2 posts tagged “marketing”
When thinking about new products or enhancing existing products, product marketers are always faced with questions such as -
1) What are the problems to solve?
2) What products should be built?
3) What is the potential market size?
4) What is the right feature set that will make a compelling product that people will buy?
Two tools that can be used to find answers to these questions are market segmentation and personas (lately getting a lot of attention). Elaine Brechlin, in her article Reconciling market segmentation and personas clearly describes what each of these tools are and the differences between the two using a simple example of Rear Seat Entertainment Systems.
Who in product development should own the "voice of the customer"? Marketing, R&D, Tech Support, Sales? Well, if you answered "Sales" you have a problem. Salesmen will tell you what the last customer told them. Given this nature, what they told you yesterday is not what they will tell you today.
In my experience, the process should be owned by Marketing - more precisely it should be owned by Product Management. But this does not mean that only product managers should be listening to customers. I have been a long proponent of the theory that visiting customers in their "native land" should be a cross functional effort. After all, multiple eyes and ears are always better - product managers hear what the customers are saying in one way, developers hear it in another way and QA has their own way of hearing things. This is good because between the different groups, you would have captured the different ways of looking at the same customer problem.
Having been a proponent of this theory, it was great to read a great article on why developers should be visiting customers. Read more at Lost Garden: The Passion of the Developers
