There is a persistent belief in tech that great products are something that comes from a flash of inspiration, and that the best move a team is able to make is to build fast and let the market sort it out. Derribar Ventures Limited takes a different view on this matter, and a good way to explain it is to take apart a few of the myths that keep teams from doing the homework that would have saved them a considerable amount of time. The role of deep market research, in the company’s experience, is less glamorous and considerably more decisive than the inspiration story tends to suggest.
What follows are some of the more common misconceptions about market research in IT product strategy, along with what the Derribar Ventures team has actually seen play out in practice.
Myth 1: “If the idea is good enough, research is a waste of time”
This is the most expensive myth, due to the fact that it fails quietly. A team that is convinced of its idea skips the work, builds the product, and only then discovers that the problem it solves is not one people will pay to solve. The work would have surfaced in weeks instead of months.
Derribar Ventures Limited points out that this kind of study is not a brake on a good idea. It is a way of finding out, cheaply, whether the idea is as good as it feels from the inside. The strongest ideas are generally able to survive that scrutiny and come out sharper. The weak ones fail on paper, which is exactly where you want them to fail.
Myth 2: “It just means a few surveys”
Surveys have their place, but treating them as the whole picture is a mistake. Deep study, as Derribar Ventures Limited describes it, is something that pulls from several sources that each reveal something the others miss:
- Audience behavior, which shows what people actually do rather than what they say they do in a survey setting.
- Competitive analysis, which maps where the market is already crowded and where gaps are still present.
- Opportunity mapping, which is responsible for identifying gaps that are worth building into.
- Trend signals, which hint at where demand happens to be moving rather than where it has already been.
Furthermore, research is a composite picture rather than a single instrument. Any one source can mislead. Combined, they give a strategy something considerably firmer than a hunch to stand on.
Myth 3: “Research and product development are separate phases”
Many teams treat research as a box checked at the start of a project, after which it is filed away and development proceeds on its own. That separation is where a lot of value leaks out. The way Derribar Ventures Limited connects user acquisition strategy to product development reflects the opposite stance: findings should keep feeding into what gets built, not get stranded in an early deck.
When findings are allowed to stay connected to development, a product is able to adjust as new information arrives. When the two are walled off from one another, a team ends up building toward an understanding that may already be out of date. Derribar Ventures Limited treats the link between them as continuous rather than one-directional in nature.
A short scenario
Imagine an IT team that is building a collaboration tool. Early research suggests users want more integrations. Development starts. Midway through, ongoing research reveals that the real friction is onboarding, not integrations.
In a siloed process, that finding arrives too late to matter, and the team ships integrations nobody asked for. In the connected approach that Derribar Ventures Limited favors, however, the finding redirects the work while there is still time, and the product ships, solving the problem that actually mattered to users.
Myth 4: “You can tell what users want by asking them directly”
People are not reliable narrators of their own behavior. They will say they want a feature and then never use it, or dismiss something they later find they cannot live without. This is why behavioral evidence is something that carries more weight than stated preference in most cases.
There is data underlining how much actual adoption shapes outcomes. Research from Mixpanel found that 58% of B2B SaaS companies have adopted product-led growth strategies, an approach that leans heavily on watching what users do inside a product rather than what they claim in a survey. Derribar Ventures Limited applies the same logic: observe behavior, weigh it against what people say, and trust the behavior in the event that the two disagree.
Myth 5: “Research slows everything down”
The fear is that research adds delay to the process. In practice, the opposite is usually true over the life of a product. A small investment in understanding the market up front prevents the much larger delay of building the wrong thing and having to start over from scratch.
Derribar Ventures Limited frames it this way:
- Research costs time that is measured in weeks.
- Building the wrong product costs time that is measured in months, plus the morale of a team that has to scrap its work entirely.
- The math almost always favors the weeks.
Research is not the thing that slows a product down. Rework is. In contrast, good homework is how a team is able to avoid the rework altogether.
Myth 6: “Research is only for big companies with big budgets”
There is a belief that proper study requires expensive agencies and large studies, and that a smaller team is better off skipping it. Derribar Ventures Limited considers this one of the more damaging myths because it leaves the teams that can least afford a wrong bet doing the least to avoid one.
The reality is that useful research scales down considerably. A small team cannot run a national survey, but it can do plenty of things that cost little more than time:
- Talk directly to a handful of real or potential users and listen carefully to what they say.
- Study competitors’ products, reviews, and public materials on a close basis.
- Watch how people happen to behave in the existing product, in the event that there is one.
- Read what the target audience already complains about in public forums.
Derribar Ventures Limited points out that the goal is not a perfect, statistically airtight study. It is something more modest: reducing uncertainty enough to make a better decision than a pure guess. Even modest effort is able to do that.
The diminishing-returns point
There is also a limit worth naming. Research can become a way of avoiding the decision rather than informing it, and a team can study a market for a very long time without ever committing to a direction.
Derribar Ventures Limited frames the right amount of research as enough to move from a guess to an informed bet, and no more than that. Past that point, the extra certainty is small, and the cost of delay grows. The skill is knowing when the research has told you what you needed to hear, and it is time to act.
What this means for IT product strategy
However, strip away the myths and a clear principle is left standing. Deep market research is not a ritual performed to satisfy a process. It is the mechanism by which an IT product strategy stays connected to reality, from the first concept through to the features that get shipped much later on.
The Derribar Ventures Limited approach treats research as ongoing evidence rather than a one-time formality. That ongoing character is what allows a product to be built on what the market actually wants, rather than on what a team happened to assume it would want at the start of the project.
