The Productologist

I had another visit with one of my customers the other day (I know, I’ve been writing a lot of posts about customer visits, but they are important and I learn a lot from them). I call them MY customer, because they are using a product that I am responsible for. It’s important to view yourself as one of the “owners” of the customer because as the Product Manager, you are responsible for their satisfaction, currently and in the future. If you are not getting out into the field to talk to your customers, both satisfied and frustrated ones, then you are missing out on valuable feedback on how to improve your product.

Jeff Lash, the Product Manager/blogger who brought you How to be a Good Product Manager and Ask a Good Product Manager, asked me to write a post to answer a question about product roadmaps. The post just went up, so you can see it on his site. Here is the link:

http://ask.goodproductmanager.com/2008/06/12/are-there-any-product-roadmap-best-practice-tools/

Popularity: 21% [?]

Many years ago, when I was going off to start grad school, BW (at the time, she wasn’t BW, just B) and I rented a big yellow truck to haul all of our prized personal belongings to our new home (at least for the next two years). It was a long trip (2 days worth of driving), so we did the prudent traveler thing and went to AAA and got a bunch of maps to plan our route. The maps were not only for us, but others, too. Since this was the age before cell phone ubiquity, for safety reasons, we gave a copy to BW’s parents so that they would know what route we were following in case we didn’t show up at our destination or check in periodically.