1 post tagged “customer engagement”

As a product manager, you are the product's CEO. You have the responsibility and accountability for everything related to the product. In your role, you have to work with and depend on multiple internal or external groups (none of whom report to you). Hence you essentially are the team's cheerleader - you have to make sure your team's morale is high and that their contributions are recognized and appreciated.

In my decade long experience working with development teams, here are some things that I have done that keeps things moving in the right direction

1. Encourage all team members to come up with ideas to improve the product
2. Invite your team members to join you at each customer touchpoint - this could be a conference call to discuss a product issue that the customer is faced with, a conference call to interview the customer or when you are planning to visit a customer for understanding their pain points. More your team members are in tune with your customers, easier it is for the entire team to come up with an effective solution to solve the customer's problem. You will no longer have arguments about what is important, what will appeal to the customer etc. However, it is important that you as the product manager own the customer engagement. Involving your team does not absolve you of this duty - you cannot delegate this to anyone else.
3. Ask your team members to review customer communications, customer surveys etc. before you send it out. Your team starts to feel that their opinion matters - "pride of product ownership" is what you want to cultivate in your team.
4. Have a weekly one hour team meeting where the team gets to discuss the important aspects of your product - major issues, progress made, any slips in schedule etc. This puts everyone on the team on the same page and you will avoid any last minute surprises.
   
5. Keep your team abreast of conferences you may come across that may be helpful for your team - maybe a conference for developers on the latest technology, a conference for product testers on latest best practices of test automation or your marketing team on search engine marketing. It is important that your team keeps abreast of new industry trends so that your product keeps pace with new trends or industry best practices.
6. Take your team out for lunch or dinner from time to time - not just at the end. It is important you do this during the product development cycle and not wait for the product to ship - take them out when the alpha milestone is met, after Beta is launched, after the product is shipped etc.
7. Share the goodies (T-shirts, coffee mugs, laptop bags etc.) that you pick up during customer visits, conferences etc. with your team. Trust me, these go a long way especially with developers who do not get as many chances as you do to get out of the offices.
8. Forward good and bad things customers tell you about your product to your team. When you reply to a customer who may have send you great feedback about a feature in your product, copy the developer who worked on the feature in the reply. In the reply, do mention to the customer that you are copying the developer whose hard effort made the feature a reality. You want to share the successes with your entire team. In a separate email, forward the email to the entire team and again recognize the developer/tester/whoever made this a reality.
   

One word of a caution on the above - you have to do this consistently. The worst thing you could do is take your team on one customer visit or make them participate on one conference call and they think what this customer told you is what everyone wants.

Again, none of this absolves you of your important role as a product manager - owning the customer engagement process.