Category: customer visits
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Customer Visits – Do’s and Don’ts
I attended the Product Camp Boston over the weekend and shared what I have learnt doing over 300 Customer Visits in 10 countries (US, Canada, Japan, UK, Germany, Netherlands, India, China, South Korea, Taiwan). Customer visits can be the best qualitative method to learn the most about your customers/prospects –…
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Customer Visit: 2 creative ways to get a budget
Times are tough, budgets are being cut, there is a travel ban in companies, so as a product manager, how do you get a travel budget so that you can get out of your office for on-site customer visits? It is hard, but here are two creative ways you can…
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Death by a thousand paper cuts ….
In my last post, I discussed the benefits of doing an on-site customer visit where you get to observe customers/prospects use your product or competitive products to get their job done. In my experience doing these visits, I often discover what I call “death by a thousand paper cuts” issues.…
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Five reasons why customer visits “rock”
I am a big fan of customer visits – ones where a software product manager visits customers on-site and observes them using your or competitor’s product. Now why do this? What are the benefits of doing this over talking to the same customer/prospect over the phone, while at a conference/trade…
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How many customers does a software product manager need to visit/interview?
As software product managers, we are chartered to unearth painpoints by interviewing customers/prospects. But how many do we have to talk to before we feel comfortable that we have talked to enough? How many is too many? I have always used the following guidelines which I picked up from the…
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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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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…
Software Product Manager by Gopal Shenoy 