 We have written a fair bit about Win/loss and Roadmap activities and how they are strategic activities. It is a funny line to balance with that statement. Running a win/loss program is a tactical activity, but the output will very much shape your strategy. I think you get my point. And, your roadmap is your strategy so it is a strategic activity.
The next question is what else can I do that will make me strategic? There are a few topics that fall out of this, but something that I wish was a bigger part of our portfolio of regular activities is writing call reports. Pragmatic Marketing’s recent survey reports that somewhere between 25-35% of product management people visit customer sites. Sometimes you will hear people talk about customer visits or trip reports, but in this case I am referring to the output from a customer visit. Call reports and customer visits work together. Also, the act of writing it down, as a call report, is much more important that actually going on the visit. Often you will find the content of a call report consists of the details from a customer visit by sales or account managers who list who was visited, the date, the reason for visit, what was discussed, any actions required and anything else that needs to be reported. I like to file these under ‘Good to know.’ From a strategy perspective, they are hardly actionable. The reality is you want information that supports your strategy (or helps you define it). Your strategy will consist of things you need to build (among many other things) and to support the development of those solutions you want observed and documented scenarios of the way people work or live. Not just anybody though, potential customers. Bear in mind, and this is important, you want to know WHY (i.e. the impact of doing or not doing). At this point you aren’t thinking solution, you aren’t constrained by product and you have an open unconstrained view into what and why they do the things they do. The key to all of this is observation. Call reports alone, can be sufficient to justify your strategy if you talk to enough of the right people. Also, call reports will be a primary method of information gathering in your market sensing program. Here are a couple additional resources on customer visits:
Image source: Positive Psychology News Daily |
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