In this insightful episode, our Director Natasha Lytton and co-host Micah Smurthwaite, Partner at Pipeline Ventures are joined by Alicia Carney, a seasoned product marketing expert with extensive experience at high-growth startups like Deliveroo.
Together, they dive deep into identifying and validating Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) in pre and post product-market fit stages. Alicia shares her insights on navigating early market fit through to scaling operations post-product market fit.
She emphasizes the importance of starting with customer needs rather than product ideas, advocating for qualitative user research and pain mapping to identify and validate ideal customer profiles (ICP). She also shares her best strategies for conducting effective customer interviews, iterating quickly based on market feedback, and leveraging practical tools and methodologies for market research.
Elaborating on her experiences at Deliveroo, she explains how she managed to segment and prioritize different types of customers, from small businesses to large enterprises, and used iterative testing to refine go-to-market strategies.
The conversation also covers:
– how to align team dynamics to enhance your go-to-market strategy;
– how product marketing teams can bridge gaps between sales, engineering, and product teams;
– the importance of empathy in customer relations;
– rapid iteration techniques;
– assembling evidence-based messaging;
– the importance of ‘niching down’ to find the right audience;
– tools and methodologies for user interviews and pain mapping.
Key takeaways:
- Define and validate ideal customer profiles (ICP) through market needs and user research
- Be intentional and thoughtful about who you are serving and the value you offer
- Focus on empirical metrics and continuous customer engagement.
Learn more about validating your ICP
To learn more from Alicia Carney, subscribe to her newsletter, Customer Focus, where she helps founders and PMMs grow their companies faster by putting customers at the heart of everything. Subscribe for tips, tricks, hard lessons, and free frameworks based on 14+ years in the product marketing trenches. Subscribe here: https://customerfocus.substack.com/
Stay tuned for the next episode!
Show notes:
Alicia Carney – https://www.linkedin.com/in/aliciacarney
Natasha Lytton – linkedin.com/in/natasha-lytton
Micah Smurthwaite – linkedin.com/in/micah-smurthwaite-2283b49
Interview guide link: http://bit.ly/3tJubmC
Establishing an ideal customer profile (ICP) by Notion VC
Market research platforms: userinterviews.com, pollfish.com, gong.io, grain.com