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Heads up: You may not like my answer.
Talking to customers and prospects (esp. in the pre-sales cycle), conducting win-loss analysis and site visits are all key ways of gathering inputs towards building requirements for a product - either a new launch or a revision.
The key point to remember during site visits is to focus on the bigger picture, i.e. what is the customer trying to accomplish? From a very textbook standpoint that could be starting with the business process that is particular to that industry and interviewing key people at the client site as steps in the process. The reality as you will find in many cases is that people are busy - appointments are frequently rescheduled, key personnel interviews are unable to be conducted due to their absence, and the sequencing is almost never right.
This calls for a 2 step strategy - First, absorb as much as you call talking to as many people as you can, and take frequent notes - you'll be surprised how quickly we forget things. No special format needed here.
Second, distill key learnings down into a few areas where the conversation was steered to repeated;y, look for patterns between your conversations. In terms of tools, I particularly favor "MindManager" - a mind mapping tool for this.
This can then help feed directly into the MRD, with some targeted for the current release and some features immediately marked as "future".
In addition, a PM is helped by having people with different disciplines/skills accompany them to the client site. For e.g. having usability experts with you is important if you are trying to design a product with high interactivity needs.
Sometimes PMs are frequently seduced by the notion that that not only at they the "Voice of the Customer" but start to veer towards assuming that PMs know more than anyone else about the customer - a dangerous notion. The only way to get around this is to test your products against the market and test often via formal/informal feedback. If you don't have 10 customers that you can call on your list for a quick opinion, your products are probably in trouble...
Raj
Warm Greetings to everyone!
I'm new to this group.
As we know, the aim of this yahoo group is targeted towards discussion/sharing knowledge related to "Product Management/Marketing".
I'd few queries, which I would like to discuss with everyone.
Here we go!
We all know that The "Product Manager" is called as "Internal Customer" within any organization
Or some people even call them "Voice of Customer"!
Here query is, when any product manager makes any visit to any customer site, his/her agenda would generally move around following points –
- Trying to find out the domain customer is working? Kind of product/services they are using? Finding out their satisfaction level?
- Trying to find out pain areas/ problems / difficulties of customer's current environment?
- Trying to find out the new features, which they would love to see in the next releases? Finding out what kind of value addition they would like to see?
- Etc… etc...
My point is does any one know any standard and "Generic" template, where we can grab all customers' inputs in a single document very systematically rather than a Wilde method of noting discussion points or grabbing customer feedback from "Minutes of meetings" and use it while creating our own MRD.
Bottom line, what I asking is, does any one know any better way to "Record customer's voice" so to have a point-to-point clarity and we can use full out of it while creating MRD.
Thanks and Best Regards,
-Yogesh
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http://zvmedia.com
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