Principle
A company does not usually decide to change its target market. It accumulates a series of individually reasonable accommodations to its largest customers, and discovers eighteen months later that the product, the roadmap, and the sales motion now serve a segment nobody chose.
Behaviour
A large customer requests a capability the product does not have. The revenue is material, the request is not unreasonable, and engineering builds it. A second large customer in the same segment requests something adjacent, and because the first capability exists, building the second is cheaper. The roadmap begins to acquire a gravitational centre.
Sales notices that deals in this segment close more readily, because the product now fits them better, and reallocates attention accordingly. Marketing produces material reflecting where the wins are. Within two years the company's product, positioning, and pipeline are oriented around a segment that was never selected, that may be smaller or less attractive than the original target, and whose economics nobody has examined because the transition was never a decision.
The tell is a mismatch between the segment described in the strategy documents and the segment visible in the last eight quarters of closed-won data. The organisation continues to describe itself as serving the market it intended to serve, and the pipeline describes something else entirely.
The product, the roadmap, and the sales motion now serve a segment nobody chose.
Evidence
Plot closed-won revenue by customer segment over three years, using a segmentation defined at the start of the period rather than one constructed retrospectively. Drift is usually visible without any statistical technique and is frequently substantial.
Examine the roadmap. Calculate the proportion of engineering effort over eight quarters attributable to requests originating from a single segment, or from fewer than five named accounts. Where that proportion is high, the product is being defined by its largest customers rather than by a strategy.
Compare the unit economics of the drifted segment against the original target. Larger customers frequently arrive with longer sales cycles, heavier implementation requirements, greater customisation, and more demanding support expectations. The revenue is larger and the margin is frequently worse, and the organisation has not recalculated its acquisition economics since the drift began.
Psychology
Each accommodation is individually correct. Declining a material request from a large customer to preserve strategic purity is a difficult argument to make in a quarter where revenue matters, and the person making it will be overruled by the person holding the number. The drift is the aggregate of many defensible local decisions and is nobody's responsibility.
Because the drift is gradual, there is never a moment at which the organisation confronts it. Strategy documents are updated infrequently and describe intent rather than observation. The gap between the two grows quietly, and the first person to notice is typically an outsider examining the closed-won data without the accumulated context that makes each individual step seem obvious.
Commercial Risk
An investment thesis is built on the market the company describes. Where the company has drifted, the thesis is addressing a market the company no longer serves, and the TAM, competitive set, and growth assumptions have all been calculated for the wrong segment.
The compounding risk is that the drifted segment is frequently one the company is poorly positioned to win. It arrived not through strategic choice but through the accumulated requests of a small number of large customers, and the resulting product is a set of accommodations rather than a coherent proposition. The company competes in a segment it did not choose, with a product shaped by five accounts, against competitors who designed for that segment deliberately.
The drift also creates a concentration exposure that does not appear in any customer concentration analysis. The named accounts that shaped the roadmap are not merely large revenue contributors. They are the specification. Their departure removes both the revenue and the rationale for a substantial portion of the product, and the company is left serving a segment it entered accidentally with capabilities built for customers who are no longer there.
Investment Committee Note