As a product manager, there is nothing more valuable than having concrete information about the market – customers, competitors, partners – all folks that influence the “external” world outside your office building. No one inside your office is buying your product, but then why do we make a lot of product decisions depending on “I [...]
Filed under: business, customer interviews, customer needs, customer visits, marketing, product management, voice of the customer | 4 Comments »
As a product manager, you are very likely to have more feature requests than what you can put out in a given release. In my case, a good product manager’s job at release planning is figuring out what to eliminate from consideration – you have to make hard decisions – that is what you are [...]
Filed under: business, customer experience, customer interviews, customer needs, marketing, product management, voice of the customer | 3 Comments »
Have you heard this one before – I have – internal pundits claiming they know what the market wants because at one point in time (read “eons” ago, before your market segment even existed), they used to be in the customer’s shoes.
“Hey, I used to do product design”
or
“I used to be a salesman”
or
“When I used [...]
Filed under: business, customer interviews, customer needs, customer visits, marketing, product management, voice of the customer | 2 Comments »
When interviewing customers to determine their needs, take the time to also ask them where they get information that keep them up-to-date in their profession.
1) Are there organizations that they regard in high regard that a recommendation from such organizations is considered valued?
2) What magazines do they read frequently?
3) Do they have a blog?
4) Do [...]
Filed under: business, customer interviews, customer needs, customer visits, marketing, product management, voice of the customer | 5 Comments »
In my product management career, I have always had some users who were more vociferous than most of the others. Their decibel level when they asked for new enhancements or yelled at you for the bugs in the software was orders of magnitude higher than majority of the users. The vast majority of these users [...]
Filed under: business, customer experience, customer interviews, customer needs, customer service, marketing, product management, voice of the customer, word of mouth | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
Filed under: business, customer interviews, customer needs, customer visits, marketing, product management, voice of the customer | Tagged: business, marketing, product manager, product management, customer visits, customer | Leave a Comment »
I was involved in a conversation last week where we were trying to unearth customer pain points. One of the product managers explained that main pain points were integration and scalability. This is what set me thinking about the difference between pain points and requirements. The two are not interchangeable – in fact there is [...]
Filed under: business, customer interviews, customer needs, customer visits, marketing, product management, voice of the customer | 1 Comment »
Unless your product is used only in the US, you as a product manager should make sure that you are listening to the “global” voice of the customer. Customers in other countries typically have vastly different needs than customers in the US. Localization of your product is something you should account for in the very [...]
Filed under: customer interviews, customer needs, customer visits, marketing, product management, voice of the customer | Leave a Comment »
You have decided to get out of your office and embark on the journey of discovering unmet needs of customers by talking to customers and listening to them express their unmet needs. One of the pitfalls to avoid is talking to the same customers – customers that you know very well, those that that love [...]
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I have found this picture to be very hilarious and after having talked to different people working in different companies, I am led to believe this is very true in a lot of companies. (I give the credit to the original creator of this picture whose name is unknown to me)
To avoid the above situation, [...]
Filed under: customer interviews, customer needs, product innovation, voice of the customer | 1 Comment »
Customers are wishing someone would listen to their needs and concerns, as opposed to talking to them. You sales people, your marketing people, your competitors and everyone else is talking to them about the products they should buy. But companies that are successful listen and observe their customers. So before you call or visit the [...]
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It is very typical while talking to customers that they ask you for a very specific enhancement. As a product manager, you should make sure you do not fall into this trap of accepting that the solution proposed by the customer is what they want. Customers are good at what they do, but cannot be [...]
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As a product manager, you could be asked to visit customers to help close a sales deal or to trouble shoot a customer problem along with a technical support person. None of these visits can be considered as part of your effort to listen to the voice of the customer. This is because in either [...]
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Whenever you start talking to users whether it is face-to-face or over the phone, first of all make them feel at ease. Users tend to be a) skeptical whether vendors trying to sell them something int the guise of a conversation and b) fearful of exposing their ignorance of the product you are talking to [...]
Filed under: customer interviews, customer needs, voice of the customer | Leave a Comment »
