Company to Customer
Enterprise customers seem to expect that vendors will dictate the product roadmap, enhancements and innovations during user group meetings. Customers hope that they can influence important changes such as the high rating for “address product issues” and “influence roadmaps”. The world has changed. Customers can and should leverage the user group and other mechanisms like forums to set product roadmaps. Customers should not try to influence the roadmap – they should be able to make wholesale changes to it.

Tactical rather than Strategic
The items in the survey that relate to the customer to vendor relationship shows a preference for tactical aspects. It is particular disturbing to see “liaise with executives” at the bottom of the list. Perhaps vendor executives rarely interact with customers (a bad sign) or the user group is managed by the product management group as a feel good exercise and executives are window dressing. Perhaps previous interaction with executives did not have positive results for customers.

A Different approach – the steering committee
There is a viewpoint that following customer tactical requirements will result in going out of business. It is true that tactical product needs often does not reflect what customers will need 2 or 3 years down the road. The mechanism of user groups tends to support majority rules. Yet, it is the outliers that will often drive the product future.

My company has been leveraging the steering committee approach. We have run into some resistance from some customers who expect to be consumers rather than participants. We have developed a few rules that we can share:

- The steering committee is an adjunct, not a replacement of the user group.
- Outlier customers participate in the steering committee. The vendor picks steering committee members. The user group has the ability to add additional customers.
- Only company executives and company domain experts attend the steering committee meetings. In particular, salespeople should not be there.
- Executives must be fully prepared and know what the issues are. Executives should attend these sessions without a safety net.
- Presentations, where the company broadcasts information, should be limited.
- Presentations by customers should be the first order of business.
- Workshops using various brainstorming techniques should be used to draw out ideas and support decisions.
- Customers change priorities and the roadmap.
- The roadmap window under discussion is 1 to 3 years out, rather than enhancements for the next release.
- Progress on the roadmap and other vendor action items should be provided on a quarterly basis to the chairperson of the steering committee.

We have found that this approach addresses many of the items that you describe

- Dedicating executive resources to user group initiatives because executives participate in the meetings
- Increasing transparency in the requirements prioritization process through enabling the committee to make wholesale changes to the roadmap
- Creating resources to share benchmarking information is partly satisfied through the customer presentations.
- Reporting more frequently on progress through quarterly updates.