pm-practice strategy sales October, 2025 It’s the PM’s responsibility to navigate their products through the market landscape on their way to hit their business objectives. These objectives tend to fall into the following distinct market motions broken out across 2 dimensions:
- Product: do you have an existing product or do you need to build a new one?
- Market: does a market already exist with established pricing, players, and value chain or does one need to be created?
Motions
- Move an existing product to a new market (e.g. adjacent)
- Create a new market with a new product
- Enter an existing market with a new product
- Exploit your existing product in its current market
- Exit your product from a market
Strategy can vary wildly depending on which box you are in.
Another set of factors to consider is the change rate of the ecosystem.
For rapidly changing environments, you should take into consideration the following approaches:
- Obsess over your customers (users & buyers): Ultimately the end-users provide the best signal on value so you need to pick the right customers.
- Make friends: develop relationships and build trust with other players in the ecosystem
- Embrace open source
- Think like lego: Build modular components with flexible interfaces that allow your product to adapt and be adapted
- Sow a few seeds: Establish a few positions in the ecosystem to get direct experience and get a sense of the early indicators.
- Focus on a niche: Trying to be a generalist is difficult because it’s hard to keep up with everything.
- Rapid iterations.
References