Four Questions You Should Ask in Customer Interviews; Five-Year View of B2B Product Management

Jeff Lash

Four Questions You Should Ask in Customer Interviews, But Probably Don’t

There are many techniques for understanding buyers, customers and users, though interviewing is one of the best in terms of the value received for the effort. Whether you’re trying to create personas, uncover needs not being met for existing customers or identify aspects of a product that current users feel could be improved, interviews can be a valuable source of insight. I talk with many product managers and marketers who are experienced at interviewing, but they often fail to take full advantage of the format. Whether you’re new to buyer/customer/user interviews or you’ve done more than you care to count, my post on the SiriusDecisions blog — Four Questions You Should Ask in Customer Interviews, But Probably Don’t — provides you with some suggestions on how to improve the insight value of an interview.

Product Management Festival 2014
This is a final reminder that I’ll be speaking at the 2014 Product Management Festival in Zurich. It’s less than two weeks away so register now! My presentation on Wednesday, September 17 will be on Effectively Communicating Product Roadmaps. It looks to be a great conference and I’m excited to present, participate and learn. If you’re attending, let me know and we can plan on meeting face-to-face.

A Five-Year View of Product, Marketing and Sales
At the 2014 SiriusDecisions Summit, I joined my colleagues Jason Hekl (@the_hekler) and Mark Levinson (@MarkBLevinson)
to present a A Five-Year View of Product, Marketing and Sales. In a previous post here I provided some links to good summaries of the Summit — many of which included some references to the Five-Year View presentation. However, there’s also a nice details summary also wanted to highlight a new summary up on the SiriusDecisions blog that provides a nice synopsis of the presentation in more detail. I recommend the summary in particular if you’re a business-to-business product manager or product management leader trying to understand key trends and implications over the next five years.

What’s Hot on Twitter
Here are a few of my tweets that have generated the most interest over the past week; to get these in real-time, follow me at @jefflash: