If you’re a key member of a company that offers professional services and you’d like to be successful in product, I’d recommend that you consider two key paths.  The first is to build a solution that will immediately benefit your professional services organization.  The second is intended to compliment the services you currently offer and…

Now that you’ve completed the customer discovery phase and identified the top problems worth solving.  You are ready to move forward to the next step in the process, solution design. The solution design phase is all about validating everything possible about your solution (future product) before you actually build it. This phase is very important…

How to identify problems worth solving for your software product Over the course of my product career, I’ve heard all about effective (and ineffective) product strategies when trying to bring a new software product to market. Over the course of reading probably hundreds of books and testing out even more strategies on products of my…

Polaroid was a very early success story of high-tech in America. When it came to photography, Polaroid developed a dramatically different experience from the next best option at the time, which included taking photos and storing them on reels of film only for them to be developed days or weeks later. With a Polaroid camera, you could…

One of my more popular blog articles from last year was about top questions that product managers should ask customers.  (More on that here.)  So I thought I’d write an update to that article on what I’ve learned since then and share a few other great questions product managers should be asking on a regular…

Market researchers have been using focus groups as a tool for over 60 years.  While they can be useful in some instances, the epic failures of some products can be directly attributable to information gained through focus groups.  The most famous product launch disaster is still – even after almost 35 years – the introduction…

The next step in the process of gathering feedback from customers is all about testing your Minimum Viable Product (MVP). We’ve previously conducted our Problem Interviews to identify a problem worth solving and our Solution Interviews to validate that our solution resonates with our target market. Our objective at this point is to confirm with…

During the first round of interviews, otherwise known as the problem interviews, you no doubt gathered a wealth of information that should help you better understand the customer’s worldview and problems that need solving. Those interviews should have resulted in identifying your potential customer base, the problems they face, and what alternative methods they are…

In our last article, we discussed how to conduct preliminary interviews to get a feel for real-world, important problems customers may have. With a sufficient number of these initial interviews, you will eventually be able to form the product idea that will appeal to the largest group of potential customers. Now it’s time to drill…

Imagine you are an auto mechanic and a new customer comes into your shop with a car that needs to be repaired. Are you going to start fixing the car without asking questions? Not likely! You will no doubt start by asking a few simple questions such as, how long has the car had this…