Know-How Exchange : Strategy

As a product manager at a software company (which was a new position for the company at the time), I was responsible for maintaining our customer's "wish list" - and implemented a simple system which worked well. What I did was to set up "product teams" which met one a month for an hour or so, with a representative from sales, marketing, development, and tech support. The purpose of the product team was to maintain a list of suggested enhancements, and to prioritize the suggestions, independent of the time they would like to implement, and independent of whether the enhancement was even possible to do.

(I found it was VERY IMPORTANT to remove "development time" from the equation. If you allow R&D to have input at this phase as to the feasibility of suggestions, you will find the things they want to do are easy and fast to do, and the things they do not want to do are impossible and expensive).

As this list was updated, it was forwarded to the R&D director with a copy to the Marketing director, so that this info could impact product development plans.

You need to be a bit careful in collecting suggestions from users. In order to be sure that folks were serious about their suggestion, I set a policy that all suggestions direct from customers needed to be in writing. This way, we hoped they would at least think a bit before submitting something. (Naturally, if many customers were expressing a need for something, it would be suggested and added to the list from someone from Tech Support or Sales.)

On occasion I would do a bit of market research (e.g. create a spreadsheet with features of your competitors products) and bring this to the product meeting - this information was very well received by the group. I considered my primary function as "product manager" was to manage the information flows (especially between departments) rather than personally to dictate the product development.