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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 »
I have been a big proponent of online communities and social media – I have written at least two blog posts on this. So when the latest Business Week arrived with the main section titled “Consumer vigilantes” I could not put it down. The most interesting article among many dealing with social media was titled [...]
Filed under: business, customer experience, customer needs, customer service, leadership, marketing, product management, voice of the customer, word of mouth | 1 Comment »
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 »
Here is a great video that I came across produced by Geert Desager of Microsoft – watch for yourself, it is fun !!
Filed under: business, marketing, product management, voice of the customer, word of mouth | 1 Comment »
This morning, while walking through Terminal 3 of the San Francisco airport to get to my gate, I happened to notice the design museum display near the moving walkways. The museum is titled “From Prototype to Product: Thirty-three Projects from the Bay Area Design Community“.Behind each display, were quotes of some famous people.
One of them [...]
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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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“Innovation”, “product innovation” are being used by everyone these days. A google search on “product innovation” returns 169 million results. A search for books on product innovation on Amazon returns over 10,800 books. Sure enough it is one of the most frequently used business buzzword these days. We all have heard phrases like “Innovate or [...]
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After 11 fun years at SolidWorks, I am leaving to pursue a new career opportunity. I consider myself lucky to have worked at such an awesome company during a time when it grew from a startup to a force in the CAD industry. In 1996, it was the second job of my fledgling career and [...]
Filed under: customer needs, marketing, product management, voice of the customer | 14 Comments »
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 »
How many times have you read marketing brochures, datasheets etc. shook your head and really wondered what the product that is being described is meant to do? Marketing collateral is full of “flexible, scalable, reliable, robust, next generation, empowering, state of the art, ….” – you get the idea. I have always wondered if [...]
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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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