Welcome to the Listening Post!

Where Do Great Ideas Come From?

Tweet

 

As a Product Manager, I struggle with the following question all the time:

“Where do great ideas come from?”

The question is born out a basic need that all Product Managers have…how to build a killer product roadmap that wows customers, creates new revenue channels and renders the competition obsolete. However, knowing where to go to find inspiration and what tools you can use to help glean insight can be challenging. Recently, Steve Johnson from Pragmatic Marketing and I hosted a webinar on The Role of Feedback in Product Innovation to address this question.

There are four main sources of information for product managers looking to build innovative products:

• Customers (end users, administrators, etc…)
• The Market (decision makers, prospects, suspects, etc…)
• Thought Leaders (analysts, press, industry leaders, etc…)
• Internal Stakeholders (executives, development, sales, support, etc…)

Customers are a relatively easy group to find and hopefully are relatively willing to talk with you. Following the Research Lifecycle we reviewed in a recent blog post, you should be able to easily conduct interviews or focus groups, send out surveys, solicit feedback and generally build a roadmap that meets the needs of your existing users. Listening to customers is incredibly valuable and will help you drive customer satisfaction, incent re-purchase, and generally improve the vitality of your overall product offering.

“The Market” is a tougher community to measure. It generally consists of key decision makers, prospects and “suspects” (potential prospects). For B2B firms, some of these individuals are actually already customers, but they’re not your end users: they are executives or key decision makers that bought your product, but then turned the day-to-day operations over to others who became your end users. This community should be relatively accessible and is a great target audience for interviews. If your company sends out an on-boarding survey or regular customer satisfaction survey (as we do at Vovici), be sure to ask product-oriented questions that probe for new ideas.

Suspects and prospects are not yet customers. While you can get terrific insight from talking to prospects during the sales cycle, tread carefully…asking too many questions about products or services you don’t yet offer puts you at risk of scuttling deals. Also, factors that prospects tell you are important during the sales cycle might not wind up being the final decision-making criteria they use to select a vendor. Another idea is to conduct detailed win-loss interviews and surveys. You can also find communities of prospects by networking at industry events, attending on-line webinars and joining topical on-line communities.

The market is perhaps the most important group to listen to. Decision makers at existing customers will best articulate problems that product extensions (or new, tangential products) can solve. Listening to “lost customers” give you great insight into areas where competitors are stronger than you and talking to suspects at industry events or in on-line communities can help you brainstorm ideas for future product innovations.

Thought Leaders represent people who can inspire you to think of your industry or product line in completely out-of-the box ways. Hopefully some of your existing customers are thought leaders…people who look past the features or functions that drive incremental improvements and who can articulate blue-ocean type changes that can solve hidden problems and open up new markets. As Vovici, we’re fortunate to have some customers who fall exactly into this category…they’re great candidates for invitations to a Customer Advisory Council, which will give you regular access to them for deep, pointed discussions. Outside of customers, reading secondary research, trolling social media sites, and building relationships with key analysts, members of the press and association representatives, can help you find inspiration and perhaps think of your product, company or industry in a new and different way.

Internal Stakeholders are the easiest to find. While it’s true that some companies build inspired products based on engineering genius, many of those products ultimately fail due to their inability to solve a real market problem (think Segway). What’s important when soliciting internal feedback from internal stakeholders is to validate anything you hear with external sources. It’s hard to contradict the CEO if your opinion differs from theirs. It’s a lot easier with market-based facts.

Leveraging all four groups of stakeholders, and ensuring that you use the right tools for the right audience is a great way to build a killer roadmap, wow customers and help your company reach new heights.