From the course: Product Management First Steps

Plan a product research customer meeting

From the course: Product Management First Steps

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Plan a product research customer meeting

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- Part of your research plan will ultimately put you face to face with a current customer or potential one. This could either be an end user or the individual that needs to make purchasing decisions for a larger group. Before you meet, however, there are some important things to plan out first. The advantage to going into a customer meeting is that you can dive deeper than with a survey and you can allow the conversation to meander a bit, but only to a point. You still need to figure out what they want and when they want it, so you need to have a plan for how you want to conduct your conversation. At the end, you'll then have actionable feedback that, when combined with your other research, gives you a great start to planning out your product. To begin, you'll prep for your meetings. This usually doesn't take too long, but it's necessary to get everyone on board. There are a few key things to define and agree upon at this stage. The first is to define who will be part of the customer meeting process. When you think of your core team, you should find a few individuals that will be part of every step of the process. Sometimes this is called the discovery team or tiger team. Whatever you call it is fine, but I'd recommend having the product manager and a representative from the user experience, engineering, and marketing teams as core members. They are at every meeting, part of every discussion, and are with the process from start to finish. Next, define who you want to meet with. Think in terms of categories. These people could be from specific industries, demographics, or they could be potential customers. A good number to shoot for is three to five. When you have to find who you want to meet with, use that list as a guide to make sure you are setting up meetings with customers equally across all the groups. An example could be mothers from 25 to 40 years of age that use an iPhone, or software architects at Fortune 500 companies. Next, you need to have agreement on the critical questions that are to be answered by the end of the interview process. Try to keep this to a small number at first, maybe about five or seven. Make them specific so you can design your discussion to get a solid answer at the end. Finally, when you have agreement on all of this, you need to schedule your meetings. How you do this is entirely up to you based on, of course, on the type of customer and product. Just remember to use the categories you defined earlier to find the balance of people that you want. Being there in person is a huge advantage over doing interviews over video conferencing or the telephone. There is an emotional aspect to being there that leads to better and more beneficial conversations. Once you have your meetings set up, determine your agenda and hold the meeting, the important part of a meeting is to make sure that you aren't doing most of the talking. You're there to listen, so you need to structure the discussion to get them to speak with you. Schedule the meeting to include all members of the core team. You should assign one of them to be the team scribe, meaning that they will write down almost everything that is said by the customer for you to refer to later. The scribe will almost always never participate in the conversation, so make sure you rotate the role around the team as you go through your various meetings. When you have your core team, alignment on who you're meeting with, and have customers scheduled, you're ready to hold your first meeting.

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