Bringing Insights
In-House

Think you're too small to justify a dedicated insights role?

I've noticed most orgs organize product management by category / vertical. Makes sense when each category is large enough to support dedicated expertise. Most small-to-mid orgs aren't there, and yet:

• Every vertical has an incentive to fill its pipeline, regardless of what the business actually needs.
• Every vertical takes on go-to-market and at-market work, which tends to dominate attention.
• The structure does not inherently push a variety of skill sets into the department.

An alternative: org horizontally instead, with dedicated roles for insights, development, and commercialization.

You’re thinking you don’t do enough research to keep an insights role busy. Consider what this person might do with minimal budget:

• Work with Finance to structure sales data so it’s meaningful to product leaders (another post for another day).
• Manage third-party POS data (and clean it, and tag it).
• Run a weekly scan on competitor launches, M&A activity, patents, and market trends.
• Jump in with Design, Sales, eComm, and Marketing to bring the right amount of rigor to in-the-moment decisions.
• Deliver all of that to the people who need it. Think about what your sales force asks for today.

And the qual/quant you're outsourcing right now? It gets cheaper, faster, and faaaarrrrr better.

Want an example?

Before there was a Stanley Quencher, there was a quantitative analysis of everything you could possibly want to know about giant vacuum-insulated cups. Every little thing. It was done internally. It didn’t even cost much. I remain convinced it wouldn’t have been possible to outsource that work.

I don't believe in one-size-fits-all. But I do believe some version of this thinking is worth a serious look from almost any small-to-mid company organized in verticals.