Product Management Case Study

Random has a blog entry about Blogger's integration with Microsoft Word. Blogger conducted some ethnographic research by visiting the Democratic National Convention to see political bloggers in action. They noticed bloggers at the convention composing entries in Word and attempting to transpose them to their blogs.

Random writes:

"I am sure there were many requests to add Word integration to blogger but is that really the solution? Did they adequately address the true customer need? Personally, I think what the Blogger users are saying is the current blogger editing tools are not very good. I doubt the Word bloggers use more than 1% of Word's features when editing a blog post. I would also guess there are numerous Word formatting quirks that will trip up the Blogger integration. My take is the Blogger team missed out on a great opportunity to really address the true customer need: a better Blogger editor."

With his analysis of this case study, Random affirms the fact that product management requires much more than just listening to customers. You have to take an active and facilitative approach to researching your market.

p.s. Random also mentions Flock. I'll be curious to check it out if I receive an invitation.

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