Segment Map
Define and compare customer segments with clear boundaries.
A segment map defines customer segments with boundaries, size, reachability, and strategic fit — choosing who you serve first and who you defer.
Serving everyone serves no one well. Segmentation focuses GTM, product, and pricing.
After market scan, before personas and VPC. Revisit when PMF signals differ by segment.
- Hypothesise segments from research.
- Score attractiveness and fit.
- Select primary and secondary segments.
- Document anti-segments.
- Link to personas and BMC customer blocks.
- Segments mutually exclusive enough to target.
- Primary choice explicit.
- Anti-segments named.
- Demographic-only segments.
- No anti-segment — bad deals creep in.
- Too many primaries.
Northvale Systems segments: tier-1 global suppliers, regional specialists, indirect micro vendors — prioritised tier-1 for MVP portal mandate.
PulseWell primary: 200–2k employee logistics/warehousing HR ops; anti-segment: sub-50 tech startups without EAP budget.
Harbor Consulting primary: UK factories £10–80M; deferred: food service — different downtime patterns.
Clearwater Initiative segments: high-density villages, sparse pastoral communities, school-linked points — prioritised high-density for monitoring density economics.
/segments segment-map, IDs SEG-01. Upstream of personas and VPC.
Related techniques
Sources & further reading
- Osterwalder, A., Pigneur, Y., Bernarda, G., & Smith, A. (2014). Value Proposition Design. Wiley.