How often should you schedule your customer conversation sessions?

Product managers and product designers need to balance the time they spend designing the product and the time they spend having conversations with customer. After every customer conversation session, product managers will need time to digest the inputs, come up with ideas and incorporate them in the prototype.

Start with one or two customer conversation sessions per week. This should result in at least one iteration of the prototype once a week.

Once in every 4-6 weeks, plan to have a full week or workshops with multiple customers. Call this the customer conversation week. The advantage of this approach is that you will be able to validate an idea with multiple customers within a few days and take important decisions. The disadvantage is that product managers and designers will have less time to incorporate feedback into the prototype. So you may end up talking about certain ideas rather than showing them in the form of a prototype.

Timing of your product conversation sessions matters a lot

One of the key responsibilities of a product manager managing customer conversations, is to determine the timing of the product conversation sessions. Multiple feedback loops with customers is a key advantage product conversation sessions have over traditional requirements gathering sessions. You should recognize this  advantage and make the best out of it by determining the number, timing and frequency of your sessions with customers. To do this well, work with the rest of the product team side by side, participate in product design sessions, understand what they are building and assess when the time is ripe to gather feedback on the newly prototyped ideas.

You might need additional feedback approximately every 4 to 6 weeks. If you are in charge of customer management, you need to develop and master your skills to assess this need for feedback and determine the timing of the conversations.

You also need to ensure that the conversation sessions actually happen. Once feedback is collected and analyzed, you need to nudge product managers and designers to incorporate the feedback into to a new and evolving prototype. This will help product managers and designers arrive at some decisions  as well as give rise to some brand new questions. By nudging fellow product managers and designers to have repeated conversations with customers, you can ensure that the feedback is actually incorporated into the prototypes. The fear of going before a customer will force the team to iterate the prototype quickly and bring it to a logical conclusion.

As a customer advocate, you need to make sure that in every session a new version of the prototype or a new idea is presented for discussion. This will showcase the evolution of the product and keep customers engaged.

Set Clear Expectations With Customers During Product Conversations

It is important to set clear expectations while engaging customers in a product conversation. In the first conversation you should clearly convey the amount of time they need to spend in work sessions every month, the type of people who need to be involved from the customer organization, the kind of product team members who will be involved from your organization and the time frame for product delivery.

You must be very frank with the customer and explain what the engagement means. One of the critical pieces of information you need to convey is that the product engagement is not a custom development project where all customer requirements are incorporated into the product without debate.  You should also acknowledge that the product design effort may not result in a product that will be released to customers. Prepare the customer for that outcome and be very forthright about that.

Being honest with your customer is the best strategy to earn their trust. Such trust will earn you a receptive customer who teams up with you to achieve the common goal of building the best product possible.

Type of engagements to have product conversations

We identified four types of engagements. You can choose the one that best fits your budget, time, skill and product development phase:

• Asynchronous
• Unstructured Engagement
• Structured Engagement
• Cumulative Engagement

Where To Start When You Are Building A Customer Pipeline

While building your customer pipeline for product conversations, start with your current customers. You can also start with companies considering your products. Existing customers, who have already invested in your product portfolio, might be more inclined to give you time compared to a prospect. It might also be easier to get a legal non-disclosure agreement signed from a current customer. Some of your current customers may already have a non-disclosure agreement with you. But do not rely only on current customers.

In order to get around 10-15 customers you will need to start with a much bigger list of customers. Aim for about two hundred target customers. As your product hypothesis evolves, the list of potential customers will shrink considerably. Also, customers are normally busy running their own businesses. Not everyone is going to agree to share their time. Customers may decline the engagement for any number of reasons. So start with a long list of customers and expect the list to shrink rapidly.

Talk to experienced product managers in your team. Normally product managers have good working relationships with many customers. Rely on that relationship to build your customer pipeline. Another good approach is  to team up with colleagues from the sales or pre-sales teams. Sales teams sometimes will have a need to showcase future innovation to customers and prospects. These are good opportunities to extend an invitation to customers to participate in product conversations. Mastering your network is necessary to develop a healthy customer pipeline.

You cannot afford to be picky in the beginning. Starting with a mind set of “any customer is a valid customer” is good. Adjust the target customer description as your hypothesis and product evolves. You need to explain this approach to your colleagues in the product team to avoid a disconnect.

Building you customer pipeline for product conversations

For product conversations, ideally, you need to have about 10-15 customers engaged with you at any given time. Based on our experience, this number will allow you to get the right amount of feedback and will give you a good idea about the market you want to reach. To reach that number, you need to start with a strong customer pipeline.

When building customer pipeline for seeking feedback, you are not just looking for a list of customers. You need to consider many factors that determine the fit of such customers for your project.

There are three factors that determine the choice of customers.

• Product maturity: Is it the product at a vision stage or is it already in the market? Is it closed to being generally available for purchase?
• Customer Profile: What industry is the customer from and how big are they? What does the customer already own from your company product portfolio? Is the customer using a similar product from a competitor already? Is you customer looking for specific products?
• Value Proposition: Is your product solving a current problem that the customer is facing or a potential problem that they are yet to face.

All these factors evolve with the time. Such evolution is not a bad thing considering the fact that your hypothesis is evolving as well. The wider the knowledge funnel of the product you are going to build, the bigger the uncertainty about the type of customer you are looking for. The closer the product is to general availability, the easiest it is to get a perfect match.

Customer engagement is all about execution. So all this uncertainty cannot stop you from moving forward. As evolving factors interfere with your pipeline building process, you will need to build your pipeline step by step, where each step is a discovery.

Selling the value of product conversation to fellow product managers

Selling the importance of getting customer feedback to product teams is as important as convincing a customer to engage in an ongoing conversation. It is in fact tougher than convincing a customer. If you are the product manager designated to manage customer relationships, you need to treat other product managers and product designers as internal customers. You need to articulate the value of  customer conversations to them. It is not easy to convince a product team to engage in a structured ongoing conversation with customers regularly when they have internal deadlines to meet. You need to earn their trust and respect. No matter how busy you are, showing up in product workshops is a good way to start earning their trust.

The product manager who manages customers, needs to participate in product design work sessions with his or her peers and identify problems that can be solved by talking to a customer. Participating in a product design workshop and brainstorming sessions is the best way to understand the challenges faced by the product design team. Just concentrating on arranging customer conversations without an understanding of the purpose of the product or the current challenges is not good enough.

Understanding the challenges faced by product designers will help determine the type of customers to reach out to, the type of concepts that need validation and the timing of such conversations. Product managers who manage customers will also benefit a lot by gathering feedback from his or her peers on past customer conversations and course correct where required.