The importance of customer-focused product managers
The team at Silicon Valley Product Group published an excellent blog entry on why, first and foremost, product managers need to make sure that they're empowered to meet with customers regularly. One piece of advice I particularly like was the following:
For whatever reason, if you work at a company where you're told you can't talk to your users, my advice is to first try hard to change this policy, but if that doesn't work, dust off your resume and find a place where you can practice your craft and have a shot at creating great products. I really don't know how you can build products users will love without a deep understanding of those users, and you won't get that without lots of direct communication, including face-to-face interactions.
I would only add that it's not only important to meet with customers, but to know how to engage with them for maximum impact. Also, to achieve real success with experience design, it's also important to conduct more than one visit with a customer as your design for the product or service advances. The insights uncovered in properly structured meetings can lead to not only major revelations about an existing product, but provide the evidence needed to trigger new ideas on new to the world products and services.
