Naturally, our phone agents are outsourced, which means my company is the outsource provider’s customer. Also, since I am a contractor, my company is technically my client.

My product’s goal is to enable is my client’s vendor’s agents (essentially my product’s customer) to provide these services to their employer’s client’s customers (also my client’s customers).

Does this ever start to make sense?

Basically, my job is to be a bleeding edge domain expert, to guide the development of my product, and of course, to translate between technical, business, and customer.

To tie this in to the topic at hand I recently had the opportunity to travel to meet some of the agents who would be actually using my product. I was able to collect a great deal of information that I’d have never received had I asked over the phone.

You see, the vendor prefers it’s operations managers to do all the talking, and much gets filtered out through the 6 layers of management between me and the agents. In a situation like this, meeting in person is the only way to cut the crap and get real answers straight from the source.

Hearing agents tell me that the product I’ve inherited is essentially garbage, and their insight on what needs to happen to fix it was infinitely more useful than the ‘everything’s ok’ spiel we were getting over the phone.

One thing to add – Bond with your customer and you will understand their needs better. If all else fails, try beer.

Great post. I agree that customer visits should be in the regular schedule of a Product Manager. What do you recommend for new Product Managers like me, whose product is not selling and have less customers ? How can I find the customers of the competition and the right contact within the organization? Thanks for the post and I look forward to hearing from you.

Great article. A few things I have learnt over years of doing customer visits are:
1) Refrain from visiting your pet customers who want to rave about how great your product is but visit those who may not be happy with your product or those that are not using your product to find out why.

2) Try to take your team members (developers, QA, documentation or product marketing) with you especially on local trips that are a short drive away so that they get to listen to the customers as well. But no matter what you do, never take a developer only on one customer visit – otherwise that one customer will become the entire world to development. It is better not to take them to any customers than taking them on one customer visit.

3) Set the expectations with customer before you get there on what you want to discuss. You want to make sure you get to talk to people who will help you understand what the customer does in their business and then with your product. Talking to a guy in the trenches will not get you the big picture and talking to the VP of engineering will not get you the real state of affairs in the trenches. Talking to both will help if that is what your visit objectives are.

4) Never take your laptop with you so that you are not drawn into the rat hole of demoing your product or educating the customer on some product feature. Your objective on the visit should be that of an explorer and not to be sales support or a trainer. These should be done at a later time but not on a customer visit where you are trying to understand the customer’s business and where your product fits in

I also doubt that motivating people internally and visiting customers are mutually exclusive — doing one shouldn’t prevent you from doing the other. In fact, you need to be able to, because both of those things you will be doing on an ongoing basis as long as you’re a product manager.

Customer visits are not just to discover the next feature to put into your product. They help you understand the market, the unmet needs, potential new product opportunities, alternative uses for your product, emerging trends, and a whole host of other things that are not directly about your product’s features. If you get in the habit of regularly visiting customers — regardless of what they’re saying about your product — you will be in a better position to take advantage of opportunities and get ahead of the curve, rather than being in a situation where your customer visits result in requests for an obvious and vitally important feature which you should have included in the first place.

I started with a new company (Alianza) two weeks ago and am already planning to make customer visits. We do not have too many customers yet but I know that a big part of my “getting up to speed” will be watching customers use the products. I will not likely have a large travel budget this year, but I can guarantee I will use it all!

Great post! Thanks.
Michael

What is the point of visiting more customers if you know what they are going to say? I’d rather focus on motivating people internally, helping to get the release out the door, and then move into a new research cycle once the customer has had the chance to sate themselves on the one feature they want.