Where to Gather Requirements From Enterprise Customers?
December 22, 2008 at 9:18 PM 3 comments
Reading Tuned In, written by Pragmatic Marketing folks, one thing strikes me. When it talks about how to find unresolved problems, it asks to “look for problems in your entire market, not just your customer base”. Wow! It is a simple idea but many of us in the enterprise software business probably forget to do it. I have seen many enterprise product teams to get their new requirements, user stories, and features mainly from the existing customers. Sometimes, they may just overwhelmed by a few major customers.
The problem to just tailor your products for a few major customers is that they probably represent just a small but important portion of your targeted customers. In addition, they have already had your product and probably have more requirements on incremental enhancements and tactical problems.
To tweak features to please your existing product is enssential to your business, but it is your incentive to move the discussion beyond small incremental improvents and instead focus on the problems that will make your solution complete, and on new problem areas that you can address. Don’t forget to get your user stories from those potential and unaddressed customers.
Entry filed under: Product Planning, Requirements. Tags: enterprise software, LinkedIn, product management.
1.
Andrew Codrington | January 14, 2009 at 7:43 AM
> get your user stories from potential and unaddressed customers
I agree this is the right thing to do, but ‘the literature’ I’ve seen (Tuned In, blogosphere…) doesn’t go deep into how to engage with that group – strategies/tactics for finding and starting conversations with people who are not yet your customer.
Anyone for a blog post/friendfeed convo on that topic?
2.
ir | March 18, 2009 at 2:18 PM
What’s worked for me has been to start by building a relationship with these potential customers.
If you start by trying to sell to these customers, you won’t get anywhere. I usually try to take them out to lunch/dinner/pub, it’s surprising how much people like to talk after a few drinks. The first meeting is usually a getting to know you meeting and understanding what they do. Even something as simple as “Hey I’m John Doe from xxx company and I’m in town next week for a conference and wanted to get together with you for drinks. Would Friday the 14th at 6 pm work for you?”.
The second/third meetings are for discussing the issues that you gathered from the first meeting. After doing this with several potential customers you’ll start to see certain common threads. At this stage you can decide how deep you want to go in investigating their problems, developing a straw man solution to discussion with them via a few ppt slides, etc.
3.
Friermperse | December 11, 2009 at 1:46 PM
Lots of folks write about this matter but you said some true words.