Designing Your Customer Before Designing Your Product May 21, 2008

Designing Your Customer Before Designing Your Product
Dave Taber, CEO of SalesLogistix

Product teams are making the transition from waterfall to agile and other iterative design methods. But moving to user-centered design can't solve a critical business issue: will there be enough demand? Companies find out too late that they are going after the wrong vertical, their channel is unable to capture enough demand, or they can't articulate the value proposition. Worse, companies discover there isn't enough customer interest no matter what the channel does. In this session, David Taber will explain solutions to this problem, describing specific techniques to help product teams design their customer while they design the product. You'll also learn:

* how to use open source communities to guide product, messaging and channel decisions
* how SaaS and information appliances can provide statistically valid market research at near zero cost
* why management needs to use "fail fast" rules to make better products

Speaker: David Taber is CEO of SalesLogistix and Taber Consulting. Starting out as Systems Analyst and moving through 7 years of Product Management, David has taken his analytical skills into marketing strategy and sales pipeline management. SalesLogistix helps client companies implement and use sales force automation more effectively and more strategically. Previously, David was SVP Marketing at Forte Software/Sun Microsystems, VP Worldwide Marketing at ILOG, Director of pricing and competitive marketing at Sybase, and Director of Product Marketing at SunSoft. Earlier, he was a product line strategist at AT&T and an engineer at Stanford Research Institute. David earned an MBA in Marketing and Finance at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business.

$10 for members, $25 for non-members.

Official Website: http://www.norcalpdma.org/