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 »
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 »
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, customer, customer visits, marketing, product management, product manager | 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 [...]
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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 [...]
Filed under: customer interviews, customer needs, customer visits, voice of the customer | Leave a Comment »
