Niche Product Management

A fun bucket of unknown unknowns

Data output from a pass placement feature @StatsBomb_FB

From B2C to Niche

When I transitioned into tech in 2017 by starting an AdTech startup, I had no idea that 6 years later I would be working on problems related to collecting data on American football games (I’m just going to call it football from here on out in this post, sorry non-Americans). That one decision changed the trajectory of my career and life. Although things didn’t work out for the startup (it had a pretty good run), if I hadn’t decided to invest my time and money into it, I might still be working in an industry (construction management) that doesn’t have many creative outlets. I would have been bored to death.

That really speaks to how exciting the product management career path can be and at the same time how versatility is at the center of a product manager’s competencies.

My startup was a B2B and B2B2C platform. My next two roles would be in B2C marketplaces. Each experience built on the other and there were plenty of frameworks and patterns to use and learn from.

That is until I joined StatsBomb and became the product manager for the football data collection product; an internal application that data collectors use to collect every observable fact of a football game. It’s not a stretch to say that this product is a 1 of 1 product. Sure, there are competitors who have their own internal tooling that do similar things. But I sure don’t have access to those products to conduct research on!

Besides the fact that I get to open my laptop and watch football video most of the day and call it work, I particularly enjoy this niche role because of the uniqueness of the challenge and the creativity it requires. Today a random B2C growth product manager might be concerned with optimizing the pirate funnel (AARRR). Today I am thinking about how an algorithm can automatically identify the line techniques of defensive lineman so that the collection time of this data point is reduced, and data quality is improved. There isn’t really a framework or design pattern for this problem!

What makes niche work challenging

This gets me to theme of this post: niche product management. How is niche product management different to more pattern-like work where workflows and impact levers are more common and known than unique and unknown?

In many ways, not so much! Working in a niche, you still:

• Gather qualitative data through continuous discovery with users,

• Extract insights from quantitative data,

• Prioritize the work to provide the most value for your users and the business

• Employ first principles, design thinking when solving problems

• Measure success against defined metrics and / or objectives

That said, there are some striking differences.

One of the main differences between working on a niche product and working on a non-niche product is the level of creativity required to produce unique solutions to unique problems. Having experience designing solutions has helped me tremendously in tackling unique problems. People talk about the importance of design-thinking all the time. You really learn what design-thinking means when you have to solve a problem that few have thought to even solve before. Like how to enable the data collection of line battles (which players engaged with each other, when did they engage, where did they engage on the field, and for how long). If you are not familiar with football, see the video below and focus on the big guys pushing against each other.

Jordan Reid @Jordan_Reid

These three plays in a row vs. TCU lastnight provide a snapshot of the positives with Jalen Carter as a prospect:

Output from the line battles collection feature @StatsBomb_FB

As mentioned before, the level of unknown unknowns (unexpected conditions that can’t be predicted) with niche products can be greater. Dealing with this level of ambiguity is not for everybody and can cause a lot of stress, especially for more process-oriented people. But for people who went to stretch the limits of their design-thinking, these types of problems are what they live for.

Ted Knutson @mixedknuts

@TheCoachEdwards Why release data so that all the competitors can see it and take aim? 1) Because as a company, sharing our data is part of our DNA. 2) This product was INCREDIBLY difficult to create. Good luck to those trying to match all the detail in the data spec at any reasonably price.

If you are just starting out in product management, working on a niche product is kind of like jumping into the deep end of the pool with no or limited swimming ability. Many can learn to swim this way (some people make a good living teaching young kids how to swim like this) but some can’t. And that’s ok. It certainly wasn’t my path. Learning the frameworks and some design patterns helped me be better prepared for my current role, not only because I could refer back to them when I needed to, but also to know when to put them aside to create something new.