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Market research is the discipline of understanding the external landscape your product operates in - the customers, competitors, and conditions that define the opportunity. It sits at the intersection of product strategy and business strategy, and it’s often skipped entirely by teams who are too focused on building to look up 🔭

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What market research covers

Customer research - who buys in this market, what problems they have, how they currently solve them, and what they’re willing to pay. This overlaps with product discovery but operates at a broader level - you’re not just talking to your existing users, you’re understanding the full landscape of potential customers. Competitive analysis - who else is in the market, how they’re positioned, what they charge, where they’re strong and where they’re weak. Competitive intelligence isn’t a one-time exercise - markets move, and so do competitors. Market sizing - how big is the opportunity? TAM, SAM, SOM is the standard framework. Bottom-up sizing grounded in real customer data beats top-down estimates from industry reports. Trend analysis - what’s changing in the market? Regulatory shifts, technology changes, demographic trends. PESTLE is a useful prompt for this kind of environmental scanning 💡

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Primary vs. secondary research

Primary research - you collect it yourself. Customer interviews, surveys, competitive product testing, pricing research. Direct, specific to your questions, but takes time and effort. Secondary research - data someone else collected. Industry reports, analyst coverage, public company filings, review sites like G2 and Capterra, job postings (a surprisingly good signal of where competitors are investing). Faster but less tailored. Most good market research combines both - secondary research to get oriented quickly, primary research to go deeper on the questions that matter most.

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The competitor blindspot

Teams tend to define their competitive set too narrowly. Direct competitors are obvious. But the real competition is often the status quo - the spreadsheet, the manual process, the “we just don’t do that yet.” Understanding why customers aren’t switching is often more valuable than understanding why they prefer one direct competitor over another 🙌 Rob Fitzpatrick’s The Mom Test is relevant here - the discipline of asking questions that reveal what customers actually do, rather than what they say they’d prefer, applies just as much to market research as to product interviews. Lesson learned: the most valuable competitive research I’ve done wasn’t reading competitor websites - it was signing up for their products, going through their onboarding, and using them as a real customer for a week. You learn things you can’t find in any report.