How to Make Sense of SME Assumptions

I've walked into several companies with little or no expertise in the market that the company addresses. That being the case, I'm almost always faced with the question of how to become useful in a relatively quick amount of time. These people know more about their customers, know more about their business, and have the internal personal relationships in place that allow them to get things done within the organization. All of which, I don't have.

I tend to have a fallback position walking in as the new product manager. My first meetings in the company tend to focus around features and customer need perceptions around those needs. I build a feature prioritization weighting with the goal of adding methodological introspection around WHY the features are important and what impact they will have for the company and its customers.

The next step (well, some might argue that it's really the first step), is to create a series of personae which model the end users as well as the channel users (if there are any).

These two steps are important because in both cases, you are asking the SMEs within the company to think about their customers, and their customer's needs in a systematic way. 

Why?

It's  often the case, I've found, that companies, particularly small ones, are so involved in their customer development as they evangelize their products, that their assumptions about their users have become truisms that few tend to question. Often, we call this "drinking the Kool-Aid."

It's not as if creating a spreadsheet of features and weights is hard, it's not, nor is creating a few personae with attributes. But, most companies, large and small, don't regularly evaluate their assumptions about their customers; certainly, not every six months (1/4 of a lifetime if you have a web business).

Coming up with key features, evaluating them against personnae and business objectives and then discussing priorities with vested interests will do two things for you. First, it will make you immediately valuable because it's inevitable that people will have "aha" moments looking at your documents and think that you're really smart. And, second, it will be the first step in transferring their SME knowledge to you.

The next question, then, is how you keep yourself from drinking the Kool-Aid and getting lazy about your product and customer assumptions.