Articles

What do product managers actually do?

This is a question that gets asked a lot, because the definition of a product manager varies from one company to the next. A survey of over 100 product managers conducted by Alpha UX demonstrates that the primary roles and responsibilities of product managers [...]

Market Studies: 3 tools of the Voice of Customer approach

Are you listening to your customers and effectively meeting their needs? Listening can be hard work, so it’s important to use the right tools to get the information you need for innovation. These three methods to determine Voice of Customer have been shown [...]

6 tools for conducting Voice of the Customer studies

How do your customers feel about your product? What innovation would make your product a real game-changer? What is preventing the product from being truly excellent? These questions are extremely important for any business looking to innovate. We’ve [...]

Top 10 mistakes to avoid in a product launch

Developing a new product is no easy task, but once you have overcome that hurdle, it’s time for the next challenge – an effective product launch. When a product launch succeeds it provides early revenue, a competitive edge and a foundation for future [...]

New game changing technologies in the medical industry

Technologies which were created with other industries in mind have also impacted the way medical devices are being designed and built. Twenty-first century technology is drastically changing how we manage our health as well as how healthcare is provided and [...]

Product strategy that’s customer-centric

One of the principles of design thinking is that you need to get employees from different departments, who serve various functions, sitting in a room together and working on solving problems. The natural instinct of employees is to look at a problem from the [...]

The Empowered Customer Movement in Healthcare

Increased globalization and technological change are leading the global healthcare industry away from the old physician-based system to one in which the customer is at the center. Customer service has become central to all businesses, and healthcare is no [...]

What you can learn from extreme customers

Traditional marketing teaches businesses to identify and map out the wants and needs of their typical customer. In addition to this technique, design thinking asks companies to look at their extreme customers. These are customers on either end of the spectrum [...]

Launching your product the right way

Companies invest millions of dollars each year developing new products and trying to increase their revenues and profitability. Some of these products succeed but unfortunately most are failures. Product launch activities have a lot to do with the success rate [...]

Innovation requires customer understanding

I have led many innovation projects over the last 17 years and I have come to understand that a large number of new product development projects go south because of poor definition and/or lack of customer understanding. A good way to avoid this problem and [...]