Customer visits have always been one of my pet subjects because the only way I have learned to deliver good products is by getting out of the building and talking to real people who buy or will buy my products. At SolidWorks, customer visits was ingrained into our working culture and all of us had an MBO of conducting six customer visits every quarter.

Jeff Lash has written a very good article on his blog titled Avoid excuses for not conducting customer visits. It is definitely worth reading.

For the last week, gmail has just stopped working for me. Boy, it has not been fun, being locked out of your personal emails. I also use google docs and the story is no different here - I am locked out of my documents as well. I have tried everything that Google has recommended on their discussion groups but to no avail. Initially I thought the problem appeared to be related to accessing gmail from web browsers on a Mac but now I am finding that this problem exists on Windows as well - web browser does not matter. Speculation on discussion groups is that this was caused by Google’s latest update. I have seen reports of this issue as early as couple of months back and to this date, there has not been a fix?

This raises some important questions about free products: Because it is free, does that mean users do not have much say - after all beggars cannot be choosers, they say. There is no customer support number to talk to a human, you can send an email to google, but it says there will be no response from them. All this from a company who has grandiose plans to replace archrival Microsoft from its stronghold position in business apps? I think Google is going through growing pains of delivering its once well known Saas solutions of gmail.

I was one of those users who did not care about ads pasted within my email, but I cannot live without my personal email. Is this what we get for using free products? Do we have any say or are we left on our own?

I have heard this question being asked a lot of times - do you use agile development methodology? How about scrum, how about spikes? I heard this asked yesterday. To tell you the truth, I have some idea what agile is but to me it sounds very much like the latest buzzword to me. In my product management career spanning 11+ years, I have really not paid too much attention to what software development process my team uses. Instead what I have focused on are things like -

1) Is my development team delivering functionality that solves customer problems that customers care about?

2) Are they delivering it on time so that it satisfies my existing customers and can help the business meet the revenue projections for this year?

3) Is the team receptive to iterative input or to customer’s new requirements during the development cycle to change the functionality based on customer feedback during alpha and beta testing - without telling me that “hey it was not in the spec and it is too late to make changes” (I fully realize to meet schedules and quality, there is indeed a point where it is too late to make changes)

4) Does my development team create very frequent and usable builds (not fully tested and hence buggy in some respect) so that QA and product management get to play with it early to ensure that what is being built is what customers want and to provide iterative feedback (Believe me, I do not think there is anything called a complete spec because have written so many functional specs over the years, I consider it difficult to foresee all the different permutations and combinations when writing the initial spec)?

5)  Are they delivering functionality of good quality that customers can use?

To me, delivering usable products to customers  that help the customer be successful and helps my business to make more money, is all that matters. What you call the process, agile, scrum, spike, non-agile does not matter.

Like anything else, if your development team does not have the right skill set, no development methodology stands a chance to do what is needed to sustain and grow your business. So before one starts using the latest fad in development methodology or starts saying things like - if you are not using agile, you are doing something wrong - it would be better to ask the question - why do I need this new methodology? what current development problems will it solve? What benefits would it bring to my customers or to the business.? Such an assessment would be well grounded in objectivity and reality rather than getting carried away by this hype.

I am not saying “agile” is bad or wrong (I don’t know enough about it) but no process can fix a problem if you don’t know the root cause to the problem.

How often have you called customer service at credit card companies, airlines, medical benefits and you have been asked to enter information such as your credit card number, your zip code, your social security number, your frequent flyer number etc. and then finally when you get to a live person, the first question is what is your XXXX - the same information that you had entered using the keypad …. Huh!!

Do these folks ever try out their own systems to check out the customer experience? Or is just a tactic to balance the call volume - benefit for them and none for the customer.

BTW, if you want to spare yourselves of this torture, check out gethuman.com

Last week, Indian automobile industry took a major step. Tata Motors, one of the companies in the revered Tata conglomerate unveiled “Nano” - the long talked about 1 lakh car (1 lakh = 100,000 and 1 lakh rupees = $2500 US). This was a dream come true for Ratan Tata - Chairman of Tata Motors.

It was a proud moment for all Indians including me. Someone had pursued his dream, in spite of all the naysayers who said that a car could not be built at such a price point. He persevered, motivated his team to create something what others called unachievable and succeeded. That is the hallmark of a true leader. He had two important criteria that he would not compromise on - the car had to look attractive and had to meet safety standards. It sure looks cute if you ask me - looks something very much like the smart car popular in Europe.

There are some very valid concerns in the general public around this announcement - impact on already congested Indian roads and the impact on increasing pollution. But let this not take away from what was achieved and how one man persevered to make his dream come true.

To me this car is going to make millions of people in rural India (where majority live) achieve their dream of owning a basic transport. Mr. Tata has changed the rules of the game needed to sell into this market segment. This is going to give a major boost to industries such as car repairs, car accessories, car parts etc. in rural India. This in turn will create more jobs and this can have nothing but a positive impact to the Indian economy.

This creation has more impact in revolutionizing the transport industry than any other product that I know. Oh by the way, remember how much hoopla was created in the US around the product codenamed Ginger what is now a failed product called Segway.

Mr. Tata, you have made a billion people proud last week. I hope that this turns to be the tipping point that makes more entrepreneurs worldwide - not just India - to believe in themselves, dream higher, persevere and succeed. I hope this car achieves market success and this becomes a tipping point that also forces the corrupt Indian politicians to wake up and fix the infrastructure problem that India desperately needs.

Imagine that you have to make a business case to your upper management for a product/project you want to get funded. There are two ways a product manager can ask for this:

1) I need $$$$$ and XXXXX number of people to do this project?

2) I have this idea that I have vetted with customers and prospects, here is the total size of the market, this will help us move the business forward, this would establish us as a market/thought leader, here is potential revenues we could bring in, what do you think and do you agree we need to do it?

Which do you think is going to be received well? Of course answer 2 (provided you have done enough research). The obvious question that will be asked would be - what would it take? And the answer is 1). But going in there with guns loaded just with 1) is not going to get anywhere.

The other benefit with 2), is you are asking for input whether it is the right thing to do - you are engaging your management to help you make the decision. Once you have the buy in that the idea/product is worth doing, they will open up for your justification for resources. But the common mistake made by product managers is doing 1) with no luck.