I have always tried to include an engineer or two during customer/user interviews, and I am continually reminded how valuable it is.

It imay be difficult for engineers to break away from their development projects to go on the road to visit customers, but they always make visits better.  Some of the reasons for this are:

• They add credibility.  I hate to admit this, but engineers often have more credibility with customers than do product managers.  I don’t know why this is and would certainly like to hear your thoughts.
• It feeds their creativity.  When engineers hear first hand about the problems customers face they seem to naturally start thinking about ways to solve the problem, and they often come up with great solutions.
• They ask great questions.  When their minds start mulling solutions, they start thinking about trade-offs and start asking questions to help them make those trade-offs.
• It puts engineering and product management on the same page.  When everyone hears multiple customers rank a problem at the top of the list, product management doesn’t need to speed much time convincing engineering.
• It increases “buy in”.  I remember a time when I tried to get a “nice to have” feature in one of our products, but the feature was always bumped by “must haves”.   After hearing a customer ask for it during a customer visit, the engineering developed it on his own weekend time.
• They become internal sales people.  After visiting customers an engineer naturally helps persuade the other engineers about the value of specific features.

In my last post, I describe our ongoing advisory team meetings.  We had several engineers at each meeting, and I reconfirmed my conviction that engineers are mandatory during customer interviews.  The teamwork is still paying off.

I only remember one time when it was more trouble than it was worth, and that was only because they engineer thought it was OK to go on a five day trip to the southwest during the summer without a change of clothes.  That trip stunk.

Product Management, Virtual Product Management

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