Yesterday I spoke rather spontaneously during the final session of the 2010 Silicon Valley P-Camp - the third annual Silicon Valley ’un-conference’ focused entirely on Product Management topics/issues.

Spontaneous talks are not uncommon at an un-conference…the whole concept is that anyone can submit a topic for consideration and attendees vote on what they are most interested in. I came to the conference with a topic I thought of that morning and 20 handouts that I printed before I ran out the door (I thought that bringing any more than that would be a bit presumptuous!) and lo and behold my topic was chosen by popular vote to be one of the 12-15 afternoon sessions!

When I say ’spontaneous’, I really mean that…this is the first time I have EVER facilitated a 45 minute session with absolutely NO agenda, just a broad idea of the topic: “Choosing the Right Methodology for Gathering Customer Input”.

We ended up with 30 people all crammed in a small meeting area to explore this topic, specifically focused on using customer input for product development/marketing/launch purposes.  The session was very interactive and one of the things we discussed before getting into the meat of the topic was why product managers so seldom actually integrate any customer research into their work to launch great products.

I came with my own theories, but we had an active dialogue and below is a list of some of the reasons that came up…I’ll be blogging about some of these in the future, but wanted to provide a summary list here:

We talked about each of these obstacles, and debunked most of them, but it was important to ‘go there’ before talking about how to choose the right tools.  According to The 280 Group’s 2009 Product Management survey, the top 3 sources of influence on product management decisions are:

Like many of you, I have gone through the process of asking the following questions about blogging:

- WHY blog?
- WHAT do I have to say?
- HOW can I set up a blog?

It’s natural to go through this questioning process unless you’re one of those early adapters of all things new. I am definitely not an early adapter type, but tend to be a ‘mid adapter’ (waited to get an iPod until the 2nd generation device was launched). And I like to be sure that any new activity I add to my already too long ‘to do’ list is something that is really going to be advantageous to my business.

To answer these questions, I first did some research (how appropriate!) by reading a variety of blogs, testing out my blogging ‘legs’ on the Women in Consulting blog, talking to fellow consultants, and discussing the whole blogging idea with some of my clients as well as with my valued business coach, Casey Dawes, of Wise Woman Shining. All of this information helped answer the ‘why’ and ‘what’ questions quite thoroughly. I learned that blogging is a great way to create a dialogue with not only my target market, but with other people who share an interest in two areas that are near and dear to my heart: customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.

As for the ‘what’ question, I recently wrote my first ‘white paper’ which received a warm reception from my clients and colleagues. I have also been experimenting with Twitter and don’t think that I’ve said anything too embarrassing yet! And by reading other people’s blogs, I realize that you don’t have the most radical concepts or most ingenious insights to be an interesting blogger…you just need to be able to facilitate interesting dialogues and get people thinking…I can do that quite naturally in person, so why not in the virtual world? I also realized that the concept of sharing the ‘load’ of generating content with guest bloggers is quite acceptable and is actually becoming more and more common.

The ‘how’ question definitely got into technical issues which led to migrating my website to Wordpress. The process wasn’t too painful at all thanks to the help of Ken at The Web Mechanic. Now I have a very agile site which allows me to do a lot of things, including hosting this blog with all the right bells and whistles…and I have a support team behind me if I run into glitches…that is very comforting and allows me to focus on content vs. technical issues.

I already have a list of topics that I’ll be blogging about regularly and this will be put into my list of things that need attention along with the other marketing activities I try to keep on top of. We’ll be talking about the importance of customer focus, why/how to measure customer loyalty, sharing examples of great service, and more…if these topics interest you, please watch this spot or subscribe to our feed. And I encourage you to add your comments along the way…this IS a dialogue!