How recruiting fundamentals can help product strategy

Finding the right customer for your product is like finding the right candidate for a job

At OpenView Labs, we work every day to assist our portfolio companies across multiple business functions, from recruitment to go to market strategy setting and execution. But how can recruiting best practices help with product strategy? Is not startup recruitment as far a practice as imaginable from product positioning and segmentation? Apparently, it makes sense and here is how:

Professor Clayton Christensen at Harvard Business School recently wrote a paper on “Finding the Right Job for your Product”, where he posited that you can only discover the right market segment for your product by finding the right “situation” whereby your potential customers will “hire” your product. That is, when you create a product that does a needed “job” perfectly for a set of potential customers.

Therefore, market research and recruiting indeed have a lot in common. A recruiter needs to consider multiple candidates for a single job, evaluating them across many hard and soft measures such as competency, domain experience, working style and career aspirations. Similarly, the factors that determine whether a prospect will possess needs that can be addressed perfectly by a product are numerous as well. More importantly, in good recruiting one cannot rely solely on the set of standard measures such as education, professional qualifications and test scores. Market segmentation that only rehashes tried and true dimensions such as demographics, organization size, etc. will not result in breakthrough new product development, because it will miss out on the less well known dimension of the “jobs to be done” that really make the product successful.

I strongly urge product managers to read this insightful paper by Professor Christensen, the architect of the framework for disruptive innovation on the Forum for Growth and Innovation website.