Product Manager: prepare your customer visits!

3 min readJul 8, 2014

If you are a product manager and you are in charge of defining the strategy, new features, releases and priorities for a product, you have surely realized so far the importance of customer visits.

Talking to your current, future or past customers and users always sheds tons of light into the way you know and understand your own product. That understanding of the customer needs is what feeds your internal knowledge base to later on be able to make informed decisions about your products. Market knowledge gives you real data to drive your product strategy, far beyond your opinion — I always remember this sentence: “Product manager: your opinion, although interesting, is irrelevant”.

I wrote a post about the importance of these market visits a while ago (“Product Manager: get out of the building now!”) but lately I’ve been doing some research about good practices regarding this important task all PMs should do and I wanted to share my notes and findings here with you. Note these are not rules written in stone, but recommendations I plan to test in the field. Anyways, they are all recommendations based on experienced PMs’ opinions and experiences, not theories.

Also, at the end of the article there are some interesting additional reads. If you know more and want to share, please let me know and I’ll add them too.

Which are the goals of a market visit?

You are not visiting a customer to sell your awesome ideas, your brand new product or to do consulting to solve all his problems. Your visit goals are the following:

Discover unmet customer needs
Discover how customers use your product today
Discover where your product fits into the customer’s ecosystem

Who should you visit?

Segment your customers to make sure you have the broadest possible audience: each one of them will give you very different insights

New or experienced User?
Customer or prospect?
User vs. Technical/Economical buyer?
Engineer vs. Manager?

Plan the visit with the customer

Clear the visit with sales, customer support or marketing beforehand, share the objectives and goals with them and set expectations in terms of what do you expect from them and duration of the interview.

PM ALERT! Avoid generalization: doing ONE customer visit doesn’t mean you know what ALL customers want

Do your homework!

Make sure that before you go visit a customer, you do some research about what they do and their current relationship status (if any) with your company. Here’s a preparation checklist that can help you:

Research the customer website
Do they have bug reports or feature requests in your systems?
Has anyone else in your company visited them?
Develop a discussion guide and have a list of questions to ask (just in case…)
Confirm the visit 1 week before, so that there are no last-minute surprises

During the customer visit

“We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak”, Epictetus

Some advice for the actual visit time

Commit to Listen! (let the customer do 75% of the talking)
Start with simple questions and ask them about their products or company (to get them talking)
Notes, notes, notes — write down customer quotes
When things go wrong (and they will), don’t cut off the customer, do not lose your cool and acknowledge, not ratify

Report your Findings

Finally, after you have finished the visit, an important part of the PM process starts: what to do next? What to do with all that valuable information you just got?

Create a summary report, as soon as possible not to forget anything.
Discuss and share it with other internal attendants to the visit
Make sure you share “qualitative” results, not “quantitative” results
Include as many customer quotes as you can
Send the report to decision makers (VP of product, engineering, PMO, appropriate C-level executives…)
Tell sales what you learnt

I hope this article helps on your next customer visit!