For Product Leaders at Companies That Need to Grow Beyond Their Current Market
Your Competitors Are Executing While Your Team Debates What to Build Next
Last updated: March 18, 2026
Your current product and market have been successful, but growth is plateauing. The board is asking about your growth plan. Your competitors are moving into adjacent markets. And your team has spent months going in circles.
Strategy sessions produce debate, not direction. Customer research generates conflicting signals. Analysis paralysis sets in while the window of opportunity narrows.
Meanwhile, nothing valuable is shipping because nobody agrees on what to build.
Here's the problem: your team is great at building products. They're not set up to do the strategic research and market intelligence work that tells them what to build next. Those are different disciplines – and trying to do both at once stalls both.
That's where I come in.
I conduct systematic market research and strategic analysis to give your team a clear, research-backed direction they can start building against immediately. In two weeks, you'll have detailed customer personas, a prioritized problem inventory, a feature roadmap mapped to real customer needs, and the market intelligence to make smart execution decisions.
Schedule a Discovery CallWhy the Usual Approaches Stall
If you're in this situation, you've probably tried or considered some of these:
- Internal strategy sessions – smart people debating without data. Opinions collide but no one has the research to settle the argument. Three months later, same conversation.
- Hiring a Head of Product Strategy – takes 3–6 months to recruit, another 3–6 months to ramp up, and no guarantee they'll figure it out. Meanwhile, you're burning months of market opportunity.
- Bringing in a strategy consultancy – they deliver decks. Beautiful decks that sit in a presentation folder, disconnected from what your team actually needs to build. The gap between “strategic recommendation” and “actionable roadmap” is where most strategy work dies.
- Customer interviews without a framework – you talk to customers, but the signals contradict each other. One says X, another says Y. Without systematic methodology, customer research creates more confusion, not less.
- Doing nothing – the most common choice. But every month of strategic uncertainty is a month your competitors are executing. Growth doesn't plateau and then hold steady – it declines.
These approaches fail because they don't connect strategic analysis to product execution. You don't need a strategy deck. You need personas your designers can design for, problems your engineers can solve, and a roadmap your team can start shipping against next week.
How the Strategy Diagnostic Sprint Works
I don't just analyze your market and hand you a report. I build the strategic foundation your product team needs to execute with confidence.
I've spent 20+ years doing strategic product work across technology, media, education, and workforce development. I've launched products, repositioned failing product lines, and helped companies find viable growth paths when internal teams were stuck. That experience is what lets me do in two weeks what internal teams take months to figure out – and what most strategy consultants never connect to execution at all.
Week 1: Strategic Validation and Market Intelligence
Market opportunity research
Before your team builds anything, the opportunity itself needs to be validated. I research your target market using systematic methodology:
- Total addressable market and realistic serviceable market
- Competitive landscape – who's serving this audience now, how well, and where the gaps are
- Market dynamics – is this growing, shifting, consolidating?
- Barriers to entry and differentiation potential
This is the step that can save you the most time and money. At Tallo, the research revealed that one of two markets they were considering had insufficient total addressable market. I told them directly: don't pursue it. That single finding saved months of engineering, design, and leadership time chasing an opportunity that wasn't there.
If the research validates your direction, I continue building out the complete intelligence package. If it reveals fundamental viability issues, I'll tell you directly and we'll identify an alternative direction that uses your existing strengths.
Knowing what NOT to build is just as valuable as knowing what to build.
Target audience deep-dive
This is where most strategy work falls short. Generic personas built from demographic data don't help your product team make decisions. I build deep behavioral and psychological profiles:
- What motivates this audience? What are they actually trying to accomplish?
- What frustrates them about current solutions? Where do existing options fail?
- How do they make decisions? What makes them choose or reject a product?
- What's their daily reality? What problems are they living with that they've stopped noticing?
The difference between a demographic description (“18–25, no college degree, looking for career advancement”) and a behavioral persona is the difference between your product team guessing and your product team building with conviction. One gives you a target. The other gives you understanding.
Problem discovery and validation
I identify the specific problems your target audience faces – not vague pain points, but concrete, buildable problems:
- What problems are acute enough that people would pay to solve them?
- Which problems are being poorly served by existing solutions?
- How do these problems cluster into themes that drive feature prioritization?
The output here is what ends the “what should we build?” debate. 15–20 specific problems, organized into 5–6 themes. Each problem concrete enough that a product manager can write user stories against it and an engineer can estimate complexity.
Week 2+: Strategic Framework and Roadmap
This is where research becomes execution.
I take everything from Week 1 – the validated market opportunity, the behavioral personas, the problem inventory – and translate it into what your team should build, in what order, and why. This is the step most strategy work skips entirely.
