Day 6 30DC - Don't Judge, Just Notice

Even with 2 days of rest and catchup, the clock is still ticking, counting down the magical 30 days of the Challenge. In today's training Ed continued his riff on market research and gave us a couple of new ways to go about it. His emphasis continued to be on noticing, not judging.

It's hard not to employ one's critical thinking skills when looking at niche markets. Immediately the brain tries to edit and evaluate what we're seeing, but at this stage of market research, like brainstorming, it is important only to notice what we're seeing. Essentially, it's a data-gathering phase.

By the way, that is one of the first phases of project management, for any project, the research and analysis phase. Note that the word Research comes before Analysis. You need data in order to have something to analyze. The quality of your analysis will only be as good as the quality and thoroughness of your data.

The term "noticing" also implies that you are paying close attention to what you are seeing. Your market research is not just a factoid grab, but an intelligent observation of the data you are gathering. This means taking in the information on the periphery as well as what is directly in front of your face. What else is on the web page you are looking at? Where do links take you from that page? How many people have been looking for that keyword? What related keywords do they search for?

If you only gather the superficial data, i.e., the low-hanging fruit, your market research will be inadequate, and if you later base business decisions on that market research, you put yourself at risk for losing money.

There is no substitute for the research and analysis phase in project management. (And if you've taken any of my classes you know that project management, product management, document development, software development, event planning, and pretty much every other human activity follows the same Development Life Cycle.) You cannot take shortcuts with this. While it's attractive to rush this stage to get into the sexy and fun part of developing a product or project, neglecting the research and analysis phase creates time bombs and traps that you will have to deal with in the latter stages of your project, and then they will be very costly indeed.

So in phase 1, Research -- noticing everything, judging nothing. Then analyze. No doubt we'll be talking about that tomorrow.