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Interest Goes Where Money Flows

Creating a Market-Centric "Voice-of-the-Customer" Program

Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs have a rich and important tradition within product management organizations. When executed well, they provide a rich source of information about unsolved customer problems. Unfortunately, many VoC programs are starting to creak under old and somewhat outdated perceptions of who or what is a customer and how you can reach them. This webinar discusses why moving beyond just your customers to include the "Voice of your Market" (VoM) provides greater opportunity to create enhanced products and services.


Watch Interest Goes Where Money Flows






About the Presenters


steve Steve Johnson is a recognized thought-leader on the strategic role of product management and marketing. Broadly published and a frequent keynote speaker, Steve has been a Pragmatic Marketing instructor for more than 10 years and has personally trained thousands of product managers and hundreds of company senior executive teams on strategies for creating products that people want to buy. He teaches several top-rated seminars including Practical Product Management, Requirements That Work, and Pragmatic Roadmapping, as well as many on-site workshops.

Prior to joining Pragmatic Marketing, Steve practiced the discipline of product management for over 18 years at a variety of software and hardware firms and served as head of marketing for the leading provider of performance management software.

Steve writes the Product Marketing blog. Contact Steve at sjohnson@pragmaticmarketing.com


Luke Hohmann2

Jim Foxworthy is an industry veteran with more than 30 years in the computer industry. He has been utilizing the Pragmatic Marketing Framework since the early ‘90’s. Jim leads the Pragmatic Marketing instructor team and is Pragmatic Marketing’s Product Manager.

Prior to joining Pragmatic Marketing, Jim was president of a consulting firm focused exclusively on implementations of the Pragmatic Marketing Framework. In that role he helped nearly 100 different organizations become more tuned in to their markets. Jim’s balance of technical, sales, and executive knowledge is certainly an attribute to his success.

“Excellent”, “well-spoken”, “clear,” and “entertaining” are just some of the words attendees of the seminars use to describe Jim, whose goal is to ensure that technology companies listen to their markets, and that business decisions are driven by fact, not opinion.

Contact Jim at jfoxworthy@pragmaticmarketing.com

Few questions

Posted by Arun Bhargava at 2009-06-19 06:01 PM
1. Which data you would rely on? Customer feedback or sales guy feedback?
2. Don't you think all customer needs, problems, etc must be all clarified before development starts? Alpha and Beta is done very late in development
3. What do you think if the development team recommends a major change in alpha or beta test? Whose fault it is product managers or development team?

feedback

Posted by Steve Johnson at 2009-06-20 10:25 AM
1. I always rely on customer feedback. It's a rare sales person who puts company interests ahead of his need to close a deal. Sales people don't see the bigger picture--and really shouldn't. They should be focused on selling what we have now. We've tasked YOU with determining what we ought to have in the future. Talk to some real people.

2. Customer validation begins with prototypes, then demos of working code. Don't wait until beta when it's usually too late to change anything. A good dev team does a prototype (on paper or in powerpoint) for anything that is not well-understood. This is tested with a product manager or product owner, and often that's enough; if we need more feedback, the product owner will get us access to a customer (a webinar works fine for this).

3. If the development team is adding or changing major stuff in field testing, your process is broken. Field testing (in alpha and beta) NOT about testing user interaction; it's about verifying your product in environments you cannot duplicate in a lab.

Bring real people--not sales people or developers--into your validation testing. Do it early and often. Get feedback while there's still a chance to adapt or change. Don't wait until it's too late.

Sales Input

Posted by Jim Foxworthy at 2009-06-21 07:19 PM
I agree with Steve: sales is tasked to focus on what can be sold today. But they will bring product management input anyway. What do you do with it? Extract the problem buried in the input, then validate it with others! Just like you'd do with problems that come to you from other sources. Don't discard it just because it came from sales, but don't take the input without using good process. No matter who generated an idea, all ideas must run the gauntlet of market verification.

Discovery or Validation?

Posted by Rajib Ghosh at 2009-06-19 06:01 PM
When you take an existing product product functionality to a new interface - say to Web from client-server, do you still recommend Discovery or go straight to Validation?

discovery and validation

Posted by Steve Johnson at 2009-06-20 10:25 AM
If the market problems are well-understood, validation research is appropriate for a new technology platform.

But with each change in technology, it's worthwhile to consider if you really discovered the problems. After all, did anyone do discovery research for the old product? And are there new problems that didn't exist before that will affect our new technology version?