Every feature recommendation maps back to a specific customer problem, which maps back to persona insights, which maps back to market research. Your team can trace any roadmap item back to the research that justifies it. No more “we think we should build this” – instead, “the research shows this problem affects this segment, and here's the feature that addresses it.”
The difference between those two states is the difference between months of internal debate and a team that starts shipping within weeks.
For adjacent market expansion with clear target audiences, this typically takes 2 weeks. For earlier-stage opportunities or more complex market dynamics, the timeline may extend to 3–4 weeks. We'll establish the exact scope during the discovery call.
What You Get
Detailed Ideal Customer Personas. 1–2 deep profiles your product team can actually design for. Not the kind of personas that sit in a slide deck – the kind that settle arguments about what to build and who it's for. The value extends beyond a single team – Tallo originally expected the persona research to serve one product team, but found it useful across multiple teams throughout the organization.
Problem Inventory. 15–20 specific problems organized into 5–6 major themes. This is the artifact that ends months of “what should we build?” debates. Each problem is concrete enough for a product manager to write stories against and an engineer to estimate.
Prioritized Feature Roadmap. Features mapped directly to customer problems, prioritized by impact and feasibility. Your team can start design spikes and engineering feasibility work immediately – not next quarter, next week.
Market Intelligence Guide. Competitive dynamics, opportunity sizing, positioning strategy, and risk mitigation. The context your team needs for every prioritization call over the next 6–12 months.
Go-to-Market Recommendations. How to reach these audiences, validate direction as you build, and adjust based on what you learn. Strategic direction that evolves with execution, not a static document.
Live Presentation. I walk your leadership team through the complete findings, answer questions, and ensure everyone leaves aligned on who you're building for, what problems you're solving, and why this direction over alternatives.
30-Day Email Support. Strategic questions will come up as your team starts building. I'm available to answer them.
A Real Example: Tallo
Tallo had a 10-year-old career development platform with plateauing growth. Leadership saw a clear opportunity: expand to serve 18–20 year olds entering the workforce without a college degree. But months of internal strategy work had produced nothing actionable.
Strategy sessions produced debate but not direction. Customer research generated conflicting signals. Leadership was also considering a second potential market. Two possible directions, months of deliberation, and zero clarity on either.
The team had been stuck in firefighting mode – reacting to problems and shortcomings with the platform instead of centering on user problems and how to solve them. They were running experiments, but the experiments were just iterating on what hadn't been working for years. They weren't charting a new path.
What the diagnostic delivered in 2 weeks:
For the Career Starters market, the research validated the opportunity and produced a complete strategic direction package – 2 detailed personas, a market intelligence guide, 15 specific problems organized into 6 themes, feature concepts mapped to each problem, and go-to-market recommendations.
For the second market, the research revealed insufficient total addressable market. I recommended they not pursue it. No equivocation, no “it depends.” The data was clear.
The outcome tells the story:
Before the diagnostic: months of uncertainty, no agreement on who to target, nothing shipping.
Two weeks later: complete strategic direction. A clear “yes” on one market and a clear “no” on another.
One month after delivery: detailed roadmap for the next quarter. Team actively shipping features.
For comparison: another internal team at the same company spent 4 months with no discovery completed, no work defined, and nothing shipped. Same company, same resources, different approach.
The Backstory That Proves This Works
This wasn't my first engagement with this organization.
Three years earlier, Stride – Tallo's parent company – hired me as their Director of Product Management. Their product team was 5 months behind schedule with an 80% defect rate. What I did in my first weeks was effectively a Delivery Diagnostic. I diagnosed the root causes, built the implementation plan, and the team tripled their productivity within 90 days.
During that original engagement, Stride evaluated and acquired a company called Tallo. I led the technical and feature discovery process for the merger.
Three years later, Tallo brought me back – this time not for delivery, but for strategy. Where I once diagnosed how they worked, I now diagnosed what they should build.
The fact that they came back after three years, for a completely different type of problem, says something about what happens when you actually solve the real problem instead of applying a framework and hoping it sticks.
Read the Stride case study →What Leadership Discovers
By the end of the diagnostic, leadership has clarity that months of internal work couldn't produce:
Whether the opportunity is actually viable. Internal debates about market direction are usually fueled by opinions. The diagnostic replaces opinions with research. You'll know whether your target market has sufficient size, whether you can differentiate, and whether the opportunity justifies the investment. No more “we think so” – instead, “the data shows.”
Who you're actually building for. Not “millennials who want career development” but specific behavioral profiles your designers and product managers can work from. The gap between a demographic description and a usable persona is where most product strategy fails.
What to build and what to stop debating. The problem inventory eliminates the “what should we build?” argument. And sometimes the most valuable finding is what NOT to build. Tallo was considering two markets. One wasn't viable. Knowing that early saved months of wasted effort and let the team focus entirely on the opportunity that was real.
