Alexei@Nitobi

One of the roles of marketing is to constantly validate product decisions and find out what customers think about your products. This is especially relevant in software because we can make changes to the product at relatively low cost (compared to physical goods) and distribute those changes to our customers immediately. What we need now is a tight feedback loop to make this all work.

Danc, over at lost garden has made some great suggestions for getting close to the customer. The goal is to make sure you’re building what people want. Some of these are more easily implemented than others:

1. Use your own product
2. Have onsite customers
3. Observe customers using your product
4. Hire experts to study your customers
5. Listen to lead users

I’m glad to say we do 4 of those fairly regularly, although it’s not structured very well. I would probably say we get even more value from our day to day interactions with customers. Especially in terms of understanding what problems people are having with the software. To this end I’d add the following points to that list:

1. Perform low-cost services around your products. Do integrations, premium on-site support, and customizations, and do as much of it as possible. Why? We have found that we learn so much when we engage customers directly in service contracts. We’re actually not averse to sending our best people on-site too – because when they come back they almost always use that experience to improve our products, and drive development of new ones.
2. Send developers directly to the customer. From time to time, send your product developers to a customer site. Why? There’s no better test environment that an actual customer project in their actual work environment. Here we see how good your docs, API, and UI really are.
3. Gather data during tech-support. Every point of customer contact is an opportunity to learn. We’ve recently begun compiling contextual data about the kinds of problems people are having during tech support calls. We’ll use that to make decsisions about product development in the future.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, December 9th, 2006 at 9:37 pm and is filed under business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.