There’s too much noise in product work right now. Between investor headlines, competitor feature drops, Slack rants, and tracking analytics on different boards, it’s easy to confuse motion for progress and adopt a more reactive approach to product planning.
If you want to get out of a reactive cycle and build something that actually resonates, you must be able to separate useful market signals from the clutter and turn them into clear, testable decisions.
One way to quiet the chatter is by getting back to basics. Try sketching ideas early and do it often. A low-fidelity wireframe forces you to shape messy input into something tangible quickly, so teams can argue about big ideas instead of frivolous details.
To add perspective, we spoke with product and marketing leaders across education tech, payments, and growth tools. Their experience shows the same pattern: market noise never stops; the trick is filtering it into a short list of things you can validate fast.
4 Common market signals PMs need to track
Market signals often mirror what marketers watch because they come from the same sources: the world around their users. Keep an eye on key streams that regularly surface useful patterns. I’m talking about things like:
- Competitor activity: Launches, pricing moves, promotional bets that might shift user expectations.
- Market trends: Changes in behavior or priorities, like sustainability, security, or new integrations.
- Sales trends: Adoption rates, conversion shifts, and which segments are growing or shrinking.
- Product and customer data: Onboarding calls, usage patterns, support tickets, churn reasons, and unsolicited feedback.
"A lot of the market signals I track as a product marketer come from what’s happening around our users: that can look like shifts in policy, funding, classroom priorities, or where competitors are focusing their energy."
Michelle Strom,Head of Product Marketing @ BrainPOP
You need to discern signals from noise
There’s a temptation to treat every trend as a mandate. Don’t. A signal is something actionable like a recurring pattern that, when fixed or improved, will move a measurable outcome. Noise is everything that distracts from that.
Look for patterns. Repeated themes across support tickets, consistent churn reasons, or the same friction showing up in usability sessions are all signals. Single complaints, hot takes, or one-off press cycles are usually noise.
As one Reddit contributor put it, a PM’s job often looks like scanning 1,000 support tickets and 200 unsolicited feature suggestions to find the 20 small changes and three big bets worth prioritizing
"Use macro trends to guide direction, use micro data to drive decisions. Markets are loud with directional trends like ‘AI in payments,’ but product decisions should come from micro signals within our own ecosystem—merchant pain points, support tickets, integration bottlenecks, and more."
John Thomas Lang,Head of Product Marketing @ Coinflow
You need to find patterns in the madness
Noise becomes a signal when you start spotting the same thread in different places. That doesn’t happen from a single dashboard sweep. It happens over time, as patterns emerge across support tickets, onboarding notes, sales calls, and competitor moves.
"A lot of what makes market input valuable comes down to doing what April Dunford calls the “so what?” work. It’s the difference between sharing a trend and making it actionable. We can look at a new competitor feature, a funding headline, or a policy shift and immediately ask: so what does this mean for how people will evaluate or use our product?"
Michelle Strom,Head of Product Marketing @ BrainPOP
To start spotting patterns, build a habit of tagging and clustering feedback as it comes in. Divide them into simple buckets like “onboarding friction” or “feature gaps.” Over time, you’ll see which ones fill up fastest and link to churn, conversion, or roadmap delays.
Pair this new habit with a monthly review where you scan for repeated themes across channels. If the same issue shows up in user interviews, competitor positioning, and internal sales chatter, that’s a strong signal.
Just remember the goal isn’t to catalog everything. Your goal is to notice what keeps resurfacing and ask, “Is this a pattern worth solving?”
You should pair market signals with behavioral data
Trends and headlines are useful for context, but behavior rarely lies. Surveys and conversations tell you intent; metrics show what people actually do. The best teams triangulate both. You have to know your mission and who your real users are. That clarity helps you decide which feedback deserves attention.
AI can help you surface those patterns faster, but it can’t make sense of them for you. It’s still human judgment, empathy, and context that turn scattered data into meaningful product decisions, which is ultimately why AI can’t replace product thinking.
"In a noisy market, the best product managers are the ones who can tell the difference between a useful signal and plain noise. They know their product’s mission, vision, and the problem it aims to solve, which helps them understand who their true audience is and whose feedback matters. When the market speaks, they can sift through the clutter, identify meaningful data, and turn it into thoughtful product decisions."
Farhan Sikder,Global Strategy and Business Advisor @ BRAC IT Services LTD
Triangulation looks like this in practice:
- Identify a pattern in qualitative data (repeated support questions about onboarding).
- Confirm with quantitative signals (rising drop-off at step two in the funnel).
- Hypothesize a fix (simplify the step or add contextual help).
- Prototype quickly and measure impact.
"Translating noisy market signals into product decisions starts with collection, but not just of data… of context. It’s about listening deeply across every channel — onboarding calls, product usage, feedback loops — and validating what you hear against what people actually do."
Josh Ho,CEO and Product Owner @ Referral Rock
You need to go from pattern to prototype
Once you’ve triangulated a real signal, distill it into a tight product brief. The brief should answer three questions from multiple perspectives—users, business, and delivery:
- What problem are we solving and for whom?
- How will we measure success?
- What capacity or constraints should shape the solution?
This is where wireframing earns its keep. A low-fidelity sketch turns hypotheses into visible flows, making assumptions explicit and debate actionable. Josh Ho explains:
"The brief sets boundaries that let creativity and focus coexist. From there, we prototype, test, and iterate, using that same feedback loop to validate whether our decisions actually move the needle."
Josh Ho,CEO and Product Owner @ Referral Rock
Keep the brief small and testable. Focus on the riskiest assumption and design a micro-experiment to validate it. That approach avoids expensive build cycles and helps the team learn quickly.
How to turn “I have an idea” into “Here’s how it works”
Markets will keep shouting. Your job is to stay in the zen zone. Start by sketching a simple flow that represents the change you want to make, and use that sketch as the backbone of a brief and an experiment.
At Balsamiq, we believe sketching early and often helps teams align faster and fail cheaper. When you translate messy inputs into a one-page plan and a low-fidelity prototype, you turn noise into a testable path forward. That’s how noisy signals become confident product decisions.
