Crossing the Chasm, 3rd Edition: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers (Collins Business Essentials)

To try to take this step earlier in the market development cycle is foolish. During the early market it is important to be product-driven and to give strong powers to the product manager. But to fail to take those powers back now is equally foolish, for every day that the enhancement list is in the hands of the original pioneers, the company risks

It is the move from being pioneers to becoming settlers. In the development organization, pioneers are the ones who push the edge of the technology application envelope. They do not institutionalize. They do not like to create infrastructure. They don’t even like to document. They want to do great deeds, and when there are no more great deeds to be

The key is to initiate the transition by introducing two new roles during the crossing-the-chasm effort. The first of these might be called the target market segment manager, and the second the whole product manager. Both are temporary, transitional positions, with each being a stepping-stone to a more traditional role.

Now, the whole product manager is a product-marketing-manager-to-be. The reason she is not one today is that the job itself is premature. Until there is a successful crossing of the chasm, there are no meaningful market relationships or understandings to drive the future of product development. The target market segment manager is off getting these

To be sure, there is a minimum level of capitalization required. You have to be able to travel to make direct sales calls, and show up looking presentable, and you probably should have an office and a phone that is answered in a professional way. You do need to invest in early market public relations—the product launch is crucial to building early

As innovation becomes increasingly continuous, focus groups, which are virtually useless in guiding the development of an early market, become effective tools. The reason they are now effective is that the fundamental product proposition is already in the market and absorbed. Until this is the case, consumers get in way over their heads trying to a

We began by isolating a fundamental flaw in the prevailing High-Tech Marketing Model—the notion that rapid mainstream market growth could follow continuously on the heels of early market success. By analyzing the characteristics of visionaries and pragmatists, we were able to see that a far more normal development would be a chasm period of little

Once this authority is transferred, the enterprise has taken a key step in moving from a product-driven to a market-driven organization. As the shape of the mainstream market emerges, as the needs of this market can be increasingly identified through market research and customer interviews, then the whole product manager steps into…

Some highlights

The tactic, which at once secures proper management of the list and initiates a transition process from pioneer to settler culture in the development side of the house, is to take this list away from the product manager and give it to the whole product manager. For whoever is serving as the product manager at this point almost certainly is a pionee

A product manager is normally a member of the development organization who is responsible for ensuring that a product gets created, tested, and shipped on budget, on schedule, and according to specification. It is a highly internally focused job, bridging the marketing and development organizations, and requiring a high degree of technical competen