potential market gaps, you need to validate them before you share them with your product team. To do this, you can analyze data such as usage statistics, conversion rates, retention rates, or churn rates. Additionally, customer interviews or focus groups can provide deeper insights into their needs, preferences, and satisfaction. Surveys or polls can also be sent to quantify customer demand, interest, or willingness to pay. Lastly, prototypes or minimum viable products (MVPs) can be created and tested to get feedback on proposed solutions.

4 How to communicate market gaps to your product team?

To effectively communicate your market gaps to your product team, so they can prioritize and develop them, you can use the jobs-to-be-done framework to describe the customer's problem, situation, motivation, and desired outcome. Additionally, you can use the user story format to specify the user, the feature, and the value. Furthermore, it is important to provide evidence and data to support your market gap, such as customer feedback, survey results, or prototype feedback. Lastly, make sure to align your market gap with your company's vision, mission, and goals and show how it can create value for customers and your business.

5 How to follow up on market gaps?

Finally, you need to follow up on the market gaps that you have communicated to your product team and track their progress. To do this, stay in touch with your product team and get updates on the status, timeline, and challenges of your market gap. Additionally, offer your help and expertise to answer questions, provide feedback, or test new features. Furthermore, share your market gap with your customer support team and get their input and suggestions. Lastly, inform and educate your customers about the new features, solutions, or offerings that address their market gaps. By using your product knowledge to identify gaps in the market, you can be a valuable asset for both your company and customers. You can help create products that solve real problems, delight customers, and stand out from the competition.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?