Category: customer interviews
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User Feedback vs. Behavior
When product managers interview customers to better understand their unmet needs, you will hear them explain their problems. If you ask them how they currently use your software, they will also explain in vivid detail how they use it. Unfortunately, often there is a distinct difference between what humans say…
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Five guidelines to prioritize feature requests
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 –…
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You want to talk to customers – ask me, I was a customer once …
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…
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Where do your customers get information?
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…
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Passion vs. decibels – How to manage vociferous customers
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…
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Avoid excuses for not conducting customer visits
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…
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Pain points vs. Requirements
I was involved in a conversation last week where we were trying to unearth customer pain points. One of the software 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…
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Voice of the customer – Tip#7 – Tackling the language barrier
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…
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Voice of the customer Tip #6 – Don’t listen to the same voice
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…
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How true is this in your company?
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…
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Voice of the Customer Tip #4 – Practice active listening
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…
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Voice of the Customer – Tip #3 – Five Why’s
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…
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Voice of the Customer Tip#2 – Role of Explorer
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.…
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Voice of the Customer Tip #1 – Start with softball questions
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…
Software Product Manager by Gopal Shenoy 