✴️ How to chair customer interaction in a product review meeting?

 

In product management world, customer feedback is very important. Product managers often set up workshops or meetings with customers to understand their problem and how the product can be utilized to solve those problems. There are several steps about how you can chair these kinds of meetings. Below is my framework to organize or manage the same.

The Framework has 3 different stages:

1. Before the Meeting: This stage focuses on the pre-work which is essential before the meeting happens with the customer.

•  Set up a clear agenda - You need to have a clear agenda which you want to discuss during the meeting. You might also share this agenda to your users prior to the discussion. Users might come prepared. Better to use a standard organizational template to create the agenda.
• Select your team members - You need to select your team members who will be present with you during the meeting. They can be marketing team, finance team, engineering team, security and compliance team etc. At least one representative is required from each team. They might or might not participate during the discussion. Their input is very much necessary for further product development.
• Schedule a time limit for your discussion - Time is very essential. You cannot run the meeting infinitely. Limit each of the topic with a finite time.
• Choose the users who will attend the meeting - Generally you need to select the users from multiple segments where you are planning to position your product. Ideally 3 to 5 different user segments are good to have an open discussion. Only one user segment might bias the discussion and lead to biased outcome.

For example - if your product of a travel booking platform, you might consider business travelers, normal travelers in your meeting. If your product is related to health, you can consider different demographics or age groups in your user groups.

 2. During the meeting - This stage focuses on what you need to do during the meeting

• Introduction - Introduce the individual users. Let them know what the broad objective of the meeting is, what is the expected outcome of the meeting. General rules during the meeting need to explain to them. 
• Let user speak freely - Let the user talk freely. Sometimes users might be frustrated for using a product and they have lot of anger which needs to be vented out. Once these frustrations come out, it will be easy for the users to settle down.
•  Allow users to discuss among themselves - It will help to identify new perspectives. Just watch and listen actively. Look for the emotional aspect in the user body language or communication.
•  Focus or direct the users to specific goals - Once users are settled down, engage the users and drive the meeting to reach towards the specific goal. Ask specific questions but do not give any solution during the meeting. When asking specific questions, avoid close ended question or questions with leading hints. Try to put the ball in the user's court and understand what their expected solution is. You will have time to figure out the perfect solution later.

For example: If you are developing a mobile under 20k, ask users how much memory size they are expecting under 20k or what is the expectation of internal memory capacity. Don't ask questions like whether 128GB internal memory will be sufficient for your usage?

• List down expected features: List down all the expected features. Do not remove anything. You are not supposed to make a solution during the meeting. Ask the users to assign business value to each of the features. One of the best ways to assign business value is - give a specific amount to each of the users. Now ask them to divide the amount and assign to each of the features. Give the maximum value to the most important feature.
• Scribers during the meeting - Whether the meeting is recorded or not it is better to have a scriber who will note down the important points of the discussion. Because the body language or the emotional aspect can be captured by this process.
• Active listening during the meeting - Listen to users actively. Ask questions to clarify.

3. After the meeting - The 3rd or final stage of the meeting focuses on the analyze part of post meeting.

•  Retrospective with the team - Check below questions with the team members. These will give you lot of insight about user behavior,

What went well?

What did not go well?

What could have been done better?

These introspections will help to drive the next customer interaction in a better way.

•  Prioritization - Based upon the feedback and notes, prioritize the top 5 feature for your next plan. Keep others in the backlog.

 I have learnt a beautiful technique to prioritize items/features.

List down all the features which users are expecting for the upcoming product. Assign the business value associated with the features which was already given by the users. Now ask the same question to the engineering team to understand the cost for each feature. The (Business Value/ Cost) will give you the return for your investment. Choose the items which have high return on investment. Check other feasibility associated with the feature (For example: Technological feasibility, resource availability, government regulation etc.). You will have a perfect balance of different criteria and a perfectly refined product backlog. It will help you to implement the next stage in your product life cycle.

•  Develop user stories - Start working on to develop the user stories around the prioritized features. User stories need to be very detailed.
•  Amendment of product roadmap - Sometimes the product roadmap needs to be updated based on the customer/user feedback. But roadmap should always align with the business objective.

 

Most importantly - keep yourself calm, use your critical thinking and have a positive leadership mindset to manage everything.