As a product manager how important is it for us to understand how our products are used in the field?Do we think it's important to know how our customers get on with our products, how our products behave, what problems our customers encounter, what features they fail to adopt, how long it takes them to get up and running?If we think this is important, how do we currently get this information? Does it tend to be by hearsay, from calls to a few customers, through our support department?Are there any tools that product managers are using to help get this information?See More

Traditional market research approaches focus on understanding the market and identifying the product features before the actual development starts. Agile and lean approaches advocate the opposite: creating a prototype or minimal viable product to learn from user feedback and to validate if a market exists for the product envisioned. This talk investigates the concept of a minimal viable product and discusses the pro's and con's of employing an experimental, iterative, and collaborative process that views market research as an integral part of building prototypes and working software. Roman Pichler works as a product management consultant and helps companies create innovative products using lean and agile techniques. His clients range from Salesforce.com to the Bank of England. Find out more at http://www.romanpichler.com.See More

Traditional market research approaches focus on understanding the market and identifying the product features before the actual development starts. Agile and lean approaches advocate the opposite: creating a prototype or minimal viable product to learn from user feedback and to validate if a market exists for the product envisioned. This talk investigates the concept of a minimal viable product and discusses the pro's and con's of employing an experimental, iterative, and collaborative process that views market research as an integral part of building prototypes and working software. Roman Pichler works as a product management consultant and helps companies create innovative products using lean and agile techniques. His clients range from Salesforce.com to the Bank of England. Find out more at http://www.romanpichler.com.See More

UPDATE: At the risk of being identified as spam... we'll be providing some liquid refreshments for anyone who actively participates in the panel discussion.This month, we're going to run a more interactive meeting, using an approach a bit like the "goldfish bowl" approach from our very early meetings, to discuss what people do about competitors - for eg:What tools do you use to track your competitors' activities?What sort of collateral do you produce about your competitors?... and what types of activity might fall outside of the ethical boundaries for your company? (but perhaps not for others!)With lots of experiences and views from different business areas, it should be a very informative meeting.See More