In the end, it all comes down to what your customer wants to tell you about your product. However, how many of us have been taught how to listen to our customers?
What You'll Find Inside:
- LET'S GO VISIT THE CUSTOMER, PRODUCT MANAGER
- ARE ANGRY CUSTOMERS A PRODUCT MANAGER'S BEST FRIEND?
- CUSTOMER LED NEW PRODUCT DESIGN: NOTES FROM THE FIELD
- YOUR CUSTOMERS ARE IDIOTS & YOU NEED TO TELL THEM WHAT TO DO
If only it was as easy as having our potential customers pick up the phone to give us a call and tell us what they'd like our products to do for them. That never seems to happen so product managers have to take a different approach.
The good news is that information on what our customers want our products to do is out there - we just need to know how to find it. Visiting the customer is a great way to get important product information if you know how to ask the right questions. Additionally, we all collect tons of information on our customers and our products, but knowing what to do with it is another story.
You wouldn't think that an angry customer would be able to help a product manager improve their product, but you'd be wrong. Angry customers will tell you in very clear terms what your product is NOT doing for them.
Your ultimate goal as a product manager has to be to involve your customer in the product creation process. Since your customer is the one who best knows and understands what their needs are, the more that they can contribute to the design of the product, the better your chances of selling it them are.
Finally, depending on how new or innovative your product is, your customers may not understand what it does or even that they have the problem that it solves. When you find yourself in this situation, you've got the job of educating your customer about not only their problems but also the solution that your product can provide them with.
This book contains the answers that you need in order to better understand what your customers are trying to tell you. It's a matter of understanding how to listen to them and then how to understand what they have been trying to tell you. After you've read the book, you're going to be a product manager who understands what your customers are trying to tell you better than anyone else!
For more information on what it takes to be a great product manager, check out my blog, The Accidental Product Manager, at:
www.TheAccidentalPM.com
About the Author: Managing a product is not just a business, it's a science. Nobody knows more about the science of product management than Dr. Jim Anderson.
As Dr. Anderson says "I don't embrace excuses from product managers about why their products are not successful, I embrace solutions."
Over the last 25 years, Dr. Anderson has transformed failing products worldwide. Dr. Anderson will turn these money pits into money makers. Welcome to the premier blog for learning how to develop, launch, and manage wildly successful products.
Dr. Jim Anderson is known as the "Billion Dollar Product Manager" because the products that he's manged have produced over US$1B in revenue. In reaching this goal, he has truly been there / done that. He has applied his knowledge of the science of product management to individual products at small start-ups as well as entire products lines for some of the world's companies.
The same successful product management science techniques can be made to work in both environments. In over 25 years of managing products and solutions, Dr. Anderson has implemented best practices for managing products at some of the world's largest firms: Boeing, Siemens, Alcatel, and Verizon.
Coupled with his practical, real-world experience he's created a proven strategy for streamlining the development of products. Dr. Anderson realizes that for a product to be successful, it takes an entire company working together, not different departments working separately. Making this happen is the real challenge that Product Managers face.
For more information on Blue Elephant Consulting and product management, go to: www.BlueElephantConsulting.com