Go interview a few at least to verify that you're not missing anything and then do validation of your new product.

Market Research

Posted by Rajiv Janjanam at 2009-06-19 06:01 PM
What kind of marketing research should be conducted to channel partners who show no loyalty to your organisation and just follow companies that throw money for their services - to find out what apart from money motivates them.

channel = sales

Posted by Steve Johnson at 2009-06-20 10:25 AM
Channel partners are sales people. THey are part of the distribution chain; they are not customers. This is a really difficult concept for many companies to understand. "We sell paper through Staples so Staples is the customer." Actually, Joe Average who buys paper at Staples is your customer. Sales people--whether direct or indirect--are never the customer; they are part of the company distribution strategy.

To be successful, someone in product management needs to understand the end-user customer, not just the distribution partners.

Customer focus groups or usability expert?

Posted by Naomi Ward at 2009-06-19 06:01 PM
What if my biggest potential project risk is usability/look and feel - how can I best move from different opinions to facts I can use to bring back on track. Customer focus groups or perhaps hiring a usability expert? Or both?

Usability

Posted by Jim Foxworthy at 2009-06-21 07:19 PM
Both - and be sure to include some 'non-customers' as well. If usability is your biggest project risk, respond with your broadest and deepest investment.

Care to Comment?

Posted by Elizabeth HInkelman at 2009-06-19 06:01 PM
The process of sorting the user problem groups into iterations looked uncannily waterfall-like... comments?

Sorting problems into groups: Waterfall in disguise?

Posted by Jim Foxworthy at 2009-06-21 07:19 PM
What a great question! To be sure, the slide graphics make the grouping appear 'waterfally', but only if you do your market research just once, compile the results and then group. But you won't do that, right? Market research (discovery & validation) is done continuously. And what you learn will cause you to re-group and re-allocate. Of course, reallocation can be less disruptive to the roadmap than it is to the sprint. But the key is that you never stop listening to your maket segments.

Question

Posted by Miki Tokola at 2009-06-19 06:01 PM
Should PMs take developers to onsite interviews?

yes and no

Posted by Steve Johnson at 2009-06-20 10:25 AM
A product manager is the developers' representative of the market. That is, they are sending you into the market so they can focus on programming. But it never hurts to take others on customer trips. Everyone needs to understand the customer environment.

Incentives

Posted by Frank Strong at 2009-06-19 06:01 PM
It's asking a lot for participation in market research, how do you feel about providing incentives in exchange for particpant's time? Does it bias the research?

give 'em better products

Posted by Steve Johnson at 2009-06-20 10:25 AM
Most firms tell me that they don't need to give incentives to customers to participate. People are flattered to be asked and like the ability to influence product direction. It may be different for consumer products but enterprise customers aren't swayed by "get an ipod" promotions. The funny thing is that sales people insist that customers should have compensation but customers rarely ask for it.

If you must give some incentive for some internal political reason, a donation to a company charity gets better results than a gift.

Sales wins

Posted by Ray Schraff at 2009-06-19 06:01 PM
In this economy, can companies afford to say no to a sales win in exchange for added features ?

sales focus

Posted by Steve Johnson at 2009-06-20 10:25 AM
I'm probably not the best person to answer this because I would encourage you to say "no" to sales requests. You don't want your sales people and your customers to DEFINE your product; you want your customers to INSPIRE your product. Sales people don't see trends and patterns; they see one deal and another deal and another deal--all unrelated in my experience.

Let's see what Jim says. He likes sales people more than I do.

Sales Wins / Sales Focus

Posted by Jim Foxworthy at 2009-06-21 07:19 PM
Oh, if all that was involved was "liking" each other better! The bottom line is similar to a comment I made above: take the features that would produce the sales win, tease out the underlying Problem Statements, then validate if the problems are pervasive, urgent and MANY accounts will pay for a solution. Then compare the impact to your business if you solve THESE problems versus the ones you'd already identified. That way you are comparing investment choices with common criteria, and not getting pulled into the emotion of a single deal.

Question

Posted by Donald Gray at 2009-06-19 06:01 PM
How many customers should you test with at the end of an iteration? How big of a segment?

test enough

Posted by Steve Johnson at 2009-06-20 10:25 AM
The short answer is: test enough. If you visit three and all three agree, you're done! Sales people think that one customer story is enough while engineers seem to think we need to survey thousands and thousands. Our point is that you don't have to run a six month study--just visit a few people and get some quick feedback. Once your company starts getting success with this research, they'll want to do more of it.