How I identified the market gap for an MVP without the time and expense of launching
Note: Because of the confidentiality, details are not going to be shown in this case study. However, I can walk you through my process to get a clear picture of how I tackled this project.
I. Context
When I worked for Panic Bear — a UX/UI design studio, my leader planned to launch an MVP that already had a full back-end system and UI design. The problem was, our product had no difference from existing players, so we wanted to enhance the usefulness and usability to stand out in the market.
Big question: What is the market gap which might be a great opportunity for our product?
My roles: Responsible for the entire project
Time Frame: 7 working days
II. Constraints
- Limited time
- No expense for conducting formal user research
- Hard-to-find target users (for participant recruiting)
III. Method
Since we had not done any research, I had no idea about the target users or existing solutions. Instead of conducting face-to-face user interviews, I decided to conduct competitor analysis first for a couple of reasons:
- By looking at who are our competitors and who are their target users, I can make at least a proto persona to define what user problems need to be solved and validate these assumptions later. This rough data could also help us define participant criteria for future user research.
- With proto personas, I would have a sense of strengths and weaknesses of competitors to find the ideas of what we should build next.
IV. Process
1. Competitor analysis
Competitor analysis is not all about what features they built, but the problems they are trying to solve and why they come up with the solutions. So to understand their products deeply, I used Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle framework.
I started by listing out all existing products that might have the same or close to our value proposition. Then I accessed their marketing material and see why they build this product (aka the problems need to be solved), who they build for, how they deliver the value and what they build.
With the overall product understanding, I dived into specific features by using them, then evaluated each one.
I interpreted the features into use cases and job stories so that I could compare different features which aim to solve the same problems in terms of usefulness and usability. These job stories also helped me form proto personas later.
2. Quick and dirty user research
To have more realistic user personas, I collected reviews, feedbacks about competitors’ products from any review website I could find and used affinity diagram method to see the repeating patterns of user needs, behaviors, and pain points.
I went through all user feedbacks, wrote any quote and insight I found relevant, linked those pieces of information together to the relationship between data, and group them under a bigger umbrella
3. Proto user personas
Because of the volume of information I gathered, it might be hard for folks — who didn’t join the project at the beginning— to make sense and build empathy with users, hence user persona was the best tool to help everyone gain a perspective similar to the user, identify the target user they are designing for, and have a direction for making design decisions.
Besides, this tool also helped me simplify the user data for identifying the market gap.
4. User journey
To detect the most crucial problem which hasn’t been solved well enough by any competitors, I made a simplified user journey and pointed out the user frustrations along the journey of using other products. (this idea came from design sprint map.) It looked like this.
5. Identify the market gap
Based on user needs, pain points, and weaknesses from competitors’ solutions, I narrowed the problem list down and identified a specific problem that was the most crucial and underserved pains which we could focus on.
The best product should be the one that is able to solve almost all user needs along the journey. In reality, many of them can’t solve all of those properly, especially when they are in the early stage. If your company just has limited resources, carefully pick the combination of needs that you think the most crucial.
After collecting these needs, I interpreted them into a concise problem statement like “How might we…” to keep us focused.
V. What’s next — Problem validation
This result mostly came from assumptions with a quick-and-dirty research method. Obviously, it needs to be validated by user research to see if this is a real and worth problem to be solved before investing a ton of time, effort, and money in development.
VI. Beyond the competition — Blue Ocean Strategy
Just looking at competitors and make a few tweaks in strategy might be not enough to truly make your product stand out in the crowded market. This is where the “Blue ocean strategy” comes into play. The concept was first introduced by management thought leaders W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne. This idea can be summarized in a nutshell:
“The best way to beat the competition is to make the competition irrelevant”
In my case, I mostly focused on finding underserved needs by looking at the weaknesses of other players, but the thing I overlooked is avoiding competition. Coming up with the strategy of blue ocean is complicated and risky. However, there were some extra steps I should take to get the most bang for our buck:
- Detecting more deeply the market trends of demand.
- Segmenting markets and focusing on a smaller niche to get a better chance to gain most of the users within the niche.
- Redefining the problem statement when needed to make our solution aligned with the root causes of user problems.
VII. Conclusion
So far, the process I went through might not be ideal but it fitted our context in terms of time and expense. At least, we had the first taste of our user needs, their behaviors, and pain points, so that we could use this to guide our future user research.
Bear in mind that the market gap is all about underserved needs. Talking to customers, researching the market trends, finding a niche in the existing market, or whatever you do, your ultimate goals should be satisfying users and helping businesses make money.
I worked in some companies that didn’t invest time or money in running user research. But I kept in mind that without the understanding of users, these companies were likely to waste too much release cycle, time, and effort compared to the cost of conducting user research. So I always keep finding a way to learn about users as much as I can, and I learn the hard way.
