As Product Managers, we need to understand our markets in depth. Why is this important? Well, we want to know how many potential lives our product will be making an impact on. We want to validate the need for our product and understand how big the market is for that need. Is it worth pursuing? It also helps to figure out who else in the market is solving the same problem and is reaching to same potential customers. Is there space for more players.
Let's see if I can define the market for my blog on Product Management Pm4dummies.com. My goal is to make this blog a top blog for folks wanting to learn about product management. That means I need to know how many readers my blog can reach out to. I need to understand how many aspiring PMs are out there. I also need to know how many existing product managers are there that may potentially ready articles on my blog for reference. Some common things that we can do - look for Industry reports ( here is one on product management) or search twitter, Reddit, etc.
In this context, I am going to use 2 approaches to define my market size - Top-Down and Bottom-up. (Buzzwords- I know). Let me try to simplify:-
Top-Down- guesstimate of the market I want to tap. Let's just focus on IT companies in the United States. Running a quick search on Google tells us that there are approximately 525,000 software and IT services firms in 2018 ( **Source CompTIA) . Let me assume that there are at least 10 product managers in each company. (just to average out) . I know that we have large, medium, and small size companies that make up this number. So Product managers in IT may be approximately 525,000 * 10 = 5,25,000 and this number is only for IT firms.
Another way to look at it will be to do a quick search on LinkedIn for the United States
Count of people who already has a title of product manager = 5,450,000
Open Product manager jobs = 89445
So this approach gives me an idea of how my market may look like. However the
The question I have - Is it realistic for me to say that I should target 10% of this market for my blog?
Let's look at another approach and decide for ourselves.
Bottom-up - Look for a similar blog and look at the data.
Let me pick one of the blogs that I like to read https://www.mindtheproduct.com/
If I do a quick search on traffic per month for this site using similarweb.com, I can see that it is approximately 84.41k. What it means to me is that these many people are coming to their blog for reading product management articles among other things. This number includes folks that are already into product management as well as our aspiring PMs.
Similarly another favorite blog of mine https://svpg.com/ has traffic of 55.14 k per month. So, for me, if I can tap into 10% of these blogs traffic, I can reach out to 5 to 8k readers per month.
I feel like this number is more realistic for me to target as a starting point. Wouldn't you agree.