Hi Krish,
As I am sure we all know the world out there is not a homogeneous place where everyone has the same problems and needs. And while this is obvious on the surface, when it comes to understanding of the customer segmentation within a specific area seems to be quite challenging for many startups.
Teams often jump to building a solution for a customer they know, which is typically themselves, and they struggle to understand how other people out there might differ. Or they make some very simplistic assumptions about the differences based on obvious proxy variables like company size or industry. And then as they start learning deeper about the market they start realizing that the needs of the different customers can vary wildly and they get pulled into zillion different directions trying to satisfy them all. Especially in software this is a big challenge, because there are no constraints - you can literally pack unlimited amount of features into your digital product.
In my mind the very core job of a founder is to understand the structure of the market - the segments/clusters of people who have similar problems/needs that can be satisfied by specific product/functionality.
To give you a more specific example from our market - in the case of product managers, there is a core set of needs that everyone shares - you need to understand 1. customers, 2. their needs and 3. what products or features you are going to deliver. noone argues with that. but then as we learned about the market we saw that the needs differ along not so obvious dimensions like:
- digital first vs digital transformation company
- b2b vs b2c
- complexity of the product portfolio and product organization
- product management maturity/sophistication and related customer centricity
- power dynamic at the company - engineering vs sales led
- etc.
My point is that the sooner your company understands the segmentation the better strategy you are able to formulate and the tighter alignment you can achieve when it comes to how you are going to prioritize the different segments and their needs.