Comments on: Are You Listening To Your Customers Product Manager?

By: 3 Skills That Most Product Managers Are Missing | Blue Elephant Consulting

3 Skills That Most Product Managers Are Missing | Blue Elephant Consulting — Fri, 20 May 2011 17:49:14 +0000

[...] we’re not talking about having the ability to sit there and listen when someone else is talking to you just waiting for them to pau…. Instead, a product manager needs to be able to listen, process what has been said, and then ask [...]

By: 3 Skills That Most Product Managers Are Missing

3 Skills That Most Product Managers Are Missing — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 04:04:28 +0000

By: Dr. Jim Anderson

Dr. Jim Anderson — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 03:29:11 +0000

Magnus: very well stated! I like your point about what questions you ask the customers. I have found that playing the role of a 2-year old child and asking “Why” over and over again seems to eventually help the customer drill down to their core pain point or need. That is if you don’t anger them first by asking the same question over and over again…!

By: Dr. Jim Anderson

Dr. Jim Anderson — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 03:26:20 +0000

Bjorn: you are probably correct. Apple does face a unique problem — their products are revolutionary and so listening to customers would only guide them to create products that look like existing products. For the rest of us mere mortal product managers, a balance between listening to what customers say and watching what they do is what we need to be doing…

By: Magnus Billgren

Magnus Billgren — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 08:05:16 +0000

Of course we all listen to the customer or market – no matter what Steve Jobs says.

But it in interesting in how we listen and if we listen to the market or customers.

I believe that Apple is primarily listening to the market, and not limiting it to the customers but to the technology development arena, the trends, the news etc. They are listening – but maybe not to the individual customer.

Right here is the dilemma portrayed by Porter about combining Customer closeness, Product Superiority and operational effectiveness. If you go for product leadership it is hard to listen to customers! (There are strategies for combining the three – Optimal modularization – used by many mastered by very few!!)

I work primarily with B2B product development and management. Thet truth is that most customers knows what features they want but that need to be handled and structured in a different way. Finding the reasons behing the feature is the trick. My key question for finding the future is: What are the forces that makes my value chain and market to change their behaviour? Can you understand that you gain true market and customer insight.

Mereley listening to customers wishes and react can create a small profitable company. But it will never create the great long term succes!

(A method described by Christian Wagner and Albert Hayashi in Journal of Product Innovation – portrays a methodology for new idea generation based on customer inputs.)

By: Björn Waide

Björn Waide — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 06:27:48 +0000

I think its a misconception to believe that Apple is NOT listening to customers. In case of the iPad they were just listening to NEW or potential customers, not existing ones. And yes, they probably don’t use focus groups, but I’m sure they are using field studies. Watching customers is always better than listening to them.