Nice article. I just found your blog, but you can bet that I will be spending some quality time here.

It’s so common to hear “Just listen to your users/customers/prospects and they will tell you what they want.” If it were that easy, Product Management would be largely unnecessary, but it’s not (easy or unnecessary). As Des said, the feedback has to be distilled. Users will gladly tell you what the solution is, but it’s more useful to find out what the problem is so that you can identify the best way to solve it. Otherwise, you end up going down the path of being a software project rather than a software product.

Ivan Chalif http://theproductologist.com

Yes. Of course they’d say that. And then , as a designer, you’d ask them why they wanted a faster horse, and you’d disscet speed as being a requirement. You’d ask if there are other concerns they have, and if they told you they wanted a more comfortable journey, or if they didn’t like animals you’d factor all these requirements in. At the end you’d have a precise set of requirements from which you begin to build a solution.

Customers always talk in the lower levels (“I want a flash home page with movies and sound effects”), and we have to ask why (“Oh, well I guess I want it to look high tech and futuristic”) In my experience customers know what their overall goal is, but they have 2 big problems. 1. They have trouble explaining what they really want 2. They tend to think at a low level rather

Great post guys, love this blog!

Des

Young open source projects are being shaped functionality wise by their users. And, for free projects, linking feature requests with donations, in the form of sponsorships for the development of a certain feature, can boost the community involvement and financial support.

But democratizing the feature selection process through voting is not a silver bullet. Winston Churchill said “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter”

User feedback like the kind your get from UserVoice should not be treated as canon is valuable data and can be invaluable in helping you steer the ship. I’d even like to point out that Jeff Atwood uses UserVoice on StackOverflow.com. :P

We also sell UserVoice on the secondary benefits you get from simply listening to your customers. It helps build the customer champions, by making them feel invested in the product, that help companies get over the hump with word of mouth referrals. It also helps my blood pressure to know that user’s ideas are being capture somewhere for later usage rather than just falling out of my inbox.

Thanks for the tip on SilveBack I’ll have to check it out.

Nice post, Tim.