How to reach this audience and validate as you build. Not a deck that sits in a folder, but a living framework your team uses to make daily prioritization decisions as they move from strategy into execution.
Is This Right For Your Situation?
This is designed for companies with a proven product and established capabilities that want to expand into an adjacent market or serve a new audience. You have a team that's great at building – they need strategic direction for what to build next.
This probably isn't right if you're pre-product-market-fit or exploring a completely greenfield opportunity with no existing capabilities to build on. Or if you need tactical execution help rather than strategic direction.
The right time is when your team has spent more than a few weeks debating strategic direction without converging. Competitors are moving into markets you've been considering. Internal customer research is producing conflicting signals. Leadership needs to align on direction before the team can start building.
What This Requires
Input from your team: Access to whatever customer research, market analysis, and strategic thinking you've already done. Existing research accelerates the process, but if you don't have any research yet, that's fine – I can start from zero. The diagnostic is designed to work either way.
Leadership availability: Time for a discovery call to establish scope, and availability for the live findings presentation.
Willingness to hear the truth: The research may validate your direction – or it may reveal that your target market isn't viable. If it's the latter, you'll know why, and we'll identify alternatives that use your existing strengths.
NDA: Standard. I work with proprietary business information and competitive intelligence.
The Investment
$15,000 for the complete Strategy Diagnostic Sprint.
Timeline:
- Discovery call to establish scope and timeline
- Week 1: Research and market intelligence
- Week 2+: Strategic framework delivery
- Live presentation with leadership team
- 30 days of follow-up support by email
Hiring a Head of Product Strategy takes 6–12 months to recruit and ramp – and there's no guarantee they'll find the right direction. A strategy consultancy will cost more and deliver decks your team can't act on. Continuing to debate internally costs you market position every month.
Tallo went from months of strategic paralysis to a shipping team in 30 days. The diagnostic pays for itself when your team stops debating and starts building.
Guarantee: If the diagnostic doesn't deliver actionable strategic direction your team can execute against – specific personas, validated problems, and a prioritized roadmap – full refund. No questions asked.
I only take 2 diagnostics per quarter.
What Happens After the Strategy Diagnostic Sprint
Once you have the strategic direction package, there are three options:
Option 1: Execute with your internal team. Use the roadmap and strategic direction to guide your product and engineering teams directly. The deliverables are designed to be immediately actionable.
Option 2: Hire someone to lead execution. They'll start with a clear strategic direction instead of from zero, dramatically reducing ramp time. The diagnostic essentially does the first 3–6 months of a new hire's discovery work in 2 weeks.
Option 3: Engage me for ongoing strategic product management. This is what Tallo chose – because strategy requires continuous refinement as you learn from building and launching. Strategic decisions emerge constantly during execution: prioritization, scope, timeline, resource allocation. A separate investment that typically begins after you've reviewed the diagnostic findings.
We can discuss these options during the findings presentation.
Frequently Asked Questions
What kind of companies is this for?
Companies with a proven product and established capabilities that want to expand into an adjacent market or serve a new audience. If you're pre-product-market-fit or exploring a completely greenfield opportunity, the diagnostic may take longer than 2 weeks – we'll discuss scope on the discovery call.
How is this different from hiring a strategy consultant?
Most strategy consultants deliver decks. The Strategy Diagnostic delivers artifacts your product team can immediately execute against – personas, problem inventories mapped to features, and a prioritized roadmap. It's designed to connect directly to your engineering and design workflow, not sit in a presentation folder.
What if the research shows our target market isn't viable?
That happened with Tallo. They were considering two markets, and I recommended against one because the total addressable market was insufficient. That recommendation saved them months of wasted engineering and design time. If your target isn't viable, you'll know why, and we'll identify alternatives that use your existing strengths.
Can you work with our existing research?
Absolutely. If you've done customer interviews, surveys, or market analysis, I'll incorporate that into the diagnostic. Existing research accelerates the process. But if you haven't done any research yet, that's fine too – I can start from zero and build the complete picture.
How soon can my team start building after the diagnostic?
Tallo's team was shipping features one month after the diagnostic delivered. The roadmap is designed to be immediately actionable – your team can start design spikes and engineering feasibility work the week after delivery.
Can you do both a Delivery Diagnostic and Strategy Diagnostic?
Yes. That's essentially what happened with Stride/Tallo – delivery first, strategy later. Some companies need both, and they can run concurrently or sequentially depending on your situation. We'll figure out the right approach during the discovery call.
Do you sign NDAs?
Yes. I work with proprietary business information and competitive intelligence. NDAs are standard.
Next Step
Email matthew@fieldway.org to schedule a discovery call. We'll discuss your strategic situation, the market opportunity you're considering, and whether the Strategy Diagnostic fits your needs.
Schedule a Discovery Call