Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

by Geoffrey A. Moore

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 under way, but they are not there today. What is there today, on the other hand, is a list of bug reports and product-enhancement requests that is growing with disconcerting speed. If this list is not managed properly, it will bring the entire development organization to its knees. 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 pioneer—otherwise, the organization could not have got to where it is today. The problem with this person continuing to direct the future of the product is that she will be driven first and foremost by her own personal commitments made to early customers. Unfortunately, these commitments are often not in the best interest of the mainstream market customer.