Do your customers know that “you” exist?

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gopalshenoy

on

April 14, 2009

In one of my previous posts, I had talked about educating customers on all the different product enhancements you have made to solve their problems. But there is another problem that needs customer education.

The phone conversation goes:

Product Manager: “Mr. Customer, I am the product Manager from company X.”

Customer: “Product Manager? Who is that?”

This is not uncommon. Not many people know what product managers do in companies. Some mistake them to be salespeople or customer support. Yes, we are a not well known breed like salesmen, software engineers, finance, customer support etc. We have to take it upon ourselves to educate our customers on who we are and then build the rapport with them.

Once customers find out that product managers have a large influence on the future direction of products they use, you become their greatest ally. But it is up to us to communicate it to them, build rapport with them, listen to them (yes listen, not talk to them) and build solutions that will make their lives easier.

2 responses to “Do your customers know that “you” exist?”

Thomas

April 24, 2009

I have made the same experiences. Always I had to explain what I am doing in my job.
Actually I am thinking about going even a step further and removing the job title completely from my business cards! Just for the joy of the experiment.

cheers,
Thomas

Reply
Dr. Jim Anderson

April 20, 2009

Sure you can do that, but is it really worth the effort? Unless you work in a marketing department (and your customers probably don’t), nobody is going to really understand what a product manger does.

Why not take an easier path? On my business cards I never put “Product Manger”. Instead I put “Senior Manger”. People know what a Senior Manger is – somebody with experience. I then tell them that I work in Marketing – everybody knows what Marketing does (sorta).

Once I got around having to brag to my customers about how important my job was, everything got a lot easier. They are now able to automatically figure out what I do without any explanations from me.

Now that makes life a lot easier!

– Dr. Jim Anderson
The Accidental PM Blog
“Home Of The Billion Dollar Product Manager”

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Software Product Manager by Gopal Shenoy